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Synology DX513 Five-Bay Expansion Module Review - Setup

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Sean Kalinich
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DX513

Storage is one of those things that you never seem to have enough of. Just when you think that 2Terabyte drive is going to last you it seems to get full like magic. I can vividly remember buying a 1.2GB drive and thinking that would last me for a very long time. As you might have guessed it did not and the progression only got faster. It was not long before file sizes were getting larger faster than storage makers could keep up, at least in the consumer world. In the professional world we still had large arrays of disks (RAID) to help maintain capacity and performance. Unfortunately, these arrays also had a limit due to the difficulty in expanding them once you reached their capacity. As storage systems evolved this was remedied by adding in more “trays” of disks. The down side here is that these types of systems are very expensive and out of the reach of many (if not most) small and medium sized businesses.  In this space the NAS (Network Attached Storage) and not the SAN (Storage Area Network) are the most common products and have the same limitations of direct attached storage. So, what do you do when your NAS runs out of space? Synology has an answer for you in the DX513. Follow along with us as we show you just how easy and even cost effective this handy add on to the DS1512+ is.

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Setting up the DX513 -
If you want ease of installation you are going to get it with the DX513. The steps for getting this connected are pretty simple.

1 – Unpack
2 – Install Drives
3 – Set Auto Start Preference
4 – Connect the eSATA cable to The Disk Station you use (In our case the DS1512+)

Power on.

Now you might be wondering about step 3. Well that is still pretty simple as well. There is a small switch on the back of the DX513 that allows you to configure the way you want the DX513 to interact with the volumes on the head-end unit. If you leave it set to default the DX513 will power on and off with the head-end; if you set it to manual it will power off with the head-end but will not power back on. You might have guessed that we recommend leaving this set to default. After you get the unit powered on you will want to log into your head in unit’s web management console to configure everything else.
DX51315

Once you are in Disk Station Manager the rest is easy you simply identify the drives you want to use, establish a disk group and then build the RAID structure you want. From there you can setup multiple volumes or make your new array one big volume. You can also add this to an existing volume that might be on the head-end unit. As we have the original DS1512+ setup as to be iSCSI volumes we created multiple volumes on our newly added DX513. We will say that while the volume creation was quick and simple the volume consistency check (which we recommend) took almost 24 hours to complete and there was a performance impact while it was running.

Volume01a Volume02 Volume03
Volume04 Volume05 Volume06
Volume07 Volume08 Volume09

 

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