| Synology Cube Station CS-406 Review |
| Written by Maxit | |||||
Page 2 of 3 Features In Detail (continued)Download Redirector Downloading files, mp3's and videos is a popular pastime for many surfers and the Cube Station introduces it's own dedicated download assistant to take the hassle out of the whole process. With support for Bit Torrent, FTP and HTTP downloading, you can use the Cube Station to download 24/7, freeing up your PC for other tasks. Once installed, you can drag files and torrents into the software window and leave the Cube Station to get on with the job. For Bit Torrent it's fantastic as it removes the need for Bit Torrent software on your PC. The download redirector is worth the price of admission alone as it automates one of the most basic and common tasks of computer users. Top Stuff!  Web Server with PHP & MySQL Support If you are into creating websites, you are going to love the Web server feature that is built into the Cube Station CS-406. With full support for PHP and MySQL, you can create everything from simple .html pages to full blown wordpress blogs and Oscommerce shops. Basic web creation is as simple as dropping HTML pages into the mapped web directory. You could create your site in Dreamweaver and test it out using the Cube Station - even run a live website across the net if you had the spare bandwith. Great for home users and business websites who don't need a dedicated hosting solution. The real power comes for web designers. With support for PHP and MySQL as standard, complex websites can be built on the Cube Station, tested and shown to clients with ease. Installing applications such as phpmyadmin - a database manipulation tool - is as easy as downloading the open source package from the internet, unzipping and moving the contents onto a folder on the web directory mapped drive. Similar applications such as Oscommerce - one of the best free shopping cart systems available - can be setup and developed from the comfort of the Cube Station. We tested Joomla - a content management system - and Zencart - a posh Oscommerce shopping cart system - on the CS-406. Joomla worked perfectly out of the box but Zencart struggled possibly due to the use of XHTML based templates and pure CSS. Pages were not displayed correctly and no amount of tweaking could sort them out. Hopefully a future update will take care of this as the system matures. 
Backup Solutions Protecting data is serious business and the Cube Station offers three solutions to cover every eventually. Local backup allows data to be copied from the NAS server on to an external hard drive connected via the in built USB ports. Connect up the drive and the unit is detected by the Cube Station and configured ready for use. Fat 32, Native Formats and now NTFS thanks to a recent firmware upgrade. The external drive can either be shared or used for backup security. A schedule can be figured to run at set intervals or an immediate backup carried out. It's a bit basic but functional enough to get the job done. On a plus note, the higher performing USB 2.0 spec is supported by the Cube Station allowing faster file transfers. Network backup allows the option to backup and restore data between two Cube Stations. There's no support for FTP backups so data syncing for web development isn't possible which is somewhat disappointing as the Web Server is so good. It really would have been the icing on the cake. A software backup solution is included on the disk called Data Replicator II. Once installed it can perform immediate backups, synchronization and scheduled backups as required. Options are limited but it does perform all the basics and is very easy to configure and use. A 1.6GB test folder was backed up in around 12 minutes and restored in a similar amount of time. As with all software backup solutions you have to remember to start and run it. If you are the kind of user that can never remember daily chores like this, you'll probably groan at the thought of software solutions. For everybody else, it's a welcome addition. Overall, we can't help feel a little underwhelmed by the backup solutions on offer. Perhaps the Photo Station and other features wowed us so much, we were expecting something with a little more X Factor. Incremental backups and data sync over FTP would be handy for webmasters and web developers. Automatic backups without the need to run software would be another. With the ability to run RAID 1 and 5, we expected Synology to throw in the works. Instead we have adequate solutions but there is plenty of room for additional improvements. The Cube Station can also act as a multimedia server over uPnP. The ability to stream media files from the Cube Station will not doubt impress Home Entertainment enthusiasts with digital media adapters. Gamers with Xbox 360 consoles and the like will struggle without the use of third party software such as Twonky Vision installed on another PC. If Synology could crack the Xbox 360 and allow the easy streaming of files between the two systems they would have a real winner on their hands! We tried hooking up the Cube Station and our Xbox 360 over a home network but failed miserably. Synology are looking into this and hope to bring support for Windows Media Connect in the near future. If and when this happens, look out! The Cube Station will become a powerful multimedia server for just about any environment and the system to have for Home Entertainment. In The LabsPerformance across networks will no doubt depend largely on your equipment and network environment. With support for Gigabit lans, the Cube Station is certainly no slouch. A 690Mb movie file downloaded from the Cube Station over FTP using FlashFXP to our PC was accomplished at around 26MB/s. Dragging a 1GB iso file from the Cube Station to a PC attached to the gigabit network took 2 minutes and ten seconds. We've pinched Synology's own test results showing a more detailed comparison in RAID 0 and 5 environments, to give you an idea of what to expect for the network experts out there. |
