4 Bay NAS - Before You Buy

[Music] hello and welcome back and today is another before you buy and today we're going to talk about before you buy on four bay nazis a number of you who are looking a network attached storage whether it's your first system or an upgrade from a previous system are looking at four bays and just like in all of my before you buys i'm going to give you five reasons why you should consider a four bay nas and five reasons why you might want to give one a miss but before we go a couple of disclaimers straight off the bat first and foremost just like my other videos there's still building work happening behind me now i'm going to limit the sound as much as i can but some of it might leak through so i apologize in advance second thing this is not a video that's going to be i'm going to be trying to talk you in or talk you out of buying anything there's plenty of solutions out there and i'm sure you'll find the right one this isn't about sales it is about helping you guys be as informed as possible before you part with your money so reason number one that you might want to buy a four bay nas is simply it is a better price you are paying per terabyte now what i mean by that is in all of the four bays and again we've got three four bays here from qnap basis thought and synology these systems allow you to install up to four drives inside now say up to you don't have to install one uh you don't have to install all four on day one you can add one and gradually scale your storage with a number of them having the right kind of storage properties in terms of thin and thick provisioning and the rate configurations that allow you to not only scale your storage over time and add drives as you need them but on top of that allow you to by adding those drives in the example of a raid 5 or an shr to get a better price per terabyte than you would on say a two-bay where you put two drives inside and instantly lose fifty percent of the storage capacity to redundancy so if you put two 10 tbs inside of two bay you're paying twice probably around about 300 odd nicker or 250 to 300 quid per drive for 10 tb whereas on these systems you can install four tb drives and put four of them inside or put four three tv drives inside which will ultimately give you the same or more storage for the same price so again four bays give you a much better uh price per terabyte and just general overall capacity and redundancy together than a two bay system that we talked about before reason number two that you might want to consider a four-bay system is that again i've touched on a lot of these points in my two-bay video so you're going to hear a lot of overlay here with regards to their pros and cons and these cons and pros but that with these systems you are better equipped to saturate available connections now currently there are 10 gbe four-based solutions that are very affordable these days we've got 2.5 and 5 gbe solutions any and of course 1gb solutions as well all of these systems can allow you to saturate fill that full 100 250 500 or 1000 megabytes per second throughput externally depending on the network interfaces with a 4-bay whether you are using ssds or enterprise hard drives with ssd caching you are just better equipped with a 4 by 4 bay in 2021 to fully fill that network connection and make sure that all of your connected users on a switch will all get if they're all on 1gbe all get their respective 100 or 109 megabytes per second each reason number three that you may want to consider a four bay nas we've already touched on it a larger array of raid configurations four bay is when you can pretty much use all of them the main ones raid 0 which is combining all the drives together you can even do a raid 1 which you can allow you to add drives shr has a fantastic system where you can come up with a triple parity with one drive as a raid one and then add mirror drives along them in that shi you've also got raid 5 a single disk redundancy raid 6 a dual dish redundancy and raid 10 which utilizes the logic of a raid one and combines dual drives in a radio environment allowing you to take potentially up to a two disc failure there but i would still er towards ratix in a four bay reason number four that you may want to look at a four-bay nas solution is it is a great jumping in point for your storage like a choice if you are looking at buying a network attached storage solution and you are sort of weighing up your budget you're looking at um what am i getting for money what am i spending the cpus on these devices are just where it kicks off it's where we start to see i7s it's where we start on our i5s and i3s it's where we see early xeons it's where we see the ryzen soc is where we see pentium processors across the field of network attached storage four bay is where most of the brands all agree to go get the better cpu or allow two bay no they don't touch it two base solar on and that's the end of the road but four bay is when you get a better jumping in point for your storage there's more to play with more options and then with that you have better memory options along with those cpus and of course improve performance internally and externally reason number five you may want to consider a four-bay nas is as mentioned a greater range of options now it isn't just that the manufacturers can turn around and say oh we'll let you have an i3 this time but if you look at any brand and i am talking synology qnap and asa store here but there are of course other brands if you look at the portfolios of any of them you go to their little solutions and they go hardware solutions click down go down and you see the entire portfolio go to the filter and click in four bay generally four bays are where they have the largest range of