Updated – Synology has added another dual-drive expandable NAS to its small-biz product line.
The DS712+ succeeds the DS710+ [reviewed] as Synology’s answer to those who want to minimize their initial NAS investment, yet allow for high-capacity storage expansion.
Like the DS710+, the DS712+ can scale to a total of seven drives (21 TB with 3 TB drives) via the eSATA-attached DX510 expansion module. Both 2.5" and 3.5" SATA drives can be used and all drives are hot-swappable.
The DS712+ runs on a 1.8 GHz Intel D425 Atom with 1 GB of DDR3 RAM. Other hardware features include dual Gigabit Ethernet ports supporting failover and aggregation and three USB 2.0 ports for attached backup and printer serving.
Like all Synology NASes, the DS712+ runs Synology’s DiskStation Manager (DSM) 3.2 with many features including iSCSI, VMware / Citrix Xen / Hyper-V virtualization, attached and network backup including support for Apple Time Machine for Mac OS X Lion and UPnP AV / DLNA media serving. Other features can be added via 3rd party apps.
The DS712+ will be available soon at street pricing around $550.