The DS209 has a pure appearance; the white chassis is accented by the black front panel. The main function for the front panel is to relay information to the owner, to let them know the status of the unit, network and disk. The only user inputs allowed are the power button and the USB copy button.

The side of the DS209 is pure white with a simple sticker indicating the Synology make. On the bottom we have 4 rubber feet as well as ventilation slits to cool the internal components.

On the back of the DS209 we see a 70mm grill to provide cooling to the hard drives as well as a href=”/images/articles/synology/ds209/large/pkg13.jpg”>two additional USB ports, a single GB Ethernet port, a K-Lock, a hard reset button and a DC 12V power plug.

I mentioned earlier that my sample came with 2 hard drives installed, that won’t be the case for you so we’ll quickly walk through the steps of installing hard drives. The chassis is split in two and the removable portion is held down by three screws on the backside. Once removed, you’ll be able to push the chassis cover off and expose the internals.

The hard drives slide into the drive cage and are mounted on the side like a typical hard drive installed in a tower. The shortened SATA data and power cable keep cable clutter to a minimum.

The 70mm fan to cool the hard drive can easily be swapped out for a brand of your choice. The four self-tapping screws can be removed and the power cable for the fan is plugged into your standard 3-pin motherboard connector. The fan provided by Synology is an Evercool brand, EC7025L12ER. This fan is capable of 28.2 CFM with a noise rating of under 25 dBA according to Evercool’s website.

Removing a few more screws and the motherboard can be removed from the frame. We can see that the Marvell 88F6281 (Kirkwood) 1.2GHz processor is soldered directly to the board. Surprisingly this processor is actually capable of 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports opening the option for redundancy should Synology wish to evolve the DS209 line some more, beyond the DS209II already offered. On the topic of networking, a single Marvell Alaska Gigabit Ethernet Transceiver can be found to the right of the Kirkwood chip. The motherboard’s FLASH ROM is provided by a Microchip PIC16F627A-1/SO. This is a low overhead microcontroller located beside the battery.

I don’t have a close up shot available but the 512MB onboard memory is provided by a single Elpida E1116AESE module.

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