An Idiots Guide to Buying Your First NAS Drive

[Music] hello and welcome back and today is my idiot's guide to nas anyone that's followed this channel for a while or if you've just stumbled across this because you know it's done a google search and you've seen my face there and gone oh he doesn't look terrible if you are watching this video then you may have noticed just from the legacy of content that i've created i talk about network attached storage a lot and i really do mean a lot a lot it's by far the most common thing i talk about here on the channel and unfortunately i can get a bit too much you know see all the wood for the trees it's very i talk about the subject and greater density of detail as i go through more and more videos and it's all too easy for me and a lot of users to forget that a lot of people are making the jump onto network attached storage devices after working with like dropbox and google drive and stuff like that and they just they don't quite know what they're buying and much like anyone at about you but when you buy a new tv you spend ages and ages researching megahertz and black and white contrast rates and frame rates and stuff like that and you use all of that research to buy the right product and then after you bought it you pretty much get rid of all that information straight away and with regards to now so many of you are trying to buy your first network attached storage device and you watch a lot of the more common content not just myself but a lot of channels and we skip over things a lot we don't really keep things down to basics we have a lot of assumed knowledge so in this video i'm going to try and keep things as chewable and easy as possible we're going to talk about a few defining points in network attached storage that you the first time nas buyer should bear in mind if you've already owned several nozzles uh nazis nas i don't know the plural um who knows um but if you've already used now for a long amount of time or you're quite versed in network architecture then there's a very good chance this video is just going to be very very dull this video isn't for you but thank you so much for watching it is for the people that are coming into the world of naz and maybe they might have built a pc in their life or they've used the pc for a few years and they just want to know what are the core tenants what are the main parts that they should be bearing in mind when buying a network attached storage device for the first time so let's get straight on to what i think and largely overlooked in the common age of nas is the most important thing about buying a nas the software yes the hardware is important and yes of course i talk about the software and we'll talk about oh sorry the hardware and i will talk about the hardware later in this video but it has to be said that the software of a nas can really be make or break now there are lots of brands out there the four brands i probably talk about more than any other in terms of nas on this channel while synology qnap asa store and terror master i do talk about other brands and vendors and stuff as well and in other areas in the world of data storage but when it comes to network attached storage those are the main brands i talk about but they all have very different like kind of perspectives on the subject of their software case in point synology and that is the ones that produce things like the 920 plus the 220 plus even down to their j series more affordable models their software is geared around the idea of it being incredibly user friendly their software is easily by far the one that most people are going to be able to use intuitively because they've spent a lot of money and a lot of time designing it that way and if you are coming from cloud services and one of the things you liked about google drive and dropbox and the like was that they were fantastically user friendly and you kind of knew what you were doing because it was just clearly obvious and things were they needed to be then you're probably going to like synology the other thing with synology is they do have a tendency to kind of ask you to do things their way in order to keep their software running as smooth and as fast and responsive as possible certain assumed um background options are already pre-configured a lot of their popular applications such as synology photos in dsm-7 and prior to that in terms of moments required you to have preset directories used for your media for example so all your files had to be in a specific location designated by the system you couldn't put them anywhere you wanted you had to put them where the system wanted them to go and that's not all their applications that do that but the majority of them do on top of that a lot of their applications they have there have been designed around the idea of they are alternatives to first party applications so for example they have synology chat which is an alternative to skype and even whatsapp in mobile form they have synology office which is an alternative to google drops and off of docs and office 365 and add their own backup tools and surveillance tools and more and all of their applications on all their services and then as environments heavily to kind of emphasize that you should use their tools it does support some third-party tools but it has to be said that they do run more of a 60 40 relationship of first and third party on their platform now qnap on the other hand a common alternative for a lot of people who look at synology and don't quite like the way they've gone that chewable friendly way qnap keeps things a lot more open they try to support as more many more platforms at once and although they have some great first party software in their q maggie stuff hybrid backup sync 3 virtualization station all of these wonderful tools it has to be said that their platform seems to try to be more flexible and more customizable than any other brand the result is it can be less intuitive while they're trying to keep a much more balanced position for all these different kinds of users and operating systems and software environments the result is that they tend to throw more information at you on the screen it can be rather intimidating also they've spent a lot more time trying to be compatible with third-party platforms and for their hardware to be a little bit more enabled we'll talk about that later in the video but the result is their software can sometimes feel that it lacks some of the polish of synology's dsm software platform but more recent innovations and more recent versions of their software such as qts 4.5 and qts5 just around the corner it has to be said that they have tightened things up quite significantly on there in terms of their software platform and of course at the end there we've got asus store and terror master asa store managed to provide a very slick if slightly less feature-rich environment compared with the other two platforms and a lot of their platform although it does provide some hardware advantages over the others it has to be said isostal will always have a tendency to feel like you are getting good value for money certainly but at the same time you are getting slightly less features than the other platforms have on offer such as lacking sonology's hybrid rage system uh lacking a lot of qnaps virtualization abilities with their first party apps the lack of zfs from qnap there the lack of an ai supported photo tool on either platform asa store and their adm platform and software and services are very very good but it has to be said that although they're slightly more user-friendly uh than the solidity platform they're certainly less able than the than the qnap platform so again it's a nice platform but i think they could still do so much more in the modern age and of