With the volume of data we all store and share increasing rapidly, the need for a robust, easy-to-use data storage solution is reaching our homes and small businesses. While large companies can afford high-end servers and system administrators, the Synology DS508 gives similar capability to the rest of us.

For starters, Synology has given some thought to aesthetics. The DS508 looks good. The plain front has just a few well-labelled LEDs and doesn’t look like a complex piece of network equipment. We don’t recommend sitting it at your workstation as the fans are reasonably loud, but it won’t cause you too much bother if it’s under the desk or a couple of metres away.

Our review unit came with four 500GB Seagate drives pre-installed in a RAID5 configuration, leaving one of the five bays free. Our first test was to remove one of the disks to see what would happen to the array. Almost immediately, a loud beep commenced. We launched the very well laid-out and easy-to-use Synology Assistant that we’d installed from the accompanying CD to find that the RAID array was degraded. We then launched a repair and all was well.

Connecting the DS508 to our test LAN was straightforward. It can be added to a Windows workgroup or domain and natively supports Apple’s (now aged) AppleTalk protocol. With our test systems, the DS508 appeared in our network browsers quickly and we could access shared folders easily.

Given that a NAS can, in effect, become a central part of your network, it’s handy that the DS509 has two USB2 ports and an eSATA port. These can be used for easily sharing other external drive units or printers. This is far easier than sharing from workstations, as the NAS can be left on all the time, whereas workstations can be rebooted or powered off.

Creating folders, users and managing day-to-day tasks on the DS508 was very simple with the unit’s configuration tool. The Synology Assistant does little more than identify a Synology NAS on your LAN. From there, it launches a web browser window where the real configuration happens. The DS508’s management software is excellent, with all options laid out in a list on the left side of the screen. There’s no need to delve through a system of hierarchic menus to find what you need.

File copies, playback of media files and all the other tests we could throw at the DS508 were simply like water off a duck’s back. Removing a disk in the middle of a test didn’t faze the DS508 at all. It just worked.

As you’d expect, the DS508 makes it easy to store and share files with users on your LAN. However, it goes further than plain old folder sharing. Out of the box, the DS508 can act as an iTunes server. This makes it easy to share media stored to other computers. If you’re not an iTunes user, there’s also multimedia sharing via UPnP, so most bases are easily covered.

The DS508 delivers HTTP and HTTPS support along with DDNS, so that you can run your own web server. The in-built web server also comes with MySQl and PHP. In other words, a small business only needs some open source forum software, a CMS and a little programming skill to create an Intranet. There’s even secure FTP support so you can receive files from outside the network.

Other than the noise, which isn’t by any means the loudest we’ve encountered with a NAS, the Synology DS508 ticks all the boxes you’d expect in a small office or home NAS, with a few extras to boot. The hardware is good, the supporting software is excellent and performance was brilliant.