Conclusions and Final Thoughts

 

The idea of a NAS drive, a device designed purely for mass storage, that only facilitates laptop hard disks is a tricky one to get your head around.  We know that laptop disks offer lower capacities at a higher cost to their desktop counterparts, so why would anyone use them in the home?

The answer takes a little thought but it is valid; we’re talking about the HOME, not the office.  People don’t want a noisy, power hungry, large device sitting somewhere in the home through which all their media, etc. is streamed.  People would much rather have a device that’s discrete, easy to conceal, quiet and draws the minimum amount of electricity.  And that’s exactly what the DS411Slim offers.

We weren’t able to hear it over the hum of other devices in the room, so it wouldn’t be a problem at all to sit this box out in the open somewhere in the home.  The black plastic case is also quite plain, so it won’t look out of place sat in the TV cabinet or on a worktop somewhere.  The status lights can be a little obtrusive when media is being streamed, but this shouldn’t bother most users, they’re certainly better than the blue LED’s featured on a lot of consumer products these days.

As with most devices in this category, you’re only going to get the best out of this is you have a gigabit network at home already, a 100 Mbps network will barely strain the drive.  That being said, even HD video can be streamed via 100Mbps, so perhaps Gigabit is only necessary should more than one client be streaming at once, which could happen sooner than you think given the switch to hard disk based media from things like DVD and Bluray.

The 411Slim is cheaper than most other 4 bay NAS models on the market, but it needed to be really; the additional cost of laptop hard disks means that the total cost of populating the thing could be a bit of a nightmare.  That being said, at around £250 it’s not breaking the bank at all, and some people may find that the practicalities of a 2.5″ based NAS are worth the additional cost.  We certainly think so here; given our current storage requirements we’d be happy to switch to a 2.5″ NAS when the time comes for us to upgrade.

You also have the option to buy it from certain resellers with hard disks included, which could save you some money, check out the links below from Amazon to see what we mean.

At the end of the day, we were impressed by the 411Slim; the ideology behind it is sound and the DSM interface continues to impress.  If you’re looking for a NAS drive for the home then you should definitely be considering a model that uses 2.5″ drives, and that being the case you could do a lot worse than the Synology DS411Slim.

 

Final Scores:

Ease Of Use: 8 / 10
Specifications: 8 / 10
Features: 10 / 10
Price: 8 / 10
Overall: 9 / 10