Overview
The Synology USB Station 2 is a quick way to turn any spare USB external hard drives into a network storage solutions. It supports USB printers; can handle external hard drives formatted using FAT32, NTFS, or EXT4 file systems; and has plenty of features and a simple to use and robust Web interface.
If you have a few external hard drives that are full of data and want to quickly share them via your network, the Synology USB Station 2 is for you. This little device gives you a taste of what it’s like to have one of Synology’s full-featured NAS servers, which generally come with a vast number of features and an incredibly intuitive Web interface to manage them.
Features
On the back, there are only two USB ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port, and the power connector. Meaning you'll be able to attached two 3GB storage drives, totaling 6GB in total - more than enough for any home users
Setting it up was a breeze. Like all NAS servers from Synology, the USB Station 2 comes with a handy CD that contains the Synology Assistant software. Once installed on a connected computer, the software helps detect the NAS server, map share folders onto the network drive, and launch the Web interface, which you can use to further customize the device.
Once an external hard drive is plugged into the NAS’ USB port, it will be automatically turned into a public share folder that anybody in the network can access. You can later restrict access by using the device’s Web interface.
Music stored on any connected drive can be streamed to iTunes player in Windows or on a Mac. Several iPhone apps are also available, such as DS audio, DS photo and DS cam, which allow you to access music, pictures and security cameras, through your home network.
Review
The USB Station 2 unit itself runs cool and silently without need for any fans, and if you only attach flash storage you'll have a totally silent network storage solution that you can put in any room in the house.
When you attach storage it will need to be formatted for Linux (EXT3 or 4) or Windows (FAT or NTFS) file systems, but thanks to cross-platform networking support, it can be accessed by all Mac, Windows or Linux PCs - a very handy feature if you have Mac and Windows in the same network. More importantly DLNA support means it'll also be recognised by other home electronics devices like audio systems and Sony PS3 or Microsoft Xbox 360 games consoles - making video streaming a breeze, although High Def video over wireless might be a bridge too far. If you're hard wired in then it will be more than fast enough.
Power consumption is amazingly low. With one flash drive and a bus-powered hard drive connected, we saw just 6-7W power consumption.
File transfers were suitably fast, and in line with expectations for the USB 2.0 interface. We tested the unit over the office gigabit ethernet network using various desktop and notebooks PCs, and also with a direct connection from PC to NAS.
We Say
The USB Station 2 is an entry-level portable NAS server for home users with casual network storage needs. Despite its nice design and a good set of features, its slow performance will steer savvy users away.
But, if your looking for a way to share content around a network of computer from a couple of storage drives - you can't go wrong with the Synology USB station, its quite pricey - but with such a low power consumption and small footprint - it definitely worth a look – if only you could attach more devices, although this can be easily solved as you can attach an additional hub to increase the device number.It’s simple to use and easy to setup and would be something that would be ideal for someone who is taking their first steps in the world of NAS servers.