Synology Cube Station CS407 - Do-It-Yourself NAS

Name: Synology Cube Station CS407 - Do-It-Yourself NAS - Page 2
Brand: Synology

by Dave Altavilla — Friday, August 24, 2007, 12:01 PM EDT

CubeStation CS407 Features and Setup

We set out to configure the CubeStation CS407 with a pair of Western Digital SE16 WD7500 750Gb hard drives in a RAID 1 array. Our hardware installation was straight-forward and easy enough for even the novice to understand with just the included installation guide for reference.

Synology CubeStation CS407 Features and Setup

Two Drive RAID 1 Installation Example

The CS407 features a compact design, no bigger than the form-factor of a two slice toaster. The chassis hood slides off with the removal of four simple thumb screws. Inside is a drive rack for housing four standard 3.5" hard drives. We were a bit disappointed in the CS407's build quality, and fit and finish in this area. The drive rack of the unit is made of thin grade sheet metal an though the edges are rounded, the feel of the drive cage is a bit flimsy. We also would have liked to see Synology provide a hot-swappable hard disk cage design with the CS407, especially considering its price range ($649 or so street price currently) but unfortunately it's just a standard drive rack enclosure.

The CS407's motherboard is a compact, low-power design that is devoid of heatsinks. The design is based on Marvell's 5281/500 SoC (System On a Chip) reference design. We're fairly certain this is a member of Marvell's Orion family of processors for "Media Vault" platforms. Together with Marvell's Gigibit Ethernet MAC/Phy combination, 128MB of Hynix DDR2 DRAM and 64B of flash memory, the system is capable of serving as a complete storage management and server platform with its embedded, configurable OS.

Physical installation, though a bit cramped for obvious reasons, took a total of about 5 - 10 minutes to complete. We slid in our WD drives, installed side-rail screws, plugged in the included SATA power and data cables, and then slid the chassis skins back together and re-installed the backside thumb screws. It was then time to power up and configure the CS407 Storage Server software and other features.