solutions to choose from be it with a range of cpus from arm 32-bit and 64-bit to intel x86 processors at 64-bit and of course we're seeing more and more amd's make it into that mix as well same goes for memory as well you see a lot more 2 4 8 and even 16 gig options you see a lot more range of network connectivity as well 4 bay is where you have a larger degree of hardware choice for you and although some of you might not like too much choice it's worth highlighting that if you've been given a static budget for your business of one thousand two thousand three thousand etc etc and you've been told you have this much to spend four bays where you can go well i'd want to spend that much on a decent cpu wall cpu is less important but i want more memory or i want to make sure that i've got better network interfaces so the cpu can kind of take a day off to be honest you can scale your budget on four bays in a way that's just not possible in a bunch of other systems when you go larger then you're paying for that larger space but something else touch on that later on before we go any further let's talk about five reasons you might not want to look at a four bay and this might make you want to buy a two-bay it might make you want to go higher or it might make you just not want to spend money on these anyway and go for google so reason number one you might not want to go for a four-bay nas a four-bay now is where things start to get noisy and i don't be noisy like these guys behind me that drive me close to madness i am talking about regardless of the fact that we have three very different nazis here in front of me four bay is when you start to hear those click hums and words of spin up and spin down more notably four ways where you start to see a lot more metal chassis in your environment four bays are when you start to see dual operating fans on the rear four bays are when you start to see bigger and more business class drives being purchased ultimately all of these factors together result in a system that just generates more clicks hums worse and background noise than most systems not huge but enough to be noticeable and that may be a factor for you if you are in close proximity with a system that's going to be spinning up uh occasionally and just generally irritating you if you're sensitive to noise reason number two on these four base systems right now the reason that you might not want to go for them it says nowhere near enough 10 gbe options out there given that four bays can comfortably saturate above the six or seven hundred megs and once you introduce ssd caching and once you introduce a lot of the adapters that you have multiple drives once you introduce expandability of four bays with four base generally being largely all expandable in most cases with only a few rare exceptions it seems weird to me that there aren't actually that many 10 gbe solutions now fair play to qnap they have more than everyone else currently in their four-bay portfolio of desktop system for example there are four 10-base solutions in their current generations but that's four out of about 20. now they're the ones that seem to be really pushing hard on this and i do believe there is another four by ten based solution coming soon but even then that ratio considering the performance and ability of these devices is largely underwhelming now on the other hand you could look at other brands where they do have 10g solutions out there but not many synology have no four base solutions to the port 10g now they would argue that four base still isn't quite enough to saturate a 1000 meg connection but i would say that if you do use drive adapters if you do use ssd caching and moreover if you are using media inside that has a great multi-user access you look at some of those enterprise drives the result is that just because you can't saturate one connection at a thousand megs doesn't mean that several users accessing the same storage area with the right media inside aren't able to leverage a lot of those benefits and the limitations we're seeing on four bays at 2.5 gbe and 1gbe across the majority of systems not factoring in lag is a little underwhelming reason number three you might not go for a four bay nas and this is one i personally disagree with i actually think this is a good thing but i know i'm not wholly in the majority here and that is four bays almost always arrive with external psus for those that aren't aware these systems you turn all three rounds sorry about the noise there you will see that all three have got a little power pin in one corner generally always the bottom corner in case of synology it's like a four pin proprietary one they've all got little psu connectors and that's because they've all got external psus they don't have the psu internally now there are obvious benefits and losses from this um being the setup so for example i like external psus i think an external psu-1 easier to replace if it fails two it removes the heat that it generates from the system and has it externally three you can have a backup around your house that's easier to replace an internal psu is a lot more hassle to replace they are a lot more finicky some brands will not allow you to just remove the psu and send off for a new one under your warranty and you have to send the whole system but i do know there's a lot of people that do not like external psus they don't like a dangly psu that's hanging out the back of the device where the weight of it can actually remove the psu from it they don't like the idea that an external psu is easier to lose generally in things like transit and stuff like that and three external psus are generally lower power when you get about a certain point generally i'd say about the above 160 maybe 200 watt mark that's when