Synology Shows Off Two New NAS at Computex
We took a little peek at Synology's NAS solutions on show in Taipei.
We swung by Synology's booth at Computex this week and caught sight of not one but two NAS solutions that the company is showing off at the conference. The DiskStation DS413 is a four bay NAS based on a 1 GHz Freescale CPU, 1 GB of RAM, 2 USB 3.0 ports and a new hibernation mode for improved efficiency. The DS413 also boasts high encryption performance with AES 256bits encrypted read and writes speeds at 48.38 MB/sec and 24.10 MB/sec, respectively. It also snagged a Best Choice award for the show.
"The DS413 features system hibernation mode that is unparalleled within the industry with minimum energy consumption at 3.3 watts. Synology’s breakthrough technologies allow users to remotely bring system back online from system hibernation mode simply via web access," the company said in a statemebt. Synology DS413 deploys Freescale dual core CPU with 1 GB RAM, benefiting users with a faster and more enhanced multitasking experience."
Also on show was the DS213 Air, which is a consumer NAS with two bays, a 1.6 GHz CPU, 256 MB of RAM, and two USB 3.0 ports. You can also access it directly with a Web UI, iOS and Android apps.


For many, you can build a PC that will support more drives, the same raid methods, and have significantly better performance and offer more features, all for much less money than a dedicated NAS.
for example, on an old system that I use as a NAS/ server/ DLNA/ game server/ torrent box (sometimes performing many of those functions at the same time) the AMD 64 3200+ system, can read and write to an encrypted partition at around 110MB/s (max speed of the 7200RPM drive)
If I want the transfer to also be encrypted, then I can SSH into the device and perform the transfer and the speeds will still be about the same.
I mainly use the DLNA function for streaming media to my tablet (since no transcoding is needed (tablet supports pretty much all of the popular formats as well as soft subtitles)
I can usually have a backup going while at the same time downloading a torrent, and hosting a left 4 dead 2 server
and still have the backup go at around 100MB/s + (I have multiple hard drives, but I did not set up raid )
The CPU rarely clocks up to it's full speed.
Not sure about the load power of that NAS box but I am sure that the old PC uses more power, but overall, it does more, it offers better performance, supports 4 drives (and can be expanded if I get a cheat $12 2 port raid card, (I can add up to 4 of them) (I can also add a USB 3.0 card since a full sized pci-e slot can also support x1 cards though I will lose a standard PCI slot since I would have to install a regular PCI videocard)
I also been using Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d 4TB (non-cloud edition...don't get me started about not being able to hack the firmware to become cloud aware) for years and been working great. Found a way to enable telnet and hack into it's bits and glory.
Simple get a mini itx board and a low power CPU and a cheap case,, (on newegg, you can build a mini ITX system (minus the hard drive) for about $150
and a system like that will get you a small size, 4 sata ports, a pci-e slot, 2 memory slots.
That is enough expansion to rival and beat most NAS devices, and if you need extra sata parts, then all you need to do is get a cheap raid card
many of the newer Llano CPU's (especially the really cheap ones, have a very low power consumption especially at low loads (a mini itx based system is almost like running a laptop with a bunch more expansion ports, generally 6 USB ports, 4 sata ports, and sometimes, an esata port and some other random port)