Years ago I used to have a handful of single external drives connected to my Mac where I kept all my data as well as backups. This became rather tedious after a while so I decided to switch to a central backup solution. I decided to get the DROBO solution which at the time was not a NAS but a disc array that was connected via USB or Firewire. This worked ok for a while but I was not satisfied with the performance (it was slooooow) and I finally decided to switch to a Synology solution.

Why the Synology NAS ?

I decided to get the Synology 1513+ 5 bay NAS system together with the Synology DX513 5 bay extension. One of the main reasons to get the more powerful “+” version since I wanted to be able to run the Plex Multimedia server on the Synology itself and it should be able to transcode movies directly on the NAS.

The DS1513+
THe DX513 extension

I put 3TB discs into the DS1513+ and 2TB discs into the DX513. This gives me a total of about 18 Terabytes of available space.

Installation and setup

Installing the drives in both the DS1513 and the DX513 is straight forward. Just pull out the drawers. Fix the drive with the supplied screws and put them back in. All the rest happens in the Synology Diskstation user interface called DSM.

Here I was able to create logical drive names like “Entertainment” or “Backup” which are then visible as mounted drives on the desktop.

I connected the Synology DS1513+ using two ethernet cables by sort of “joining” them together as one. Synology calls this bonding.

Network speed tests showed that this bonding provided a slight speed increase and as I had two ethernet cables lying around anyway I just configured it this way.

Managing the drives

The Synology storage manager provides an easy interface where you can manage and view the health of all your drives.

Performance

As this is primarily a media server and backup solution performance was not at the top of my mind when I picked the system. My old Drobo system was very slow and it sometimes took hours to copy several gigabytes of movies onto the drive.

The Synology now gives me these read and write speeds using the disk speed test tool from Blackmagicdesign:

I get about 80-100MB/s write and 105-110MB/s read speeds

For my purposes this is totally fine. It is fast enough to play back 1080p content. Once everything is 4K I might have to switch systems but that’s something I’ll worry about in the future : )

My favourite third party software that runs on the Synology NAS

Plex Media Server
Cloud Sync – allows you to backup content from your Synology to either Google Drive or Dropbox
Tautulli – great addition the Plex media Server that gives you statistics about users, file usage, data transfer etc.

Of course there are dozens of other additional apps like a surveillance station that manages your connected webcams or a download station to download media in the background that can be installed. I just did not have any use for them at the time.

Verdict

I’ve now been using this NAS for more than 3 years and have not had any issues with it whatsoever. One of the drives has been showing a bad sector for about a year now but other than that I would highly recommend Synology products to anyone who wants to either run a Plex media server in his home or who would like to run a file backup station in his home.