Introduction

Update 11/13/2007: Also available as the faster DS207+, with Marvell "Orion" processor and 128MB of RAM.

Synology and Thecus are two aggressive NAS producers that have their sights set on stealing some of Buffalo Technology's dominant share of the consumer NAS market with full-featured BYOD NASes. Last year Jim Buzbee looked at the single-drive DS-106e and Bill Meade the quad-drive RAID 5 CS-406. You can think of the DS207 as something in between the two, with styling more akin to the CS-406, but hardware design closer to the 106e.

The attractive while plastic enclosure provides easy access to the innards for disk installation by removing two screws and sliding the larger cover forward. Front and rear panel details are shown in Figure 1. The "USB Copy button" arrow in the Front View below actually points to the front panel USB 2.0 port (the actual button is right below the port). Don't get too excited about the removable plastic plug above the Power button—there's no connector under it.

Two more USB 2.0 ports are found on the back with a 10/100/1000 Ethernet port that supports jumbo frames in increments of 1000 up to 9000, Reset button and power socket. The power cord clip below the socket is a thoughtful touch.

Figure 1: DS-207 Front and Rear Panels

As noted above, getting inside to install your drives is easy and Synology provides all the cables and screws that you'll need. Figure 2 shows the drives sit piggy-back held by two metal brackets that are removable from a metal base plate for mounting ease.

Figure 2: DS207 Inside view

The board detail shot in Figure 3 shows a design similar to that of the DS-106e, based around a 266 MHz Motorola Freescale MPC8241. Gigabit Ethernet support is provided by a Marvell Yukon 88E8001, the SATA controller is a Silicon Image SATALink 3512 and the USB controller is provided by an NEC D720101 USB 2.0 Host Controller. RAM and Flash have been doubled, however, to 64 and 4 MB respectively from the 106e.

Figure 3: Detail view of board

Due to popular request, we've started to measure NAS power consumption. The 207 averaged around 32W while active and 16W when in "hibernation".