As you can see from the list, this NAS provides a very impressive array of features far from what most external hard drives and NAS units provide. Some of the more interesting features are the download clients that allow you to download web hosted files as well as BitTorrent resources directly from the NAS unit. The device also supports several common RAID levels such as RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD as well as RAID levels that most consumer NAS devices do not support such as RAID 4 and 6.
With only space for one hard drive you may be confused as to why you would need this functionality, but this unit does have external USB and an eSATA port to allow you to connect additional hard drives. It is hard to advise the usage of USB 2.0 for any RAID array due to USB 2.0’s limited bandwidth and latency, but RAID via the eSATA port would be simple and more complex RAID levels could be accomplished in theory with a SATA expander (but we will not be diving into things that deep with this review).
A simple yet important feature on this NAS is the Gigabit network controller. Gigabit is almost a must for anyone transferring large amounts of data and considering this is a storage device it is important SilverStone included it. The network controller is of course backwards compatible with Standard 100 Mbps FastEthernet. Worth noting though is there did not seem to be an option to enable Jumbo Frames/MTU on the network interface.
This DC01 also advertises itself as your “personal cloud”. While I hate marketing buzzwords as much as I hate the term “cloud” in reference to technology, SilverStone has come up with a neat solution. They have combined a simple dynamic DNS server (www.myakitio.com) with some customer software built into the NAS unit. This allows for very simple configuration as well as the ability to access your DC01 anywhere via the Internet. Even more interesting is the fact you can use the built-in media player to stream videos directly from your NAS to whatever computer you are on over the net (more on this later).
