Ten months ago I was debating what route to go down with home servers, I’ve debated this in my own head for a while and about 6 months ago briefly fired up a spare mini-itx board and a couple of drives as a home Debian based headless server. While it worked, it wasn’t quite what I had previously envisaged as one of my main points was to have something which wasn’t going to cause my electricity bill to sky rocket while at the same time filling as many roles as possible. I discussed these in the previous post, but the main points were:

1. File server
2. Bittorrent capable
3. Low power consumption (as low as possible)
4. Secure external access

One of the embedded linux boxes I had my eye on before was the Bubba, it had its upsides including Debian as a base OS which made it pretty flexible. However, I already had a 500Gb SATA drive sitting around and the Bubba is IDE only.

A little look around and I found the Synology website and a fantastic list of compact low power devices, add to this their forums which include a dedicated section on modding their products and I was pretty much sold on buying something from them. Certainly for me, a company who are willing to openly encourage modifications and further development of their product range is a big attraction.

I chose the DS107+ in the end, only a single internal drive but with an eSATA port and 3 USB2.0 ports, 500mhz processor, 128mb RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, a selection of third party bootstraps, several glowing reviews and the aforementioned forum/wiki it looked like the perfect solution.

I’ve been playing around with it for a week now and am very pleased, its quiet, plays well with Xbox Media Centre and while including an array of useful web apps is flexible enough to let me replace them where necessary.

I’ve replaced the included bittorrent client (rTorrent based) with Transmission/Clutch and set up a few CRON jobs and shell scripts to control it and its running very well. The main reason for doing this is that the included one whilst having a handy desktop download redirector application is based on an old version of rTorrent and doesn’t seed very much (not in the spirit of things really!). The OS is BusyBox linux which is not at the time of writing totally open on the 107, annoying but currently not a big issue.

One other point to add, while putting the drive in I noticed the motherboard headers for a second SATA drive as well. It looks like the DS107 and DS207 products share the same board. Not something which I’m concerned with now, and it would without a doubt void the warranty, but if needed in the future I have a feeling it would take the firmware for the 207 to give me a mirrored RAID.

Here’s a couple of the reviews I found helpful:

• Pro-Clockers
• Xbit Labs