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The Surveillance Station looks useful, as the appliance is licensed out-of-the-box to take feeds from up to five IP cameras such as those from Axis, Panasonic and Vivotek. We tested this with an Axis 216FD and were able to view its live feed from the separate web interface, record continuously or to a schedule to the default Surveillance directory on the appliance and apply motion detection as well.

For multimedia you have the ubiquitous iTunes server and you can password protect your music folder and create smart playlists on the appliance. Go for Synology's optional Remote receptor plus a pair of certified USB speakers and the Audio Station can be used to play music directly from the appliance. You can use Photo Station 3 to store your pictures on the appliance and publish them on the web and the interface for this includes a blog facility that can be accessed securely over HTTPS.

You can run your own website from the appliance as it comes with an Apache web server along with PHP and the latest MySQL. Backup features are in abundance as the appliance can manage jobs that secure data from one local folder to another or to an external USB storage device.

Data can also be secured to another Synology appliance or another rsync compliant one over the network. For workstation backup, you get a copy of Synology's Data Replicator 3 and after a full backup has been completed, it monitors selected sources and secures new or modified files in real time.

The DS409slim may be small but it's big on performance with copies of a 2.52GB video clip to and from a dual 2.8GHz Xeon X5560 Broadberry CyberServe returning respectable read and write speeds of 43MB/sec and 36MB/sec. FTP speeds were in the same ball park with the FileZilla client reporting speeds of 48MB/sec and 36MB/sec respectively.

Verdict

The Synology DS409slim is one of the most impressive desktop NAS appliances we've seen so far this year. You pay a slight premium for this miniaturisation but this appliance is small, quiet, reasonably quick and is packed to bursting point with features.

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