It comes with the Mac OS X compatible Synology Disk Station Manager software, which is now up to version 2.2. The latest version introduced a new Surveillance Station 3, DLNA compliant media server, Apple Time Machine and iPhone support while improving reliability and other features, so it's obviously Mac friendly.

I'm running the Synology DS209with two WD 640GB drives, with one serving as the main drive and the second as a back-up. One of my complaints about the Synology solution: it's hard to open it up. Very hard. A simple drive caddy mechanism should be part of the package.

But once you get up and running -- Gigabit Ethernet port enables you get your data quickly -- there are a lot of benefits. The hardware/software combo provides transparent bad sector remapping, dynamic bad sector remapping and recovery. There's iSCSI support, which allows for the creation up to 10 iSCSI targets on a single Disk Station. Three USB 2.0 ports deliver easy connection to your peripheral devices. Advanced RAID data protection includes RAID 0, 1 and JBOD.

Besides being a solid back-up device, the DS209+II is a fine multimedia server. Its iTunes Server feature lets you share music to other iTunes clients over a network. Sweeet. UPnP support lets you stream multimedia files with an UPnP Digital Media Adapter (DMA) on a stereo system or a TV-set. The Sony PS3 and Microsoft Xbox360 are also supported.

I also like the USBCopy feature. You can copy the data on a location of your choosing on an USB drive with the push of a button. The Synology solution is also "green," with scheduled power on/off feature.

The negatives. The plastic enclosure feels a little cheap. If you want to do things like remote access/management, you'll need to be more than a casual computer user. And there are some odd quirks.

If you can't find the .pat file after you unzip the downloaded firmware on our Mac, you could run into a snafu. If you're running Mac OS X 10.5.x ("Snow Leopard") and using Stufflt Expander to unzip files, you'll need to make sure the option "Continue to expand if possible" is un-selected and try to unzip the downloaded firmware upgrade again.

Also, if you can't back-up files or folders from the Synology product to an external USB/SATA disk, it may be because there are icons in the folders or the file name contains illegal characters in FAT32 format (such as \ / < > * ? | “ \r \t.). To back up files or folders in the above condition, you need to format the USB/SATA backup disk in Native format on the "Device > USB Disk" page or the "Device > SATA Disk" page. However, note that formatting will delete all data on the USB/SATA disk, so be sure and back up your data.

So is the Synology solution for you? If you're comfortable in the NAS world, sure. If you're not, there may be better options. Which we'll be exploring in the days ahead.



Macsimum rating: 7 out of 10