Synology USB Station 2 Review

Final ThoughtsTo setup and configure the Synology USB Station 2 was very straight forward with the Synology Assistant. The DiskStation Manager 3.1 operating system is used throughout the Synology NAS range and allows the Synology USB Station 2 to offer a large range of features from acting to a media server, printer server to running a home FTP server.

The Synology USB Station 2 offers a good way of turning existing hard drives into a NAS solution, making your data available to all your networked devices. However to do this your drives will most likely be formatted as NTFS and unfortunately NTFS speeds during testing were disappointing which appears to be because using NTFS increased the demand considerably on the CPU in the Synology USB Station 2. I would therefore strongly recommend formatting the drives to the Synology USB Station 2 native file system of EXT4 to gain the best performance.

Overall I was impressed with the Synology USB Station 2, its very stylish, small and compact , its offers a wide range of features but is let down by its slow NTFS Speed and only has two USB2 ports.

Pros

• Small & compact
• Flexiable Operating System
• Extensive range of features
• Respectable EXT4 speeds

Cons:

• Slow NTFS Speeds
• Limited USB2 ports