bobpeers -> blog

I bought a Synology DS-106e last year and I’ve been very impressed by the device. It’s certainly not the cheapest NAS device on the market but in my opinion it’s well worth the money considering it’s performance and features. I installed a  320GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 hard drive in mine since I’m mainly backing up data files and don’t use large multimedia files.

The performance is great but the best part is the support provided by Synology. Even though my Disk Station is last years model they continue to release firmware upgrades that can be applied to any model.

For example they recently released a new management interface that supports, amongst other things, SSL/TLS over FTP and HTTPS web connections. On top of that there’s a patch available on their support page that enables SSH or Telnet connections into the Disk Station.

I’ve just been testing the SSH support that this evening, backing up some data using rsync over SSH, also connecting directly over SSH to tidy up some files and it works like a dream.

Synology seems to be one company that, unlike many others, allows advanced users open access to the product instead of locking down the system. Even though my server only has 32MB of RAM it essentially means that I have my own Linux box at a cut down price with none of the hassle of making my own server.

On top of that it uses very little power and is almost silent in use, just a slight hum from the hard drive. In the future I’ll definitely consider upgrading to a two disk device that supports RAID1 for extra security.