Synology DS213air Review

Synology DS213air Review

Manufacturer: Synology
UK Price (as reviewed): £246.99 (inc VAT)
US Price as reviewed): $299.99 (ex Tax)

When it comes to getting new products out the door, Synology manages this with frightening regularity. However, what can you add to an already great set of features and a NAS box that’s incredibly easy to use? How about a WiFi adaptor, which can be configured to act as a wireless hotspot, a wireless bridge or a wireless router? Well, that's what you get with the new Synology DS213air.

So, for instance, you could use this as your main home Wi-Fi box with integral NAS or, if your shed has mains power and is in range of your WiFi network, you could place the DS213air there, free of the risk your data could be caught up in a house fire or burglary.


At £246, the Synology DS213air is considerably more expensive than Synology’s current budget two-bay NAS, the DS212j, which is our current favourite budget NAS till the company inevitably replaces it with what we assume to be the DS213j. Thankfully, the DS213air, does have a beefier specification as well as the WiFi gubbins; it has a faster 1.6GHz Marvell Kirkwood mv6282 CPU, albeit still a single-core, and DDR3 as opposed to the DDR2 memory and two rear USB 3 ports while the DS212j only offered USB 2.


Synology’s excellent DSM operating system is much the same as it was this time last year but has gone through a couple of revisions and has some added features. Its excellent Cloud Station package, which offers Dropbox-style cloud syncing and storage, with the data stored on your NAS, has received some much-needed upgrades. It now supports file sizes up to 10GB (instead of 1GB), you can retain up to 32 previous file versions and the number of shared folders you can synchronise is now unlimited.


There’s Bluetooth speaker support and you can now view thumbnails of pictures in the file station package – immensely useful if you’ll be storing and editing photos on the NAS. You can now drag files directly into the browser, use common keyboard commands such as Ctrl + A and Ctrl + V, and Synology has added the ability to resume a movie where you left off if you’re playing it in the browser using the Video Station package. All the usual features are here too, including iTunes Server and DLNA support and the DS213air supports independent BitTorrent, FTP and HTTP downloads too.

Specifications

• Local connections Front: None, Rear: 2 x USB 3, LAN
  
• Network connections 1 x Gigabit Ethernet, IEEE 802.11b/g/n
  
• Storage Up to 2 x 4TB hard disk (not included)
  
• Cables 1.5m Cat 5 Ethernet,
  
• Cooling1 x 92mm fan
  
• Features FTP server, webserver, photo server, music server, independent download (via HTTP, FTP and BitTorrent), iTunes and UPnP media sever, DLNA, print server, storage server for external USB hard disks, surveillance server
  
• Dimensions (W x D x H) 100mm x 165mm x 225mm
  
• Accessories Data Replicator 3, Photo Station Uploader