I received the Synology DS1010 less than a week ago. I’ve not really had time to put it through it’s paces, but I thought I would write about my impressions so far.

The unit itself is heavy for it’s size, sleek and does look the business in an understated fashion. I initially loaded it up with three 1TB drives; one Western Digital WD10EACS-65D and two Hitachi HDT72101.

The DS1010 took around six hours to build the Raid 5 volume, after that I decided to run some very short tests; I wasn’t impressed. The unit is attached to a gigabit Netgear switch, I made sure all the a cables were quick enough by testing it on other Gigabit capable machines. However when transferring files across to and from the DS101 the speeds were well below par, only reaching around 20mb/s. Sometimes it would burst to an unbelievable 100mb/s but only for short moments.

Since then I’ve put in two 2TB drives and as of right now it’s rebuilding the Raid 5 volume which does take a long time.

I shall post some benchmarks when I have a bit more time.