Synology America Launches New Rack Station RS409

Synology America Corp., which develops next-generation Network Attached Storage (NAS) products for the home, small and medium sized business markets, has launched the new Rack Station RS409, a 1U 4-bay network attached storage (NAS) server with high performance, large capacity and rich business applications to help small to medium sized businesses and workgroups easily share and safeguard valuable data.

In a release, Synology officials claim that the RS409 is one of the most affordable rack stations in its class. Not only is the 4-bay RS409 affordable, the storage capacity of the RS409 can be expanded from 4 HDD to 8 HDD, for a total of 16 TB (using 2TB HDD) for two separate volumes, by adding the Synology RX4 expansion station via an eSATA cable.

Officials say the RX4 also features plug-n-use connectivity, hot-swappable HDD design and disk hibernation which works seamlessly with the RS409 for extra storage or backup.

"For businesses, reliability and performance of their file servers can be critical," said Douglas Self, product specialist at Synology America Corp., in a statement.

Self said that the RS409 delivers that needed peace of mind. In the company’s laboratory tests, the RS409 under RAID 5 configurations showed Windows upload speeds with 2 GB files reaches 35 MBs/Sec, while download speed reaches 47 MBs/Sec. The RS409 delivers on performance and the dependability that Synology has come to be known for," said Self.

Officials pointed out that the DS409 ships with the system software, Disk Station Manager 2.1, which provides Windows ADS integration, cross platform data sharing, RAID data protection, and rich business applications.

Mail Station add-on enables the RS409 to be a mail server that supports Web mail, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP. Web Station allows users to host up to 30 websites on a single RS409. The RS409 supports two USB printers, and the Add Printer Wizard simplifies setup process with a wizard.

Giving details, the company officials said that the RS409 is equipped with a 1.2 GHz CPU, 256MB DDRII RAM, two Gigabit LAN ports, two USB2.0 ports, one eSATA port, and supports up to 128 concurrent connections. The RS409 comes with four hot swappable disk trays, each supporting 2 TB SATA hard drive which is the largest capacity on the market, making its total volume up to 8 TB.