Device breaks the low-end NAS wide open

I'm clearly very much impressed with the CS407. This tiny little box took the place of the behemoth file server in the lab quite handily. Naturally, it also uses less power while doing basically the same work. It would be very nice to see the CS407 with more horsepower and RAM, and definitely with hot-swap disks, and I'm told that these features will be available in the forthcoming Disk Station 508, to be released early this year.

At around US$599 on the street without disk, the CS407 is reasonably priced. I wound up with 2TB of RAID 5 network storage for around US$1,300. Some retailers are bundling the CS407 with disks, such as the US$1,919 deal from Aegis that adds four 1TB disks. A 4TB file server for under US$2K is not shabby at all, especially when you consider that you can modify how those files are served in just about any way you like.

In sharp contrast to most SMB NAS devices, the pure openness of the CS407 is exemplary. Rather than being locked into an untouchable system, it's as open as if you built it yourself -- but you didn't have to.