Synology Cube Station CS407 - Do-It-Yourself NAS


System Software Configuration and Setup

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Upon power-up, we dropped the Synology setup disk into a workstation that was connected to our Gig-E network. Synology's system discovery and configuration wizard found the CS407 NAS unit and proceeded with setting it up, flawlessly we might add.

System Software Configuration and Setup
Wizard-Driven and  Easy
We stepped quickly through the procedure for configuring a RAID 1 array with a pair of Western Digital Caviar SE16 750G SATA hard drives.  The entire process was fully automated and we let the setup wizard also run a full low-level scan for bad sectors on the disks.  The wizard would automatically re-map bad blocks on the disk so that data wouldn't be written to them, if in fact any defects were found.  Fortunately, this wasn't the case with our new hard drives.  The physical disk scan took a while to complete, since our drives were so large, but this was a cheap insurance policy and we were happy to wait it out.

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Setup, Volume Creation, Status, Priviledges and Power Management

From there we setup our admin rights for the volume.  There is a fair amount of granularity in this menu area and you can configure users and groups with various access levels (read-only or read/write etc.) to the volume or specific directories on the volume.  We then hit the Power Management menu which allows you to configure power recovery functions in the event of an outage, as well as hard disk idle spin-down time and power cycling of the entire unit itself.

Other configuration options of the CS407, include LAN setup configuration, either automatically (DHCP) or manually, and the ability to enable Jumbo Frame support and its associated MTU size.  We would caution, however, that Jumbo Frames needs to be something that is supported by the client-side NIC as well.  It's great that Synology provides this feature but if other devices on your network aren't capable or configured (this means clients as well as switches and routers) to support Jumbo Frames, using this setting may provide no benefit and could possibly even limit performance.  Netgrear has a good article on the topic here for your reference.  We specifically performed all our testing with Jumbo Frame support disabled.

Lastly, the unit also has the ability to send email notifications via an SMTP mail server to any address, for notification of error events and volume failure. This is a great feature to have, especially in support of other features like the unit's integrated web server application. 


Tags:  ATI, NAS, CS4, Synology, S4, tat, stat, Cube

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