First and foremost destined for small and medium sized businesses, the Disk Station DS508 is a high end model from Synology, one of the current best manufacturers on the home and SoHo NAS market. It succeeds the impressive CS407, which you may recall had the best quality/price ratio in our previous NAS Raid 5 roundup.
The main improvements of this model immediately stand out: the DS508 can now take up to 5 hard drives compared to the 4 of the CS407 as well as the support of drive installation in hotswap. Previously, we had to open the chassis for access. It directly rivals the Thecus N5200BR Pro which is currently the only other current SoHo NAS that shares these characteristics.
We can also assume a few changes were made “under the hood” as Synology announces performance improvements that are in no way insignificant. The DS508 is thus capable of writing at more than 30 MB/s on a Raid 5 volume and in the transfer of Windows data (CIFS/SMB) as well as especially being able read data at more than 49 MB/s! You may recall that the fastest NAS we tested up until now, the N5200BR Pro, could already write at a little more than 30 MB/s but only slightly surpassed this speed when reading still in CIFS/SMB. Otherwise, in the same conditions the CS407 slightly surpassed 12 MB/s in writing and 25 MB/s in reading.
A quick look at the DS508’s back panel also allows us to see the addition of an eSATA connection for relaying an external volume as well as a second Gigabit network connector. Moreover, we know that Synology NAS have recent IP camera capabilities for the direct and autonomous recording of sequences on the hard drive. This function was still in its beta version and so we weren’t able to test it in our previous article. Finally, this is the first NAS from Synology to offer a startup planner by hour and weekday, something very practical for saving energy with the overall system and your hard drives.
In short, the DS508 has enough to convince us to put our 2/3 drive NAS (10 models) article on hold, to which we will promptly return after having dissected this new monster!
