The 409+ is a four-bay BYOD NAS that can take up to 2 TB 3.5" SATA drives. Supported volume configurations include single, JBOD, RAID 0, 1, 5, 5+ spare, and 6. Online RAID expansion and RAID level migration are supported. Internal drives are formatted with EXT3 and are not hot-swappable.
The 409+ is built on a hardware platform similar to its single-drive sibling, the DS109+, using a Freescale MPC8533 @ 1.06 GHz and 512 MB of DDRII RAM in an SoDIMM. Two USB 2.0 ports and one eSATA port are provided for storage expansion and backup drives.
Backup to attached USB or eSATA drives can be scheduled once daily with selected days of the week. NAS-to-NAS backup is also supported to another Synology NAS or rsync server. The connection can be optionally encrypted via SSH with file compression and incremental replication options.
Power consumption was 46 W with four Samsung HD753LJ 750 GB drives that Synology provided for testing. Fan noise is low, meaning the NAS is barely audible in a quiet room with multiple computers running. Drives can be scheduled to spin down after between 10 minutes to 5 hours of inactivity, which reduced power consumption to 27 W. Shutdown, startup and restart can also be scheduled daily, on specific days, only weekdays or only weekends.
CIFS/SMB, AFP and NFS network file systems are supported, and files can also be accessed via FTP and secure (SSL/TLS) FTP. HTTPS is supported for admin access. iSCSI targets are not supported.
Media features include iTunes and UPnP AV / DLNA servers, proprietary audio server, optional SqueezeCenter module and web photo sharing. There is also a download service for HTTP, FTP and BitTorrent files.
The 409+ turned in an average RAID 5 write performance using a Gigabit Ethernet connection of 47.7 MB/s for file sizes between 32 MB and 4 GB, with cached behavior not included in the average calculation. Average RAID 5 read performance was higher, measuring 60.4 MB/s with the same conditions.
File copy performance using a Vista SP1 client under the same conditions (RAID 5, Gigabit LAN) measured somewhat lower at 34.3 MB/s for write but significantly higher at 70.2 MB/s for read.