Synology
sent us a couple of two-bay network boxes, a sample of the very many on offer
from a company which specialises in this area.
There
seem to be several variations of the DS213, with the DS213j being the
lowestcost version. It is distinguished by having a lesser processor and lacks
such features as hot swapping of disks or the ability to be expanded to
additional boxes. Nonetheless it still features the security of RAID 1, and
it’s a bit prettier than usual, in a nice white box. And internally it can
support two 4TB drives.
Synology
DS213j in a nice white box
Oddly
Synology provided the review unit — remember, you normally purchase them empty
of disks — with just one hard drive installed. And, almost incredibly, it was
just an 80GB drive. I didn’t realise you could still get those. Anyway, that
meant that it wouldn't accommodate my full 118.8LB load of tracks. So I left
out about three quarters of the FLAC tracks for this test, bringing the load
down to 49.3GB. File transfers seem to be faster with fewer big files rather
than many smaller files, so this likely under-represents the speed a little.
Nonetheless it managed this in 17 minutes and 33 seconds for an impressive
speed of 47.9MBps.
File
transfers seem to be faster with fewer big files rather than many smaller
files, so this likely under-represents the speed a little
In
this field there is some tension between ease of use and power. This system
leans towards the latter. The media server is not pre-installed. But installing
it is easy and takes only a moment (it’s downloaded from the internet by the
unit). And once I’d done that, I had to go to the Media Indexing Service and tell
it where I’d put the music. Once I’d done that it started indexing it all to
create the necessary lists.
So
a little more fuss than with some. But what you get as a trade-off is
exceptional control over the thing. You can set whether it serves up cover art
in low or high resolution, and whether it converts FLAC or AAC on the fly to
some other format if your client can’t cope with them. Indeed, you can even
choose what menu items it presents. Choose the fuller menus and you have can
have 14 options, including composer and year. For accessing your music, this is
simply brilliant.
It
also organised albums in track number order, regardless of file name.
When
I tested the transcoding it chose WAV (rather than MP3) as the format, so full
quality was preserved, yet the track information and cover art was still
dutifully conveyed. This converted for all clients, though, regardless of their
ability to read FLAC natively. If you are mostly listening using a FLAC-capable
client (of which there are many these days) then switching off conversion will
reduce network load. One other nice thing — you can choose which folders the
media player serves up, so if you’re using back-up software that simply mirrors
content from a computer onto the network drive, it need not be indexed.
Connections:
1 x LAN (Gigabit), 1 x USB 2.0
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Synology DS213j
Price: $235 + drive/s ·
Firmware when
tested: DSM4.2-3236 ·
Music access
options: Configurable, the maximum list being By Folder, All Music, Playlist,
Smart Playlist, By Artist, By Genre, By Album, Artist\Album, By Album
Artists, Genre\Artist\Album, Genre\ Artist, Composer\Album,
Year\Artist\Album, Recently Added ·
Connections: 1 x
LAN (Gigabit), 1 x USB 2.0 ·
Dimensions
(MM): 100w x 165h x 226d ·
Weight:
0.91kg (plus drives) ·
Warranty:
Two years
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