Synology Disk Station DS408
The Synology DS408 is available in online shops for about $750 without hard drives. Purchasing an empty housing makes sense especially if you still have unused hard drives from a computer upgrade that you want to put to good use.
Although you can find the DS408 pre-configured through a number of VARs, we’re still going to recommend going for the empty enclosure and building up your own configuration that best meets your storage and expansion needs.
Build
Although purchasing a Disk Station DS408 is expensive, you will get a very nicely-built device for this price with a very good data transfer rate in comparison to other devices in this price class. More about this later.
The housing of the DS408 NAS devices is almost completely constructed of metal. Only the front is made out of glossy, black plastic, which doesn’t lower the overall impression. In contrast to other devices, the hard drives are installed into the DS408 by opening the back, and there are no movable plastic parts that might break off. The front is simple, functional, and gives information about the status of the individual hard drives, LAN activity and the device as a whole.
One negative is that you cannot use slide-out trays to install the hard drives in the DS408, which in this price class is pretty much standard. The hard drives are mounted in the device with screws, which means switching out a defective hard drive is a lot of work.
The back of the DS408 housing has a hinge and can be flipped open after removing four thumb screws. Once the rear of the DS408 is open, you have to remove the rest of the housing in order to install the hard drives.
After the hard drives are installed into the hard drive cage, you simply put the housing back together. The precision of the fit is very good, though connecting the single SATA power and data cables in this tight space is a real mess. Closing the case also requires attention and dexterous fingers. The 80 mm fan on the back is deep in the housing and when closing the lid, it’s easy to pinch some cables.
We noticed that, after a couple of hours, when we installed an additional hard drive, a passive cooler on the motherboard came loose. We think that the cooler must have come loose in transit. The increase in temperature caused the system to crash—something that should not happen in a storage device priced as high as this one.
Accessories
The Synology Disk Station DS408 comes with more bundled accessories than other NAS devices. This is not so much due to the generosity of the manufacturer, but rather because of how the hard drives are installed. This is the reason why there are four additional SATA power and data cables in the accessories, as well as the external power supply, an Ethernet network cable, a manual, and quick-start instructions. In an enclosure with a midplane, the cabling wouldn’t be necessary at all.
Don’t forget the CD, which contains the Synology Assistant application, as well as a copy of the firmware for the NAS device.
