At a glance
Product	Synology Disk Station (DS413j)   [Website]
Summary	Least expensive four-bay Synology NAS based on 1.6 GHz Marvell Kirkwood SoC
Pros	• Many features • Very quiet for a four-bay NAS
Cons	• No hot swap • No USB 3.0 or eSATA

Typical Price: $769  Buy From Amazon

Overview

If you're looking for a bargain-priced RAID 5 NAS, you normally would have to skip by anything from Synology or QNAP. Both vendors produce feature-filled NASes, but both also command premium prices.

So it's nice to see that Synology hasn't forgotten the budget-challenged among us who need the combination of capacity and data robustness that only a RAID 5/6/10 NAS can provide.

At around $380, the DS413j is the cheapest way to put a four-bay Synology NAS on your desk. It's meant to compete with QNAP's TS412, which has performed a similar role for QNAP for the past year or so.

The 413j is housed in Synology's old "CS" style enclosure that is now the hallmark of its four-bay "j" series products. While the drives are easy enough to get to by dropping a rear panel, they are not considered hot-swappable. The callout view below provides the rundown on ports, indicators and switches.

DS413j panels and callouts

As befitting an entry-level NAS, there are no VGA or HDMI ports to support an attached console and no LCD status panel on the front. There is only one 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet port on the rear panel along with two USB 2.0 ports for drive and printer attachment.

Inside

The 413j is easy to service. The rear panel drops down for easy fan replacement and the power supply is an external brick-sized, uh, brick. The graphic below from the 413j's Quick Install guide shows removing the cover for drive access, but it's not necessary. The four plastic drive mounting trays slide in and out easily with the cover left on.

DS413j drive installation

The key components are summarized in Table 1 below along with the QNAP TS-412's. Note that the TS-412 has two Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports and two eSATA ports to the 413j's none. But the 413j has the edge over the QNAP in processor power and RAM.

Table 1: DS413j key components & comparison

Here is a photo of the main board that I was able to shoot with all the drive trays removed. The Marvell SoC has a ceramic heat spreader attached to keep it nice and cool. The flash device was covered by a label, which I didn't disturb. So I wasn't able to determine its capacity.

DS413j main board

Power consumption measured 28 W with four WD Red 3 TB (WD30EFRX) drives that WD kindly left with me, after my little look at them, spun up. Consumption dropped to a mere 9 W when the programmable drive spindown kicked in. Fan noise, in the default "Quiet" mode (the other two modes are "Cool" and "Low-Power") was barely audible and there was little idle drive noise in my quiet home office environment. So I rated the 413j's noise as very low.

Features

The 413j supports all the features in Synology's DiskStation Manager (DSM) 4.1 OS. The DSM 4.1-2647 build used for testing has a very extensive feature list, which is described in Synology's DSM Highlight pages. See the DS1512+ review for a feature summary and check out the DS413j's product datasheet.

Overview, Inside, Features Performance, Closing Thoughts

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