THE DISKSTATION DS213+

Much like the previous DS212+ model the DiskStation DS213+ is an all-black unit with a hard plastic exterior that measures 165mm in height, 108mm in width and 233.5mm in depth with a weight of 1.25kg.

The Synology logo is engraved on both sides of the housing.

The front fascia is actually a piece of polished hard plastic placed in front of the 2 drive bays.

The model version is imprinted on the lower left of the polished fascia piece.

The usual green/yellow status/LAN/HDD activity LEDs can be seen at the top right.

An SD card slot along with a USB port and the power/copy buttons are placed right beneath.

The rear is also black and packs quite a few interesting features.

Exactly like its predecessor the DS213+ features a rather large 92mm exhaust fan (compared to the 70/80mm fans found in most units).

Beneath the exhaust fan we see the reset switch, two USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet port, eSATA port and the DC in.

A Kensington lock is also placed at the rear.

Moving back at the front of the unit we see that the large hard plastic polished piece is not actually attached onto the chassis so you just need to pull it out in order to see the drive bays.

The drive trays are not made out of metal/aluminum but Synology has used durable plastic instead.

Slicing open the unit is not extremely hard but i don't recommend it to anyone unless absolutely necessary since the casing is made out of hard plastic after all.

On the single PCB we see the Freescale P1022 dual core CPU (under the large aluminum heatsink), the Realtek RTL8211E 10/100/1000 gigabit Ethernet transceiver and four 128MB DDR3 SDRAM chips by Samsung (not 4x1GB as some people may think).