Synology DiskStation DS213+ review
With fast transfer speeds, a great processor for the price and the brilliant DSM 4.1 interface, this is our new favourite two-bay NAS enclosure
Setting up an iSCSI target, which allows a single user on your network to mount and format a section of space on the NAS as though it was a local hard drive, is only slightly more complicated. Select the grey and blue DSM icon at the right of the GUI’s top icon bar, select the Volume Manager and follow the creation wizards in the iSCSI LUN and Target tabs to set up your target. You’ll then be able to configure a network PC to use the target with Windows’ iSCSI Initiator.
Other tools allow you to create scheduled backup tasks either to back up the contents of the NAS to an external or shared drive, or back up a shared drive to the NAS. There are wizards to guide you through normally fiddly tasks such as connecting the NAS to the internet – it can even serve as its own router if you connect it directly to a cable or ADSL modem. Meanwhile, Synology’s online package centre provides a massive range of apps that you can install on the NAS to turn it into a streaming media server, VPN server, fully functional web server with PHP and MySQL, VoIP phone server, cloud synchronisation device and more.
The 213+ is ostensibly an update to last year’s Synology DS212+. It has the same combination of ports (one USB2, two USB3, one eSATA and one SDXC card reader), but there are hardware differences. Most notable of these is the 213+’s dual-core Freescale processor. It only runs at 1GHz, compared to the 212+’s 2GHz single-core Marvell Kirkwood 88F682, but the DS213+’s DSM interface feels nippier. As we’ve recently updated our NAS benchmark tests for throughput, we’re unable to directly compare the two units. However, if you plan on using encrypted folders or running modules from the NAS that benefit from fast response times, such as a web server, we recommend the more dual-core DS213+ over its single-core predecessor.
The DS213+’s processor is also more powerful than that of our previous two-bay Best Buy winner, the QNap TurboNAS TS-219P II. They cost the same, too, making the 213+ a worthy Best Buy award winner.