Synology DS211+ NAS server promises cool and quiet design

Posted on Wednesday, December 15 2010 @ 0:15 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Synology presents the DS211+, a new dual-bay NAS server for SMB users. It's available in retail stores for around $399.
Synology® Inc. today launched DiskStation DS211+, a high-performance, secure, and full-featured 2-bay NAS server for SMB users to share files, centralize backup, and protect critical data quickly and efficiently. The DS211+ comes with the brand new hardware design to provide more reliable solutions and quieter working environment.

The DS211+ incorporates major hardware upgrades from its predecessor. Its hot-swappable hard drive design minimizes the financial lost due to system downtime and increases reliability. The 92mm low-rotation fan and efficient airflow design provide sufficient airflow to keep the system running cooler than its predecessor, while ensure a low noise level at the same time. The special material of snap-on front cover absorbs HDD vibration, which further ensures quiet operation. The DS211+ was measured at only 19.4 dB(A) in operation, much lower than office background noise that is about 40 dB(A). The SD card and USB slots offers a plug-n-save quick solution to store data with just one touch on the <> button in the front panel.

“The brand new hardware design of DS211+ realizes our promise of providing satisfying solutions. We designed DS211+ to be hot-swappable for higher reliability, and also cool and quiet to ensure the best user experience,” commented Chad Cheng, product manager of Synology Inc.

For fulfilling the demanding requirements of SMBs, the DS211+ delivers an average of 108MB/sec reading and 55MB/sec writing speeds under RAID 1 configuration in a Windows® environment. Its performance is further ensured by the 256-bit AES hardware encryption engine, which prevents unauthorized access attempts to hard drives, while at the same time boasts read speed to be 200% faster than the pure software engine.

The DS211+ offers rich features and applications with the renowned DiskStation Manager 3.0 operating system, which can replace several network hardware equipments in offices. Its comprehensive network protocol support assures seamless cross-platform data sharing and backup. Users can back up data to rsync servers, external hard drives via USB or eSATA connection, or cloud via Amazon® S3. Moreover, they can use Synology Time Backup to back up different versions of files, and flip through to find the most recent changes quickly. The Web Station provides virtual hosting feature via LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) server, allowing hosting up to 30 websites. With simple setup steps, the DS211+ can also acts as mail server, printer server, FTP server, and centralized interface to monitor the office environments. Internet information security is a critical issue for SMBs. Other than the hardware encryption engine, the DS211+ provides encrypted file sharing, HTTPS, firewall, and IP auto-block support to increase the security level. Furthermore, users can efficiently control and set privileges with Windows® ACL support.

The Synology DS211+ is powered by 1.6GHz CPU, 512MB RAM, one Gigabit LAN port, three USB ports, one eSATA port, and one SD card slot. Compliant to the energy-saving trend, the DS211+ consumes relatively low power of 24 watts in operation and supports multiple scheduled power on/off and hard drive hibernation.


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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