In the desktop form factor NAS space, it is quite difficult to find units with more than two network ports and / or PCIe expansion slots. These features are usually reserved for rackmount units targeting high end SMB users. Synology is bringing some of these high-end SMB / enterprise features to the desktop form factor with the launch of the DS1513+. The enclosure has been redesigned and the drive bays are now screwless.

To differentiate itself from the DS1512+ (with which it shares the same computing platform, a 2.13 GHz dual core Atom D2700), the unit has four GbE network ports. The unit also brings multi-path IO (MPIO) to the desktop form factor. SHA (Synology High Availability) is also part of the enabled features. This provides for seamless failover transition by maintaining identical contents in real time across two Synology NAS units.

Synology claims read and write throughputs of 350 MBps and 200 MBps respectively when all four ports are link aggregated. The unit is now shipping globally, but availability may vary across regions.