Synology today officially announced the DS409slim, a four-bay NAS designed exclusively for 2.5″ drives with a footprint slightly larger than a large coffee cup.

The company said using 2.5″ drives increases tolerance for physical shocks, reduces power consumption and results in a smaller footprint. Lower power consumption also allows the cooling fan to remain off “under normal operating conditions” with even four drives installed.

The hardware platform has four hot-swappable 2.5″ SATA drive bays, a 1.2 GHz Marvell CPU, 128 MB of DDRII RAM, Gigabit LAN port, two USB 2.0 ports and one eSATA port. The NAS supports up to 2 TB with the combination of four 2.5” SATA or SSD hard drives of 500 GB each.

The DS409slim supports individual, JBOD and RAID 0, 1, 5, 5+Spare and 6 volumes with online RAID expansion and migration. The slim also provides the standard Synology feature set including Windows ADS integration, CIFS/SMB , NFS and AFP network filesystems, FTP serving, Telnet/SSH root access, backup to attached and networked drives (via rsync), media serving including UPnP AV and iTunes, download client and photo serving.

The DS409slim will be available shortly with street pricing around $400.

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