Technical Data And Features

The weight of the Synology Disk Station DS408 without hard drives is about 2.2 kg. It measures about 17 cm high, 18 cm wide, and 23 cm deep, which is dairly compact for a NAS device. You can connect the DS408 to a home network via a Gigabit Ethernet port and connect external storage media and printers to the two USB ports on the back of the device. The DS408 can also communicate with an uninterruptible power supply via USB.

Optimized For The Internet

The brain of the DS408 is an 800 MHz Freescale MPC8543 processor based on the PowerPC architecture. The 512 MB of onboard RAM not only guarantees fast response of the Web-based configuration interface, but this particular hardware configuration also accelerates other applications pre-loaded onto the DS408.

In addition to storing data, the Disk Station DS408 can also serve as Web server with PHP and MySQL support. The NAS device offers a simple way to post pictures and video on the Internet, a blog with integrated user management, as well as access to stored data via its Web interface.

UPnP Server And Network Protocols

The Universal Plug and Play-capable multimedia service and an iTunes server offer access to audio, video, and picture files on the network. All common formats are supported: MP3, WMA, WAV, MPEG2, MPEG4, VOB and XviD.

Currently there are still limitations when using the DS408 in a heterogeneous network. Although the protocols SMB/CIFS as well as AFP are supported, Linux users who want to get access via NFS have to remain patient: this feature is supposed to be implemented in one of the future firmware updates, which are already in the beta phase.

Active Directory Service support makes integration of the NAS device into a Window domain simple. With this, it is possible to authenticate users not only via SMB/CIFS or AFP, but also when requesting access using the FTP protocol.

You can activate the so-called CIFS recycle bin on the Disk Station DS408, so you do not permanently erase data that has been deleted unintentionally within Windows Explorer. This functions like the Windows recycle bin and can be emptied over the administrator’s interface.

Configuration with AJAX

Once you have installed the hard drives and the actual firmware using the Synology Assistant software on the NAS device, you can do the rest of the DS408 configuration by using the AJAX-based Web interface. This Web interface can be accessed via the Disk Station on port 5000, because port 80 is reserved for the integrated Web server.

Although you can argue the sense of using AJAX technology on Internet pages, Synology shows how to use this technology intelligently on a terminal. When configuring the Disk Station, you don’t feel like you’re working with a networked device, but rather a local Windows application.

The design of the Web interface is clear and simple, and assistants for different tasks—like creating user accounts or customizing file sharing settings—make life a lot easier for beginners. Advanced users will also get used to this in no time. For example, setting up an email notification when an error occurs is very easy.

Configuring the Web server, the blog, or the monitoring station—which can access and manage up to 10 IP cameras—is just as simple. Even setting up and managing data backups over the network is a breeze.

We could not find any incompatibilities with browsers in our test: the Web interface worked on Internet Explorer and Firefox without a problem. Even the Google browser Chrome didn’t cause any issues—far from it, in fact, as it loads the pages much faster and gives you even more of the feeling of configuring a local Windows configuration.