Synology DiskStation 2-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage (DS213j)

First I'd like to say that my experience in working as a pc tech has been around 15 years so I'm somewhat competent when it comes to figuring out pc software & equipment. However, I had zero experience or real knowledge of NAS devices. For many years now I have been buying dvd's and bluRays and ripping them to my hard drive so I could share the video files over the network on any pc in the house (4 pc's total). I have collected about 2TB worth of HD movies stored on an external 4TB hd while also backing up the drive to another 4TB drive. I usually share the drive from one of my pc's but I wanted to get a device that would allow me to share my drive to all pc's without having to use one of my pc's as a host to share the drive and the solution to this was getting a NAS.I first looked at the QNAP which supported 4TB drives but was later referred to the Synology by another reviewer off amazon. I looked over the various Synology NAS and decided to go with the DS213j mainly because of the price of $200 fit my budget. I wanted a NAS that supported 4TB drives and had 2 drive bays so I could expand my space in the future.I got the DS213j and to my surprise had it up and running with in less than 10 min. I read a lot of reviews that the setup was not so user friendly but imo I think a 5 year old could do this setup. However, once I started to copy my HD video files over the network I found the transfer speeds to be somewhat slow about 25mb Upload, which ended up taking me about 24 hours to transfer my files but the reason why the upload was so slow in the beginning was because the NAS was also performing the Disk check on the drive.As for the drive I choose to use with my DS213j I choose the Seagate 4TB ST4000DM000. I choose this drive because of two reasons, one it’s certified by Synology to work with their NAS and second because of the price which at the time was $159 versus the Western Digital 4TB Red WD40EFRX for $188. Now WD claims that their RED drives are better suited for NAS devices but after researching further I found in comparison to the Seagate drive that it’s mainly just a marketing ploy. You can also look at the reviews for each drive and both have about the same amount of positive and negative vote’s ratio. Normally I would tend to lean more towards getting a WD as I have used them for many years and found their products to be very good but considering my purpose for the drive, I think the Seagate will do just fine.Anyways to continue, once the Disk check was done I started getting about 50mb Upload over ethernet, which was an ok speed but not exactly great. I fooled around with my NAS for a few days testing out the features that I could use, mainly streaming 1080p HD videos from one pc to another which I would like to say worked perfect. I don't use a DLNA media server software to stream my movies, I prefer to add movies to a pc video player that I use called BS Player so that I can watch a movie while surfing the web on my pc, plus using a pc video player gives me imo a little more freedom while watching videos. So if anyone wants to know if the DS213j will stream HD 1080p movies the answer is "YES" it streams movies flawlessly.Next, I tested the iTunes server app in the NAS and while it does work as it says which allows you to see and play all of your music files, it had one major drawback which lead me to uninstall the package. The iTunes server will not allow you to create playlists within the iTunes app on your pc/mac, if you want to create a playlist you must create the playlist within the NAS iTunes server app. I found the interface method for creating playlist to be quite cumbersome so I opted to just uninstall the package and add my music to iTunes manually over the network which does allow me to create playlists within iTunes. The only drawback is that when you add music files to your NAS music dir you will need to add those files to your iTunes Library as it will not update automatically which the iTunes server will do. So if you are the type of person who is constantly adding music to their music library then you may want to just use the Synology iTunes server app as it will update your drive with all of your music, as for me I don't add music that often instead I create more playlists so I chose the opposite route.Next, I tried the Download Station package, this package works better than uTorrent and I found it to be very intuitive. When I first started to use it I ran into a slight problem. Since I use Firefox as my browser of choice I was unable to grab magnet links to point to the Download Station, so this left me with having to copy and paste the magnet links within Download Station which is not very intuitive I might add. However, I found out later that the site I download from had a tracker file that could be loaded to DS so I could bypass using the website all together and do all my searching with in DS. FYI, apparently there is a google chrome & safari plugin that will allow you to grab magnet links and direct the downloads to your DS. Firefox also has a plugin called SynoLoader but I was unable to get it to work, which was fine because the method I explained earlier works perfect for my needs.Next I installed the Antivirus essentials package which is great because it's a free virus protection software for your NAS. I haven't really had to use it to much but it's pretty much self-explanatory and does the job.Next I was ready to start backing up all my HD videos to an external drive and the program I used was Backup & Restore. Originally I tested the Time Backup package and while I'm sure the package works great it did not provide the type of backup I was looking for so I tested Backup & Restore which worked perfect for my backup needs. Currently I have several folders on my media drive each is categorized for the type of movie like Drama, Horror, Action, etc. The great thing about Backup & Restore is that it will only backup files that are missing or have changed, to the new backup drive, which was exactly what I wanted. Typically I add 2-5 movies to various directories over a months’ time and its a lot of work to track down and backup the newly added files so normally before I got my NAS I would use an app called AllwaysSync which did the job but now that I have my NAS, the Backup & Restore feature does this exact same thing and more.Finally this led me to start backing up my NAS to an external usb 2.0 drive (FYI, your NAS will read FAT32 and NTFS formats; you do not need to format your external drive to EXT4). I started the backup and found it to be very slow; I think it took me about 24hours to backup 2TB of HD Videos. I realized at this point that perhaps choosing the DS213j may not have been the best solution as far as transfer rates are concerned. So at this point I started looking at other Synology NAS that would provide me with faster transfer rates via USB. I researched further and found that for the best price which was already over my budget, the DS214play looks to be the best option for faster transfer speeds as it provides USB 3.0, a faster processor, and a few more additional features that the DS213j does not have.I have chosen to give the Synology NAS DS 213j 4 stars instead of 5 because I discovered later that it runs a bit warm 50° C which is about 15° higher than what the spec's say it should run and this was running at idle with no apps or streaming going on. I also have it standing in a vertical position in a well-ventilated area and it's also winter time here in south Texas so I can only imagine how hot it will run when we start hitting summer temps of 100°+.Overall I'm blown away by the intuitiveness of using a NAS over my previous method and Synology defiantly makes good quality products with the software to match. If you are looking for a 2 bay NAS at a reasonable price the DS213j is defiantly a winner.