you almost always see internal psus but internal psus can generally be improved with calling they can be like filter and their external k chassis be removed and a number of people do not like external psus they think it makes unwarranted uh work for an external psu to feed it through and generally there's a school of thought for some users that external psus do not last as long as internal i disagree and there's stats to build to back up both sides but still there's a lot of people that when they get a four bay nas device and they bought purchased it online will go oh i don't like this external power brick so it's definitely worth factor for some of you worth considering in our five by five reason number four you might not want to buy a four bayonets and i'm looking towards my notes because i want to again just like before phrase this right when it comes to four bay nas is although there is that tremendous range of options available with the cpus you do pay what i would closely consider as the raid 5 tax when you buy a um five four bay we mentioned in my previous two bay video that if you look at most two and four bay nas ranges from all of the nas range nas brands out there you find in the 20 plus series in the locker store series and the five one or five d series this is a two bay and a four bay in that range they are identical the only difference being two drives more that's it the two drives inside there and those two drives there they've got a little starter connectors in there but the cpu the memory the connections everything about it it's largely the same yes it's a slightly bigger chassis but the the design is there and a lot of these companies use re the same chassis across multiple devices in their ranges the result is that four bays kind of have this inherent extra payment between 100 to 150 pounds more where you're paying more to pay more money for drives yes you're paying more for an overall extra capacity yes there is the inherent benefits of those other rate configurations but you're not getting any better hardware in any other way you're just getting a slightly bigger chassis and two extra sar ports inside which literally cost pence so the result is that the fire a four bay for a number of people you may be put off by that extra spend for what is obsessively just these two bays here being popped on the side so it's worth bearing that in mind if you are on a tight budget that a four bay the money you're spending and it becomes even more apparent when you look at more budget solutions that use irm processors on their two and four base that a large chunk of the money you are spending is for two empty bays of storage which you then may or may not fill so do make sure if you're buying a four bay that you are going to utilize those bays even if it's hypothetical that's better than nothing because if you're not you're kind of paying the raid 5 tax the last reason that you may not want to go for a four-bay nas solution right now and again reason number five is only a single psu now to date i only know of two nazis that have ever subverted this expectation now four bays again yes they are considered you know soho smb kind of user the middle so home prosumer and the small medium business there in the middle but four by desktop nazis generally only ever have one psu and i've talked about it before on the channel the psu on and ours is the second most frail part after the storage media and again there's lots of variables behind that but the psu if the psu fails it breaks it busts it overheats it just fails then the whole system's kaputski it doesn't matter if you're running uh from a um a ups in the background doesn't matter if you've got that because the psu if that fails it's game over now rackmount users have enjoyed dual psus or redundant psus for many many years now but desktop users with the exception of two viable alternatives have always been one psu and if you care about safety nets if you care because you're going for a raid 5 box anyway so it must be a consideration a single psu is going to be off point now i mentioned those two exceptions one was the fetus n5810 pro that was one of the only overtly clear dual psu and battery um supported nazis i've seen other than the drobo of course which had the battery but not the 2psu model but the ability to have two psus on a desktop very very appealing the other one of course as we've mentioned before is the wd pro wd mic cloud pro series that had two psu ports on the rear but you had to go out and buy a secondary psu so again a number of you that care about redundancy and it's one of the main reasons you've gone for a four-bay maybe you've already got a ups in your house the idea of a single psu being no there's no fallback on that may be off putting to you and yes of course you can have another one on the shelf that we talked about plug it in and bob's your uncle you're done but there's still no avoiding if that psu fails then you could have data corruption you could have active transfers uh receiving even not the full pack of data or just generally corrupting and be overlooked later so do do do bear that in mind and of course if you are someone of a frame of mind where redundant psus are just a given next to ecc memory and ups's before bay desktop may not be for you but this has been before you buy on four bay now solutions if you have enjoyed the video click like if you want to learn more click subscribe and visit the links in the description there's links to on that compares to everything we talked about today but otherwise i will see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 18,350

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Id: HZkngCmj15Y

Length: 17min 53sec (1073 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021