Synology DS413j DiskStation

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I replaced my old DNS 323 with this box. What a difference. This is almost professional grade. If you are looking for something close to a linux server..this is it.

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I had a Seagate Black Armour 110 NAS prior to this that I hated with a passion. The DLNA server never worked consistently and storage was capped (that was more my fault than the Seagate).This NAS is a completely different story. Simple setup if you any computer and network experience, drives install super easy and its really easy to expand your drives without having to reinitialize the whole system if you use the Synology Hybrid Raid technology. I've had this for about a week and I have nothing but good to say about its performance and setup to date!

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For the average user this box is complex to setup since there is a lot of things this box can do. Parity check does take a long time to do. Overall once setup the box is very reliable. Just make sure to format any hard drives with data on them before putting them into the NAS.

Comment:
Bought this on sale for 350$ - 392$ w/ tax. Very good value for the money. Besides expanding enormously your storage, the Synology DSM is top notch, which is what makes Synology NAS'es worth it. Prolly if you just want a local storage array, there could be cheaper alternatives. The 413j is perfectly suited for home use (1-3 users). The CPU is plenty and same with RAM. Regarding my cons, as I mentioned the UPS implementation is dumb. If power goes out, the DS413j will not actually shut down, but unmount the volume and keep the diskstation running (wasting your UPS battery). If power comes back before UPS battery is dead, the station HAS to restart in order to mount back the volume, thus making this pointless. There is no option to shutdown the DS413j if running on battery.Also, the ethernet port is very wobbly. Never experienced something like this before. It does make contact tho. It is not a unit defect. Apparently all the units have this, which is weird.