Synology Disk Station DS409+ NAS Device

One of the stronger features of the DS409+ is data protection. For instance, if a volume is configured as RAID 5, RAID 5 + Spare, or RAID 6, you can actually hot swap a failed drive without having to power down the device. The DS409+ also lets you backup any or all the device's shared folders contents to an attached external hard drive, another Synology server, or an rsync-compatible server. Data backed up via a network connection can additionally be encrypted--unfortunately, this is not an option for backups to direct-attached external drives. Regardless of the backup destination you can schedule these backups to automatically occur at regularly scheduled intervals.

Information on a degraded volume.	Server backup options.

The DS409+ also supports Active Directory Domain Services via KDC IP, Full Qualified Domain Name (FQDN), or domain NetBIOS name. You can also completely disable Windows file service if you don't want Windows users to be able to access the device as a file server (i.e., if you are using the DS409+ only as an FTP server). Some other security features are the ability to enable or disable support for the NFS protocol, Telnet and SSH services, and forcing all HTTP-based connections to use HTTPS with SSL/TLS protection (including importing private keys and certificates). The device's FTP server (which you can disable if you choose) includes a wide range of granular controls, including bandwidth restriction, an IP block list, and only accepting SSL/TLS-based FTP connections.

Windows and Mac OS file server options.	FTP server options.

The DS409+ also comes with a number of features that make the device far more than just a file server. The included Web Station lets you host a Web site on the device. You can also enable individual users to host their own personal Websites on the device as well. The Web server supports PHP+MySQL, can support up to 30 Websites, and can even report some basic usage statistics. You can also set up the DS409+ as a mail server, with SMTP, POP3, and IMAP support.

Web Services options.	Mail Server options.

A few caveats need to be mentioned, however: If you set up any Websites on the DS409+ with the expectation that you will have external visitors from the Internet, make sure that your broadband Internet account doesn't have any bandwidth caps--or at least bandwidth caps that can accommodate this extra traffic. Also, the processing power of the DS409+ is fairly limited, so more than a handful of simultaneous users can potentially bring the DS409+ to its knees. If you do plan on using the DS409+ as a Web server, it would be best to password protect any sites it hosts and limit access to only a handful of users--if you need a more robust Web server than this, then the DS409+ is probably not the right solution for you. Also, if you plan on using the DS409+ as a mail server, make sure that your ISP supports this. Some ISPs will only let commercial accounts run a mail server--and the same bandwidth and number of user constraints apply here as well.