Intel’s Atom processors are proving to be popular choices for many small business NAS appliances as their combination of low power and good performance hasn’t gone unnoticed by most of the big manufacturers.

Synology was an early adopter and its new dual-drive DS710+ sports the latest D410 1.67GHz model. It makes some big performance claims but also teams this up with an impressive features list and a very high expansion potential.

The DS710+ is a compact little box with a pair of plastic drives carriers located at the rear. They aren’t lockable but a small button on each carrier stops them from being accidentally popped open and they also have mounting holes for 2.5in. SFF SATA disks as well as standard 3.5in drives. .]

Along with Gigabit and three USB2 ports, you have an eSATA port at the rear which is designed primarily to accommodate Synology’s optional DX510 expansion unit. This is a dumb five-bay unit with matching design which presents an extra five hot-swap SATA drive bays to the main unit.

Synology’s Assistant utility prepares the hard disks and installs the OS either from the supplied CD-ROM or from a location where the latest firmware has been downloaded to. For testing we loaded the latest v2.3 firmware and popped in a couple of 1TB WD GreenPower drives.

This new firmware adds a pile of new features with IP SAN support now allowing block level iSCSI targets to be created although this will require an entire physical disk. Synology’s hybrid RAID allows drives of differing sizes to be used in the same array and you have optional 256-bit AES volume encryption.

The main Disk Station Manager (DSM) web interface is a smart affair that’s very well designed and offering easy access to the myriad features. You’re first job is to create an array and to test Synology’s speed claims we initially configured the two drives as a RAID0 stripe which took six hours to create.

We had the new DX510 expansion box and were able to connect this to the main unit on the fly and as we added new drives they appeared ready for configuration. With an extra five bays up for grabs, RAID5 and dual redundant RAID6 arrays become realities and a new feature in DSM 2.3 is migration from the former to the latter.

The DS710+ has the same feature set as its larger DiskStation brethren which includes support for Windows, Linux and Macintosh clients plus local or AD authentication. As users are created you can determine their share access privileges at the group and user level whilst quotas allow you to limit how much storage each one can consume.

The new firewall feature is aimed at those that want to link the appliance securely to the internet. Synology provides its EZ-Internet wizard which guides you through configuring your broadband connection and creating port forwarding rules for inbound remote access.

The firewall supports up to 100 rules which can be applied to individual IP addresses or ranges and tweaked for specific services. Thes...