Synology DS213Air review

In addition to its Ethernet port, the DS213Air also has two USB3 ports to which you can attach USB drives or USB printers to share on your network. It also has a button for enabling or disabling Wi-Fi and pairing your DS213Air to routers via WPS.

Out of the box, the DS213Air works as a wireless hotspot and you can connect to it directly by selecting its SSID. Configuring its Wi-Fi connection can be a bit confusing if you’ve never done it before, but it won’t take long to learn its many configurations. You must change the wireless settings within the Network screen of DSM, and the options available are dependent on the mode in which the DS213Air is set, such as wireless hotspot or router.

You can use the Synology DS213Air's built-in WiFi adaptor in a number of different ways; you could make the DS213Air a wireless hotspot, for example, or access it directly

Its Wi-Fi data transfer performance is predictably much slower than its performance over Gigabit Ethernet, making the Built-in Wi-Fi adaptor a convenience rather than a killer feature. At a distance of 5 metres, it wrote large files at a painfully slow 2MB/s and read them at 1.42MB/s. With scores like these, it’s clear to see that the Wi-Fi connection is best used for configuring the DS213Air as a wireless hotspot or access point.

We like the DS213Air, and we think the built-in Wi-Fi adaptor is a neat feature if you want to use your NAS as a wireless hotspot or pair it to your network wirelessly, but other Synology devices, such as the Best Buy-winning DS213+ let you attach Wi-Fi adaptors to a USB port. If you want a Synology NAS enclosure with a built-in Wi-Fi adaptor then the DS213Air is the NAS for you. Otherwise, if you just want a NAS enclosure, go for the Synology DS213+.