Intel's Atom processors are proving to be popular choices for many small business NAS appliances as their combination of low power and good performance hasn't gone unnoticed by most of the big manufacturers.
Synology was an early adopter and its new dual-drive DS710+ sports the latest D410 1.67GHz model. It makes some big performance claims but also teams this up with an impressive features list and a very high expansion potential.
Along with Gigabit and three USB2 ports, you have an eSATA port at the rear which is designed primarily to accommodate Synology's optional DX510 expansion unit. This is a dumb five-bay unit with matching design which presents an extra five hot-swap SATA drive bays to the main unit.
Synology's Assistant utility prepares the hard disks and installs the OS either from the supplied CD-ROM or from a location where the latest firmware has been downloaded to. For testing we loaded the latest v2.3 firmware and popped in a couple of 1TB WD GreenPower drives.
This new firmware adds a pile of new features with IP SAN support now allowing block level iSCSI targets to be created although this will require an entire physical disk. Synology's hybrid RAID allows drives of differing sizes to be used in the same array and you have optional 256-bit AES volume encryption.
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