Final thoughts and rating

Although a pricey prospect at just over £300, Synology's DiskStation DS210+ offers an assortment of features - ranging from a built-in DLNA Media Server to 256-bit AES encryption - that will appeal to both home and office users alike.

From a hardware perspective, performance lives up to expectations and the DS210+ manages to remain cool and quiet when in use.

Yet it's on the software front that Synology solutions really shine. The new DiskStation Manager 3.0 firmware, currently available as part of a beta release, is highly intuitive and offers a desktop-like interface that should feel familiar to most users.

When you're in the market for a NAS, you're generally looking for something that's compact, quick, easy to use and brimming with features. The DS210+ ticks all of those boxes.

The Good

Extensive feature set
Compact, quiet in use
Solid all-round performance
Innovative DiskStation Manager 3.0 interface

The Bad

Bit pricey for a two-bay server

HEXUS Rating

Synology DiskStation DS210+

HEXUS Awards

Synology DiskStation DS210+

HEXUS Where2Buy

The Synology DiskStation DS210+ can be purchased from SCAN.co.uk* at a cost of £303.11.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

*As always, UK-based HEXUS.community forum members will benefit from the SCAN2HEXUS Free Shipping initiative, which will save you a further few pounds plus also top-notch, priority customer service and technical support backed up by the SCANcare@HEXUS forum.

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I never understand why these things cost so much!

Jay
I never understand why these things cost so much!

Components, development on the OS, and it's not a high volume product so the margin has to be high.

Trouble with these pricier ones is that you can buy and Atom board and a nice silenced tower case for less money and run a full fat OS on it, if you don't care about size and doing a bit of setup.

I use the little brother of this device, the DS210J which is similar just a little slower and much cheaper. I've installed the 3,0 beta firmware and I'm really pleased with it.

I believe that the price is very well justified for these devices. They are simple to set up, you can set up a raid array with a few clicks. They are very low power, silent, file server, DLNA/uPnP server, itunes server, iSCSI server and complete download station to name but a few. All this functionality is easily available from any remote location via the excellent web interface.

I'd suggest you check out the live demo of one in action from the synology site, it's an amazing bit of kit ;) synology dot com/enu/products/demo/index.php (silly url rule :) )

Not sure if anyone can answer this, or maybe the good guys at Hexus can test this.

According to the website it is a DLNA/UPnP media server and has PS3/Xbox 360 support, so does this box transcode MKVs for play back on the PS3?

Thanks

Kimbie

There's no way it has enough CPU power to transcode MKVs on the fly, unless they're at 180p ;)