When I reviewed five new NAS appliances back in May, Reader Robert said he much preferred getting storage appliances without disks. He had a good source for disks, and wanted more storage without paying the vendor's markup. Those of you who feel that way will love the new Synology Cube Station, a slick NAS appliance you can buy sans disks and plug in your own. The fact their software and hardware works well is an added bonus.

Although seemingly identical, the Synology Cube Station CS-406 has the SMB tag, while the CS-406e aims at the home and SOHO market. Both let you add four of your own SATA (Serial ATA) drives. Using four identical drives makes it much easier to use disk mirroring and redundancy like RAID-5 so one dead disk won't corrupt your data. Currently, the largest SATA drive supported in the Cube Station is 500GBs, but since they support the new 750GB SATA drive from Seagate in their single disk appliance, I'm sure they'll support that larger drive in the Cube Station soon.

The shoebox-sized silver box with a white front looks like Apple helped design it because of the clean lines and iPod style plastic. One large and quiet fan keeps the drives cool. USB ports allow for extra disk capacity from external drives, perhaps like one of Synology's Disk Station (single drive) appliances. You can also plug a USB printer into one of the two USB 2.0 ports and let multiple people print their NFL Fantasy Football rosters to the same workgroup printer. The network connection supports Gigabit Ethernet.

Synology includes backup options for the NAS unit itself and for attached computers. Unfortunately, the network backup option requires another Cube Station instead of any compatible network shared disk. But this is somewhat understandable since Synology includes enough intelligence in the boxes to handle file transfers themselves without a client PC in the loop. They also offer this as a download feature so you can start downloading large online files and turn off your PC while the download continues. While that's a pretty dumb thing to do, getting the PC out of the loop releases your PC for other work and reduces the workload.

Client backup software Data Replicator II (branded by Synology, but I don't know if they developed the software themselves) eliminates user excuses with a variety of backup options. You can back up immediately, schedule a backup, or use "Synchronization" which backs up files as they change. This jumps into the realm of Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and comes on few backup systems at this level.

James Gaskin writes books (16 so far), articles and jokes about technology and real life from his home office in the Dallas area.