This is not a full review of the performance specs, etc. of the Synology 1513+. You can find something like that here.
This is just a brief review of setup and daily use of the DS1513+ as a media storage device. The DS1513+ is frankly grotesque overkill for this purpose, but I wanted something future-proof, and I got it. Synology's custom RAID algorithm allows adding disks of different sizes on the fly, and if that isn't enough, hardware expansion units are available to allow you to add more disks. I went with five WD Red drives, which are supposedly designed specifically for use in NAS enclosures. They're 5400 rpm, so not fast, but they were inexpensive (the price has since gone up) and they run cool. Synology's magic NAS software (about which more in a moment) says the entire enclosure is running at 88 degrees Farenheit, which is remarkably low, and there is a turbo fan setting I'm not currently using. I suspect if you wanted to spring for them you could run 7200 rpm drives without a temperature issue. I have not thus far noticed storage to be a bottleneck.
Setup of the unit is a weird process. Essentially a Synology utility searches for and finds the device on the LAN and then pushes the Synology DiskStation package to it. As a sysadmin who has been scarred by more than one firmware update gone bad this made me nervous, even though DiskStation is just a webserver add-on and not the underlying firmware itself. DiskStation is a browser-based graphical interface. Obligatory pretty picture:
The main issue with the install was that I'd also purchased a managed switch with the intent of enabling both link aggregation and jumbo frames in order to make the connection faster (the NAS has 4 ethernet ports). This took some digging through deep options in both the NAS and the switch to accomplish, and it would not have been doable without some network experience. On the other hand, no one without network experience would have known about or attempted it, so that's fine.
Once fully up and running the thing has been delightful. No hiccups, no dropped frames on 1080p video even when streamed over my crappy old 802.11g wireless bridge to my home office in a back room. Particularly nice has been the combination of Synology Download Station and the Download Station Chrome Plugin, which allows me to click a magnet link in Chrome on any device in the house and have the downloading handled entirely on the NAS. For my legal torrents of Linux distributions, of course.
There are all sorts of other advanced features and downloadable plugins that allow you to do things with this NAS that I've frankly never imagined doing on a NAS. Use it as an iSCSI SAN. Turn it into an LDAP server, DNS, server, a host for an enterprise resource planning system (?!), or about a million other things apparently. I haven't tried much of this, but Synology seems determined to make their products as open and flexible as possible, which is a big plus to me.
I paid quite a bit less for this NAS than it's now selling for, which is peculiar, so you may want to look for bargains, or check out the other Synology models. Git you one.
