Storage/NAS by stefan @ 2013-12-02
The DS1513+ NAS from Synology comes with a redesigned enclosure which features removable fans, new screwless trays, 2GB of DDR3 RAM (with the possibility of upgrade to 4GB), an Intel Dual Core CPU at 2.13GHz and no less than four LAN ports with Link Aggregation support.
Superior Performance
The Synology DS1513+ is built for speed. With dual core CPU and expandable RAM capacity, the DS1513+ is ideal for the mission critical tasks of SMBs as well as the most intensive applications from data-encryption to video-transcoding. With link aggregation, Synology DS1513+ can deliver up to an average 350.94 MB/sec reading and 202.34 MB/sec writing speed under RAID 5 configuration in a Windows® environment.
Resilient and Reliable
In addition to superior performance, the DS1513+ is built for reliability. Four LAN ports provide redundancy in the event of unexpected hardware failure while hot swappable drives also help to minimize system downtime during drive replacement. Furthermore, passive cooling technology eliminates the dependency upon a dedicated processor cooling fan. Should a fan fail, built-in redundancy mechanisms will spin up functional fan(s) to improve ventilation.
Uninterrupted availability is a critical goal for all businesses; however, many businesses worldwide still remain unprepared for disaster. Synology High Availability (SHA) can ensure seamless transition between clustered servers in the event of server failure with minimal impact to applications to decrease the risk of unexpected interruptions and costly downtime.
Unparalleled Flexibility
As your data storage needs grow, Synology’s DS1513+ can grow with you. The DS1513+ can be connected to dedicated expansion units for additional storage on the fly, growing capacity with minimal effort. When paired with two DX513 expansion units1 through specially designed eSATA connectors, raw capacity can be as high as 60 TB.
Feature-Rich Business Applications
Put your data to work with Synology’s DS1513+. With Windows ACL and LDAP support DS1513+ fits easily into any existing workgroup environment, providing detailed access control and efficient privilege settings. A wealth of SMB applications including printer sharing, VPN server, ERP software, mail server, web server, anti-virus, and network video surveillance, allows a single Synology DS1513+ to replace several pieces of traditional hardware and helps to maximize your productivity while keeping cost and effort to a minimum.
Easy Backup Solutions
To protect your critical business data, DS1513+ can become a centralized backup target for consolidating fragmented and unstructured information across your network through a range of options. PC users can backup to DS1513+ with Synology’s Data Replicator, while DS1513+ also fully supports Mac OS X®'s native Apple® Time Machine®. Synology’s own backup wizard can back up information to another Synology NAS or any rsync server, with the option of using an encrypted connection, or to an external hard drive via USB 3.0 or eSATA. The wizard can also back up your information to the cloud, including Amazon® S3, Glacier, and STRATO HiDrive.
iSCSI and Virtualization Ready
With the iSCSI support in DSM, the Synology DS1513+ provides a seamless storage solution for virtualization servers, such as VMware, Hyper-V, and Citrix.It is the ideal alternative to SAN solution for businesses. Affordable and costeffective,iSCSI allows SMB users to consolidate storage into data center storage arrays while providing hosts with the illusion of locally-attached disks.
Energy Efficient Design
Synology DiskStation are designed and developed with energy efficiency in mind. Compared with the average PC counterparts, Synology DS1513+ consumes only 51 watts in operation. Wake on LAN/WAN and scheduled power on/off features can further reduce power consumption and operation costs. HDD hibernation can be configured to take effect automatically when the system has been inactive for a specified period of time to save energy and extend hard disk life. All Synology products are produced with RoHS compliant parts and packed with recyclable packing materials. Synology acknowledges the responsibility of a global citizen and works continually to reduce the environmental impact of every product.
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Bought this one about 2 months ago to replace a home build server that was running Windows 2003. I've replicated 99% of the tasks I want from the full blown server to this compact Synology, the DSM software is powerful and the extra packages and available sources add a lot of value and functionality.
