Synology USB Station 2 review

We’re big fans of Synology’s Disk Station NAS enclosures, and the USB Station 2 is the new baby of the range. The original USB Station never made it to the UK, so this is the first time we’ve seen what is essentially a Disk Station, but without the disk enclosure.

Instead, you can connect up to two 2TB USB disks, and two USB printers. There are two USB2 ports on the rear, but you can attach a USB hub to increase the number of ports to connect the four devices. You’ll also find a Gigabit Ethernet port, a power socket and, on the side, a button to safely disconnect USB disks.

We appreciated the quick and easy setup process: unlike Disk Stations, you don’t have to download and install the latest firmware on the USB Station 2: it comes pre-loaded with Disk Station Manager 3. Plus, you won’t have to format your disks in order to use them and share their contents over your network. File system support includes NTFS, FAT32, EXT3 and EXT4.

Disk Station Manager 3 is like a multi-tasking operating system, but it runs in a browser. We had no problems using it with Chrome and Internet Explorer, but there’s also support for Firefox and Safari. It’s by far the prettiest NAS interface around, and makes it simple to configure user accounts and use the USB Station’s other features.
Although some applications are missing compared to a Disk Station, you still get an FTP server, Download Station (for downloading files directly from the internet), Audio Station (including internet radio support), an iTunes Server, DLNA/UPnP server and a print server. You can share a maximum of two printers simultaneously, and we had no trouble sharing our Samsung laser printer.

The missing features include a web server, Photo Station, Surveillance Station (IP camera monitoring), network backup and Windows ACL and Domain support, but we can’t see many people complaining at this price. There’s also no RAID capability, as you might expect, and no way to back up the contents of one connected disk to another. You still get Data Replicator 3 for backing up files and folders from your computers onto the USB Station’s disks, and support for Apple Time Machine.

Those with iPhones or Android phones can use the DS Audio app for streaming music from the USB Station 2, while the DLNA/UPnP support means you can stream video, photos and music to Xbox 360s, PS3s and other devices.

File transfer speeds usually depend on which disks you connect, but it’s the file system you choose that will dictate performance with the USB Station 2. Most people will want to connect an existing external disk with their files already on it, so we first tested with an NTFS-formatted disk. Fortunately, the USB Station can share these immediately without requiring a format, but performance was well below our expectations. Large files were read at just 10.6MB/s and written at 6MB/s. Small files were written and read at 3.5MB/s. This is disappointing compared to even Synology’s cheapest Disk Station enclosure.

We reformatted our Freecom Mobile CLS disk to EXT3, and were rewarded with a large-file read speed of 22MB/s and a read speed of 19.6MB/s – almost four times faster than with NTFS. Small files were read at a faster 5.5MB/s but – oddly – written more slowly at 2.2MB/s. We also tried formatting the disk as EXT4, but performance remained the same.

Obviously, the USB Station 2 makes sense if you already have one or two USB2 disks and want to share their contents among multiple PCs. The facts that it draws just 5W and is completely silent are two other advantages over a Disk Station. However, you’ll see poor performance unless you reformat your disk to EXT3 or EXT4. This is inconvenient if your disk is full of files, and also means it can’t be connected directly to a Windows PC or laptop as you need extra software to read these formats. If none of this bothers you and don’t need any of the USB Station 2’s ‘missing’ features, it’s great value.