Synology DX513 Diskless System Expansion Unit for Increasing Capacity of the Synology DiskStation

Pros: See other thoughts

Cons: See other thoughts

Other Thoughts: A point to be made to users complaining about constant rebuilds, in particular the person using WD Greens: Not all hard drives are designed to work in a RAID situation. WD Greens are particularly known for poor performance. The problem is they lack a feature WD calls Time-Limited Error Recovery (TLER), other manufacturers have a similar feature under a different name. This feature restricts that amount of time a drive tries to spend recovering from a read error. If the drive spends too long dealing with a read/write error, the raid controller will thing the drive has failed and drop it from the array. More enterprise level drives like the Western Digital Caviar RE's do much better as they have this feature.

I have 5 RE4's in my Synology 1511+ and it's worked like a champ! Never dropped a single disk or had to rebuild.

Pros: Easy Setup.

I am updating my review because it turns out that this unit does NOT like WD green drives. Even though the drives I was using were on the Synology approved drives list they caused most of the trouble I was having with this unit and once I figured that out things went much better. I assume it has something to do with the esata connection.

Cons: Poor error reporting, it would have saved me a lot of trouble if I had gotten some indication of what was going on instead of just locking up or telling me the volume was crashed.

Other Thoughts: Once the drives issue was figured out, seems stable although still a bit slow on the volume creation functions.

Pros: Looks good, matches main unit well

Cons: Piece of junk.
keeps dropping all disks in expansion box (they suddenly disappear from the DSM storage manager screen).
Keeps telling me fan has failed, even though they are both running. Slows down volume creation to a crawl. Crashes the main unit (connection lost reboot)

Other Thoughts: So far I'm not impressed at all with this unit. I Suggest simply buying a larger main unit to begin with. Being able to add storage on later is a nice idea but poor execution in this case

Pros: Basically plug and play...plug in the esata cable and go to the management software and set it up. Put in 5 WD RE4 2 TB and in a few hours it all set up. Used this to expand a 1812+ 8 bay nas by synology.

Cons: none so far