Features worthy of note:
- Recycle Bin option, very useful to enable on the photo/music/document shares, when you delete files from file station, or over NSF/SMB it will move them to a recycle bin folder in the root of each share. Extremely handy in case you deleted a file and want it back without going to restore from backup.
- speaking of backup: you left this out of the review, worthy to include, hook up an USB 2.0/3.0 drive and you can use it as a backup target, first run it will do a full backup, then incremental afterwards, you can also define to have up to X version of a file. Say you change a file every day, you can keep a backup of 3 last versions, nifty. works the same way as "previous versions" in windows and "time machine" on mac. Synology NAS is seen as capable Time Machine target too, even with the latest OS X Mavericks!
- I was using www.crashplan.com on my windows server for offsite backup, there's plugin available on the DSM for this, so I can continue using CrashPlan with the Synology!
- The "photo" "video" and "audio" station apps are "nice to have" but imho nowhere near as powerful as their desktop alternatives. when you mount data shares from PC/Mac you can better use Picasa/iPhoto to manager pictures, use iTunes for music and just use VLC/Media Player Classic for video. The only redeeming feature of "audio" station is the ability to stream music directly to Airplay speakers; DSM plugin available: Logitech Media Server, works very nicely too if you a Squeeze Media Player!
When playing media from mobile devices, it's imho not worth it to use DS Files or any of the other DS apps unless you require remote access to them from the internet. Otherwise a FileBrowser app + VLC will take care of 99% of media playback from you mobile device.
You can browse to the DSM Admin site from mobile browser, it will present a nice mobile interface to manage the NAS!
- Download Station: paste a link to youtube URL in the top left field and it will download it :-)
I haven't made the NAS reachable from the internet (port forwarding) but Synology goes the extra length to make it easy with their Router Wizard and general user friendliness, even if you have never owned a server or NAS before you will get a lot out of the Synology thanks to the DSM; If have you experience with a server setup , the Synology will really blossom, it's not the cheapest solution on the block, don't buy it if you only want a "box full of disks", it's way to overpriced for that; buy it to have a smart backup/media/storage solution, with tons of features, plugins and active community.
ps: the functionality I haven't reproduced yet is a scheduled FTP download job, but since you can Telnet into the Synology box you can run scripts and set them to execute automatically. Will come back on this when I have a bit of spare time.
overall I'm pretty pleased with the investment;
some random data:
- 5x2TB initialization time approx 24 hrs.
- easily maxes out 1 gigabit network;
- enough RAM to run a minecraft server
- dual CPU never sees higher than 60% and that's when I fully loaded it will all features running... except when you use video station to re-encode video, then the system maxes out and flunks most of the time... don't use it to re-encode! Plex media server is a possible install, tried it, but found the re-encode to be a limiting factor for HD content;
- if you want to be able to browse over SMB from a XBMC install, enable the guest account on Synology, otherwise you get an error (only to browse! and once you browsed, disable it again)
- it's a quiet box, and doesn't use much energy ~45W at idle 60-70W full load (building raid array)
with the disks nicely filled and running some music playback, copy operations I pulled a disk from the Synology; the system took about 60 seconds to "unfreeze" after which things continued as normal. Putting in another disk it has to be THE SAME SIZE OR LARGER! important to know because not all brands are exactly the same size.
Synology Hybrid RAID is nice as you're not stuck using the same size disks forever, you can upgrade disk per disk in the system and expand, it's not exactly the same as UNRAID (http://lime-technology.com/) which would be my choice if I were to build a custom NAS again, but a close second, you use this calculator to see how much space you get the Hybrid RAID: http://www.synology.com/en-us/support/RAID_calculator
I agree on the HDMI port missing, QNAP does have it and the ability to run XBMC directly from the NAS is a very nice plus, now I have a second device for XBMC which is kind of a waste.