Product Comparison

The DS107e, my review unit, is the cost effective entry-level member of the family. On the Synology web site, it’s grouped with other "Home and Small business" NASes. The other two family members, the DS107 and DS107+ are grouped with Small Business and Corporate products. Both the DS107 and the DS107+ have identical feature sets that mirror the features found on the Cube Station CS407. The only difference is, of course, with a single-drive NAS, there’s no support for RAID. The main hardware differences between the three units are summarized in Table 1 below:

Table 1: DS107 series summary

Check out the slideshow for photos and descriptions of main board components for all three DS107 models.

All of the Disk Stations contain the same full suite of server options designed to make it the center of your network. Like the CS407, all of the DS107 models include a Web server with PHP and MySQL, a UPnP Multimedia server for music, photo and video, and a download server that supports direct scheduled downloads using either HTTP, FTP or BitTorrent. In addition, the built-in print server supports LPR, CIFS, and AppleTalk. The file server supports CIFS, FTP, and for legacy Macs, AFP. All models also include a backup server and well as an iTunes server. 

One of the minor differences between the entry level DS107e and the DS107/DS107+ models is the FTP server. On the DS107e, the FTP server is just a simple, un-encrypted FTP server. On the two "corporate" models, the FTP server also supports FTP over SSL and FTP over TLS.

There are some additional differences between the corporate models and the entry level DS107e. First, the corporate models support management over HTTPS. They also support encrypted network backup. In addition, as you expect from products targeted at the enterprise, both the DS107 and the DS107+ support Windows ADS domain integration with support for ADS/NT4. 

Setup

As with other Synology products, the DS107 is a BYOD device, so you’ll need to install your own SATA drive. The installation guide provides easy-to-follow, well-illustrated instructions. You should be able to install your drive, connect it to your network, and be up and running in about 10 minutes. Once the device boots and is online, you’ll need to use the Synology Assistant (Figure 2) to find it on your local network.

Figure 2: Synology Assistant searches your network and identifies the Disk Station

This utility is quite simple. It lets you map network drives, add a USB printer, or manage the DS107. When you click on "Manage," you are taken to the DS107’s home page (Figure 3). The web-based management runs on port 5000 of the DS107’s IP address.

Figure 3: Home page of the DS107

From this home page, you can log into the DS107 management console, or log into one of the built-in applications to manage them. From my perspective, I would have preferred a single admin login with access to configure the web applications from within a single user interface.

Tags: BYOD, NAS, Synology,

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