Synology DS409slim Diskless System DiskStation NAS Server for 2.5 HDD only

Pros: The use of laptop drives makes for a very quiet system and one which quietly sips at power. It takes four drives and is hot-swap capable. The system itself is super small too, allowing you to put it just about anywhere. The USB printer facilities are quite nice and work as well as any print server out there. The system will also work with most USB-capable UPS systems in order to shut down properly in the event of a power failure or glitch. Since there are only two USB ports on the system, you might want to consider a small hub.

Cons: I haven't figured out how to break up a volume into smaller chunks or partitions. Everything seems to be confined to one huge drive. This is an important consideration for any Time Machine users as Time Machine will continue to grow until all the space is exhausted, at least without employing a hack or two. It might be advisable to keep those backups on another external drive.

Overall Review: I bought this device to replace an aging mid-tower with a much smaller RAID-5, and a couple of standalone USB drives. I expect my power bill to drop a small bit, and to have more drive space at my disposal. An error in the documentation states that Mac printers need to be postscript in order to be compatible, which is not true. The printer driver just needs to work with LPR. I'm using a PhotoSmart 7960 on my MacBook Pro and on Win7 Ultimate, and Vista Home w/o any trouble.

Pros: This thing is small, about the size of a small box of kleenex. Got it with the DSM 2.3 which was good. Upgraded to 3.0 which is really great. I had a bad failure with 2 drives going bad on me, but it still managed to go into enough of a safe mode to save all my data. Remote access works great, and some of the 3rd party apps are cool, such as the Android download manager "Synodroid" which allows you send and manage download tasks directly to your server over your phone. Lastly, this one is way cheaper then many of it's competitors.

Cons: Sorta plasticy, does not feel really solid, the off/on button is too easy to press. I have often turned it off, and accidentally turned it back on just by picking it up.

Overall Review: Support is not that great on the forum, but the direct support is really good. If you have a real issue, always use the direct support. If you have product questions and want to use the forum, answers are few and far between. Lastly, as you should always do with all your raids, buy high quality drives and read the reviews carefully before you do. All drives fail, but the ones with the least amount of failures, and a longer history are better. After you build your raid, test your drives carefully.

Pros: Excellent on-line support, easy to use and useful software, low power draw, low noise, and small footprint. eSATA and USB ports for initial file transfers. 35-50% cheaper than I could assemble from equivalent mini-itx components on my own.

Cons: Software (crashes on latest Windows and MacOS X releases) and documentation on included CD is badly outdated and incomplete- while downloading either was trivial, blue screens, crash logs, and unproofread pigeon English don't exactly make a good first impression.

Overall Review: I'm not sure how long the drive carriers are going to hold up- in my experience, this type of plastic lasts around 10-15 months before it starts to oxidize and crumble. With some digging into the BusyBox OS (Linux) that operates underneath, I'm using this for Windows backup, TimeMachine, WordPress, and DAAP (iTunes Server).