Synology USB Station 3-in-1 SOHO Server Review

Package Content
- Synology USB Station
- 2m RJ-45 Ethernet cable
- Power adapter
- Assistant CD

Before Sharing Comes Install & Configure
Unpack the USB Station, and you'll find the station itself, 2m RJ-45 cable, AC adapter, quick guide as well as the CD. Next step is connecting every cable to where they belong as well as plugging in your USB peripherals. There are 2 USB ports on the station, but you can connect up to 2 printers and 1 hard drive simultaneously by adding a USB hub. The Ethernet connection maxes at 100Mbps. The 100Base-TX isn't really a bottleneck since we found out later that the USB 2.0 speed was sort of sluggish. If you are a network newbie, make sure you read over the PDF under the Document folder on the CD. The set-by-step guide is immensely useful.

Only about 4" in width.

USB Station cable clutter.

A USB drive disconnect button is on the side.

Setting up the USB Station step by step.

Next thing is the station assistant installation. You'll find both Mac and PC software on the same disc. The two are almost identical except the Mac version doesn't ship with drive mapping / printer wizard and data replicator which keeps up to 20 history snapshots. On Windows XP SP2, you will be prompted to manually add the DSAssistant to the list of services that can pass through the system's built-in firewall. The program at the beginning will search for the USB Station, and your router will assign an IP to the new member by DHCP. You can manually enter the configurations later. Much of the management is done on the web interface. From there, you can restart the station, check device status, upgrade firmware, manage FTP service, format USB disc, etc.

DSAssistant found 1 USB Station on my LAN.

Web control panel accessible via Safari and IE6.

This shows the device information.

Getting USB Drives Ready for Sharing
Before you think you can start streaming DivX over the LAN from a USB HDD connected on the USB Station, there's one more step to do and that's formatting. The USB Station mandates all USB storage larger than 2GB (max. 500GB) to be formatted into EXT3 file system or 'native' format as Synology puts it. The EXT3 is for security purposes on Linux. If all you are sharing is a 1GB flash drive, you can keep it in FAT, and every client on the network will see it as 'usbshare'. On the contrary, the USB Station will show an EXT3 shared drive in 'admin', 'private' and 'public', each of which folder has its own permission settings.

Shared resources (3 folders & 2 printes) shown in Network Neighborhood.

The FTP service is a plus but a security alert since you have to send password in clear text for authentication over the Internet. Or you can simply set to anonymous (free for all) FTP. There also isn't a log for recording FTP activities. Lastly, you have to figure out how to enable port forwarding on your router before your friends can login your FTP from outside.

Basic FTP features.

So far, everything went quite smoothly. The Synology USB Station had no problem powering my Apricorn bus-powered 20GB hard drive except I had to back up the data due to the format requirement. My Intel iMac and Windows XP SP2 recognized all the shared folders immediately. You'll have to map the folder into a drive if you want the shared resource to stay permanently as a drive letter. This can be done via the Synology PC's wizard.

USB Performance & Printing
For USB performance, I tested with a relatively fast 23MB/s read, 14MB/s write Kingston DataTraveler 1GB, and a 4200-rpm 20GB 1.8" USB hard drive. The USB Station allows 16 concurrent connections if the drive's larger than 2GB and only 4 if disk is smaller than 2GB. As I only had 4 Macs and PCs connected to the station, I couldn't verify how the limitation might affect performance.

On a standard Netgear 100Base-T router, an assorted array of files totaling 699MB were copied from the 20GB drive to a Windows XP SP2 over 100Base-T in 3:40s. This translated to about 3.25MB/s, not exactly what I was hoping for. The next test was the same file transfer except I swapped in a USB flash drive. This time, I got 4.88MB/s. The thumbdrive supposedly reduced some overhead. Yet, I was expecting for better results. Playing back some high bit-rate DivX during the transfers didn't drag down the speeds, interestingly. Don't expect the Synology can handle multiple video streaming though.

Getting the networked printers (up to 2) ready was a relatively easy task. The USB Station immediately recognized my PSC 1210, a HP's low-end, obsoleted multi-function. Synology's wizard for Windows made the whole process a breeze. Repeating the same printer installation on my Mac required manual configuration of the protocol, address as well as the printer model selection. The web management fortunately guided me through every step. Keep in mind that you'll need drivers ready. If they are already installed, all the better. Here's a list of compatible USB printers for your reference.

Printer wizard.

The Bottom Line
The Synology USB Station priced at just under $70 is a decent starter kit for setting up a barebone NAS and printer server on a SOHO network. Its affordable pricing, thorough manual and simplicity are what a networking layman will appreciate. However, for those looking for unattended bit-torrent support, UPnP media serving, RAID, secure FTP and web server, you have to shell out a lot more than $70.

By Ian Chiu, Managing Editor