I bought a Buffalo NAS unit about 4 years ago and had a reasonably good but troubled relationship with it. A couple of weeks ago something in the motherboard gave out or the firmware became corrupted after a power outage and it became necessary to replace it. My boss recommended Qnap as a good NAS device (he runs the IT dept. for a college at a mid sized state university) so I started out by looking at those. While the more expensive Qnap units seemed pretty good, the lower end ones didn't seem to rate so well. Many of the Qnap reviewers recommended Synology as an alternative. And so I came to examine the DS213j.With an attractive feature set and good reviews and a very attractive price for the cabinet it seemed like a good choice. I did note that some reviews complained about the difficulty of set up. Being a software engineer of long standing who has worked on the design of many different computers for a (now non existent) major computer maker, I thought I could handle it.On receiving the cabinet and two WD20EFRX drives I was pleased to find that getting them in the cabinet was easy. Slide them in and they mate with the connectors smoothly. The supplied screws mated with the holes int he drive rails with no problem, unlike in the old days. Synology even provided a couple of extra screws in case you dropped one and couldn't find it in the shag carpet. Thoughtful. The ethernet and power cables appear to be of high quality which was reassuring. All in all the quality of the supplied hardware is high.However, typing find.synology.com into my browser did not find the unit on my network. Installing the software from the supplied CD worked however and brought up a nice, if complex, UI for managing the NAS. Unfortunately there was no "EZ Setup", so I had to read the manual. The manual was clear and of high quality and reading it allowed me to easily set up format the drives, set up shares install optional packages (in my case the DLNA server and the video server which works with the DLNA server) and begin copying files from my laptop to the NAS. Which went slowly because of the drive verification process which runs when you first set it up so copying stuff took most of the night.Now I've got it running, I've got my shares up, I've got the DLNA server running and I am very, very happy. Performance is good, the maintenance UI provides lots of information and tools to analyze how the drive is working. Since it is basically a Linux appliance, you can log in to it using Telnet. It is also possible to configure it to be at the heart of your home network as it supports (via optional packages loaded though the package manager) most of the major internet protocols. No, I have no plans to put this in a DMZ outside my firewall, but you could, if you wanted to. This is a very sophisticated and capable unit and well worth considering if you are moderately knowledgeable about networks. I am only rating it 4 stars because the initial setup can be intimidating for neophytes. It is still time consuming (a couple of hours) for people who already understand this stuff.

Beautifully engineered, faultless installation, impeccable performance - as close to perfect as you can get.

As described

excellent productvery easy to use

Easy to use interface, compact design and easy hard drive installation.

Considerando che ero totalmente ignorante nel campo dei nas server, su consiglio di un amico, ho acquistato questa disk station, Sono stato a lungo tentato di acquistare un prodotto più economico ma proprio perchè consigliato ho preferito questo synology. I prodotti più economici hanno problemi di prestazioni ma soprattutto di rumorosità. Non volevo correre il rischio di avere questo tipo di problema dato che è un apparecchio che potrebbe rimanere acceso 24h su 24,L'installazione e il montaggio degli hard disk è semplice: basta un giravite e in 5 minuti è possibile montare tutto.Per la configurazione e la gestione del dispositivo in rete, ho avuto dei problemi ma questo è dovuto alla mia assenza di preparazione e conoscenze tecniche.Con un po di pazienza e perseveranza, sono riuscito a configurare la maggior parte delle applicazioni che intendevo usare (servizio cloud, photo station, audio station, emule, ftp server ed accesso da remoto).Il dispositivo è silenziosissimo. In fase di configurazione, ero preoccupato per l'eccessiva lentezza ma una volta terminato il caricamento di tutto ciò che intendevo memorizzare sul dispositivo, ho notato con piacere che è molto performante.Unico consiglio al di fuori del dispositivo synology: se dovete accedere da remoto ed avete una linea internet con Fastweb e siete sotto rete nat, dovete chiedere a Fastweb un ip pubblico altrimenti anche se aprite le porte sul vostro router, non riuscirete a raggiungere la disk station. E' sufficiente ottenere un ip pubblico dinamico anche perchè l'ip pubblico statico è un servizio Fastweb a pagamento....