At a glance
Product	Synology Disk Station (DS413)   [Website]
Summary	High performance value-priced four-bay NAS based on dual-core Freescale QorIQ CPU
Pros	• High Performance for a non-Atom NAS • Quiet • Fast attached backup via eSATA
Cons	• Big throughput hit for encrypted folders • Mostly plastic construction

Typical Price: $860  Buy From Amazon

Overview

I'm cranking through four Synology NASes that recently came in. The DS413 is number three of four and it's an interesting one, too.

The DS413 is the four-bay offering in Synology's "Workgroups & Small Business" line. It most closely compares to the DS412+ that fills the same role in the company's "Standard Business Line". That's Synology's way of differentiating NASes built on lower-power Marvell and other processor platforms from those based on Intel archtectures.

At first glance, you might mistake the DS413 for the DS412+. Both are four bay NASes packaged in the same mostly-plastic enclosure that I'm not so big a fan of. I laid out the reasons in the 412+ review, so won't repeat them here. But when you check the back panel, you'll see a key difference between the two; one Gigabit Ethernet port on the DS413 vs. two on the 412+, with link/status lights, even! The other ports are the same, i.e. two USB 3.0, one USB 2.0 and a single eSATA.

The callout view below provides the rundown on the DS413's ports, indicators and switches

DS413 lights and ports

In keeping with the 412+' cost-saving, no frills approach, there are no VGA or HDMI ports to support an attached console, nor is there an LCD status panel on the front. You'll have to get any information you want via the front panel LEDs or logging into the web-based admin.

Inside

Since I didn't have a lot of luck getting at the DS412+' board, I didn't attempt it for the DS413 and it looks like no other reviewers did, either. So I have put what I component info I have into the comparison table below.

Table 1: DS413 component comparison

The processor is the dual-core version of Freescale's "family of processors is designed to deliver complex application processing performance with exceptional feature integration and high-speed connectivity for IP networking and advanced media processing applications".

Power consumption measured 31 W with four WD Red 3TB 7200 RPM (WD30EFRX) drives I supplied spun up and 16 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 413's noise as low.

Features

The 413 supports all the features in Synology's DiskStation Manager (DSM) 4.1 OS. The DSM 4.1-2657 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.

Overview, Inside, Features Performance, Closing Thoughts

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