The Disk Station DS-409+ is a powerful NAS server supporting four hard drives, designed to appeal to small-and-medium business users seeking an affordable solution for efficient data sharing and backup.

Read the full review at:
http://www.techspot.com/review/169-synology-ds409p/

Please leave your feedback here.

Thank you for the review.
What's most important for me and many others I suspect is: does it play nicely with Windows 7 (RC) search (or Vista). If you add document folders to your Windows 7 libraries from Synology, will you be able to do fast, indexed searches? That would be a minimum requirement for me regarding a modern storage device.

very nice in-depth review. However that thing looks like an IT tech's worst nightmare, an explosion in a wire factory! With that design and layout, you're just begging for a fan to catch a cable. That means custom length cables for each drive would be a must. Today, there are cableless installation/mounting alternatives, which in this case, would be the simpler and proper way to go. I also don't see how the HOME/SMALL/MEDIUM business can justify having 4 drives or 8TB of storage, unless you plan on downloading the FBI mainframe onto it, then backing it up to the 6TB you still have free...but whatever, to each their own.

The SATA cables are custom made so its not nearly as bad as it looks. That said I agree hot swap bays like I mentioned in the review would be a much better alternative.

As for the mass of storage it all depends on what kind of office/home you are talking about. My partner for example is a designer for a magazine and has to store loads of layouts and high ress TIFF images which takes up huges amounts of space. Further more she has to save them all for referance so this is ideal.

People that do video editing will find the space invaluable and I am sure there are many more examples.

That said if your office consists of users that write plain documents, send e-mails and play on YouTube all day then no the storage will not be necessary

Thanks for the feedback.

No, I am sorry to say, it does not! Well, not yet anyway. Perhaps they will include this in a new version of the firmware.

I bought the 409+ in december 2009 and it's now with a backplane.
The only thing you have to do is install disk, plug in ready.
No wires anymore.

The backplane is for 2.5" and 3.5" disks.