When we?re talking network attached storage in our own homes, it isn't everyone that needs a large server with 4, 6 or 8 bays. Sometimes one bay is enough, if the features and functions still match. We?re also seeing a hard drive size that keeps growing with 6 TB consumer drives and 8 TB enterprise drives already available and the 10 TB drives aren't far in the future. This might be a smart route to take for people who get into the NAS area now and need both a new device and drives for it, but also for those who just want to cut down on the running costs.

Today I?m taking a look at a device for just this situation, the brand new Synology DS115J Disk Station. A compact, lightweight and energy-efficient NAS that is perfect for the budget-conscious home users looking for a simple, yet feature-rich NAS server. You can easily back up documents, monitor live surveillance feeds, build a personal cloud to share files with friends and family or just use it as a media location.

The performance doesn't need to suffer when thinking in these directions and Synology shows that fact with this device. It promises speeds of up to 103 MB/s when reading; that is a 28% increase compared to its predecessor. This is achieved by using a CPU with built-in Floating-Point Unit (FPU), the Marvell Armada 370 that runs at 800 MHz. The NAS has 256 MB DDR3 ram which should be sufficient for a 1-bay device like this. Of course the device has been tested to support the newest 6 TB NAS drives and it should work just fine with any other 3½ inch SATA drive as well. It also supports 2½ inch drives, but that requires an optional Disk Adapter.