Stefan Mileschin

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.

http://www.madshrimps.be/articles/article/1000528/

jmke

Nice review Stefan, thanks!

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 in my humble opinion 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 in my humble opinion 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.

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