Synology DS213j 2-Bay NAS Review

Final Thoughts

I’ve been wanting to work with Synology for quite some time now purely because of the fact their suggested to be one of the bigger players in the UK NAS market, which really means that it is a bit of a no-brainer that I should be seeing how their products line up against the other big players.

Starting off with the aesthetics of the DS213j, having the drive bays fully internal and having no front panel to access the drives through does give the system a very clean and refined look to it, which over other similar systems is a huge advantage when you consider where units of this nature are aimed to be used – in the home. The does of course then mean that accessing the drives is not as much of a simple process as one would normally expect by simply removing a drive tray to swap out a drive. The system instead has to be placed on its side after being powered down, opened up and the drive unscrewed from its mounting. For the most part though, this situation is only going to occur realistically during the event of a drive failure and given the longer life span of hard drives these days, the other occasion where the system may be opened is during drive upgrade.

Aside the looks, the setup of the system is rather simple. As a note you do have to remember as I mentioned before that the operating system is installed on to the drives that you install into the NAS, so this does mean that the first time setup process does take a little longer as the OS is downloaded from the internet. Having the system set up like this however does have two advantages, firstly by having the OS installed on to the hard drives, there is no need to have any form of storage on the motherboard such as a SATA DOM. In turn this means that there are lower manufacturing and component costs, thus presenting the end-user with a lower priced product.

Looking closer at the performance of the DS213j, Synology make it clear that this is not a performance model – as indicated by the ‘j’ rather than a ‘+’. As a result, Synology advertise the system as having read speeds of just over 100MB/s and a write speed of ~70MB/s and from the NASPT testing we can see that the system is clearly able to give this with read speeds topping out at 108.2MB/s and write speeds topping out at 99MB/s – just over 40% more than the rated performance.

The UI is also easy to work around and this is crucial for a product of this type – aimed for the home entertainment market. Some systems can have a rather complex looking UI that in turn can pose as a daunting and overly complicated system to use. The simple tile and window interface here gives a far more user-friendly approach to using the system with a chunky and easy to use appearance and a clear layout.

Overall for my first look at a Synology product I am rather impressed with what they have to offer on the entry-level end of their product spectrum and I do hope that this is to be continued as I aim to look at some of their mid and top end ranges and systems that not only offer better capacities but also considerably more options and performance in turn.

Pros:

• Easy to use GUI
• Clean looks
• Good performance for an entry-level product
• Highly competitive price point
• Virtually silent

Cons:

• Hard drive installation not as simple as loading a drive tray
• Not totally plug-and-play
• Drive upgrades require system to be totally reconfigured

eTeknix says: Synology are considered to be one of the top contenders in the UK NAS market and from looking at the simple, easy to use and very well priced DS213j, its easy to see why. It’s an affordable system that offers the basics – but at the same time, everything that the home user would really need.