Synology DS107e Single-Drive NAS

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by Greg King on October 9, 2007 in Networking, Storage

Looking for a single-drive NAS box that’s feature-packed and looks good? Synology’s DS107e delivers. Though not inexpensive, Synology delivered one of the most solid NAS boxes to cross our desk, which is packed with functionality and also proves to be one of the best looking units on the market.

Page 5 – Testing, Final Thoughts


Like in our other NAS reviews, we are using a 600 MB file that we will be writing to the DS107e, as pulling it from the devices to get our read speeds. To do this, we ran our transfers three times, read and write, and averaged the speeds of the three.

In our other reviews, we have been evaluating dual drive NAS boxes. Since this is a single drive device, we won’t be comparing the speeds of each device, but rather, will be giving you the speeds of the DS107e alone. For those interested, we are working on a full list of comparison speeds and should have that up as soon as we finalize our other NAS tests. While this does us no good in this evaluation of the DS107e, it does give you something to look forward to in the near future.

DS107e
100MB
1000MB
Write
7.9MB/s
11.2MB/s
Read
8.8MB/s
15.1MB/s

Another test we performed was to use the DS107e as an iTunes server. I took the DS107e to work with me, connected it to our network and had 5 of our users stream music from the device, all the while, the NAS worked wonderfully. Obviously this isn’t an environment most devices like this will find themselves in, but after testing the DS107e and its iTunes serving capabilities in this type of scenario, it’s reassuring to anyone looking for a device with this functionality.

The Audio station options of the DS107e can also be found in the DS207 review but it should be pointed out that there hasn’t been anything changed between the two devices.

Final Thoughts

In our DS207 review, we came out and stated that the device took “our idea of what a perfect NAS would be and raised the bar considerably higher” and while we personally like the redundancy built into a multi drive NAS, for those that do not need, or cannot afford a device like that, the DS107e certainly seems like a perfect product.

Synology continues to impress us with their total lack of exclusives. Regardless of your model, they open up their available features to everyone. By taking this approach, the associate these features with the company as a whole and not the devices on which they run. There are companies out there that force you to choose your device based on functionality and feature set, Synology does not.

While the DS107e is at the bottom of the 107 series of Disk Station NAS, it’s perfectly suited for home users and perhaps small business or workgroup type scenarios. With the DS107e situated at the bottom of its respective class, it lacks the active directory capabilities of its more powerful brothers but in all honesty, unless you are going to use this in a workplace environment, it’s not that big of a deal. However, should this be a priority, we suggest looking at Synology’s DS107 or DS107+ as both offer AD support.

As good as the DS107e has been, it’s not perfect, however close it might be. As we just stated, we don’t care to give up active directory support but with that in mind, the DS107e is absolutely perfect for home use and it’s there that we recommend the device. Clearly not ones to sit around idly, Synology recently released their DS207+, offering a more powerful hardware list but aside from that, it’s identical to the DS207 that we have already looked at. We have that device in house and are testing it daily. Look for it shortly.

All in all, the DS107e will fit right in at any home office and is more than capable of sharing files across an entire home network. With all this in mind, the Synology DS107e has earned a solid 9 out of 10. While an Editor’s Choice would be easy to award to this device, there are still 2 more powerful single drive NAS boxes from Synology and I personally prefer a dual drive NAS.

Pros

  • Solid design
  • Quick
  • Easy Setup
  • Gigabit Ethernet
  • Perfect for an iTunes server
  • Quiet

Cons

  • No Active Directory Support
  • Single Drive
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