course there at the end is terramaster terramaster often considered to be the more cost-effective choice and they have a bunch of apps but it's very no frills by comparison and you will find that it can't multitask as well it presents itself quite nicely but it always seemingly feels dated there'll be lots of stuff at the front that seems very current but you don't have to go very far before you suddenly feel you it's all going a little bit windows xp a little bit window seven there when you're looking at it but the software on a nas is incredibly important because it's how you're going to interact with it you might get one that's stupidly powered xeon now cpu you might get one that's got 10 gbe and more but if you can't interact with it well enough and the software platform inside can't manage itself appropriately then chances are that all that hardware is going to be handled very inefficiently and that is why the software on the nas is the most important thing but of course if you're coming from a pc builder background of course if you are coming from someone who has utilized computers your whole life you'll know that the hardware still has an enormous impact on these systems and if you are a first time nas buyer the one of the most important decisions you will ever make is the cpu the cpu isn't just about power people just assume cpu equal power better cpu equal better power it's really not like that it's about tailored solutions you open the drawer in your kitchen there are different kinds of knives there are different kinds of spoons one is not necessarily better than the other because it is bigger because sometimes a smaller tool is better do not quote me on that your children so cpus on nas are often downplayed and by the pc community or the pc gamer master race sometimes will look at the cpus inside of nas and just think it's a bit piddly in it wow celeron i had a celeron or celeron many many years ago my old first pc it was awful awful why would you have that a nas is about 24 7 utilization it is about a device that's going to be over days weeks months or even years at a time it's going to be a system that is accessed intermittently but needs to be responsive the minute you connect to it you need architecture that is efficient and that's why a lot of these processors are used they're either cpus that are designed to be ran without aggressive fans and can be on for days weeks months without detrimental effects or there are server grade equivalents to modern cpus such as the amd ryzen v 1500 b series where you have the ryzen cpu used in power gaming alongside gpus and then you've got embedded ryzen processors where they take a lot of that architecture and transform it into a more nas based environment now there's four factors on a cpu you've got to bear in mind the first one is the frequency alt also known as the clock speed this is the speed at which the cpu can be responsive now bear in mind this isn't as cut or dry as it used to be a lot of people will assume the bigger that number the more powerful it is and although technically that is true that if the frequency is quite high two gigahertz three gigahertz four gigahertz and higher it has to be said that it doesn't always mean that it's the best choice a lot of modern generation systems are arriving with slightly lower frequencies but they either arrive with a lower more capable processor with a lower frequency because it's a much more able processor and it doesn't need more power to do it or they have burst or turbo on the end there so you'll have a cpu such as the new celeron cpu out there that's the j4125 that's a quad core and that cpu is 2.0 gigahertz but it can be burst up to 2.7 gigahertz when needed it can overclock itself effectively and have that extra power that's a great thing to look out for in modern cpus the second thing to bear in mind is a lot of modern grade cpus can be broken down into either being an x86 64-bit processor or an arm processor which is either 32 or 64-bit now the reason that's important is when you buy a nas you want it to do a bunch of features and functions simultaneously and the cpu you choose and the amount of um code in the amount of instructions it can take any given time and do it effectively will differ wildly depending on the features and functionality of that cpu more cost effective systems such as the j series will arrive with an arm or arm based processor this is a cpu that manages to compress code that's delivered to it and therefore is able to handle these smaller more compressed areas of code and you know crea action these instructions more capably they're still not going to be as fully featured as a lot of x 86 64-bit processors from intel and amd but they still do get quite a lot done processors like the realtek rtd 1296 is a 64-bit processor that can even handle 4k media it's still going to be out done by the likes of an intel i3 or a pentium but it still does very well for what it's got under the hood now a lot of what it comes down to under the hood is our third point there which is that the cpu might feature embedded graphics now for those who aren't aware and particularly those that ever bought their first laptop you may have noticed that when you purchased it although it didn't have a graphics card it said it utilized integrated graphics and that is an area on the cpu that is dedicated to graphical manipulation the creation of visual data now with that what it means is if you're doing a task with your nas that involves visual data be it the lna media streaming or if you're going to be utilizing it for virtual machines surveillance transcoding anything that involves visual data or graphical manipulation a cpu that has embedded graphics has a special little toolbox to at its disposal that can do a much better job of handling graphics without the raw cpu power over here troubling itself to get the job done it's still going to do a lot of the process it's still going to handle and pass data instruction but having those graphically enabled tools on hand means that it can do a better job of doing graphical actions and use less cpu power overall if you don't go for a cpu with embedded graphics and you try to do graphical based actions with your nas the result is going to be that that cpu is going to have to use more raw power in order to do it and this comes back to that point about frequency about having a cpu that is tailored to do certain actions and therefore will use less power doing it ergo you don't need to have the most powerful cpu to do it and finally we can talk about encryption encryption is something that in the last few years few people have been that you know concerned with until now has become more heavily available and more stuff with malware lots of stuff with um ransomware lots of stuff with just hacks in general when encryption has become very very important particularly for those that are going to have their own server at home now encryption is largely available on the majority of nas systems it can be built into the cpu and indeed in the latest version of windows 11 that was leaked recently and at their press conference it was raised that windows 11 largely insists that the hardware you are using does have on-board encryption with that cpu so it can take advantage of it internally now once again i'm pleased to say that pretty much all nazis have encryption but it's worth highlighting that nasa's that have an x86 64-bit architecture processor again uh zeons we're talking a lot of the modern grade amd's we're talking um a lot of the i3i5 i7 pentium celeron all that sort of stuff all of those processors have encryption on board but they have aes n i advanced encryption standard new instruction and it allows the system to keep that encryption up with a lesser impact on overall system resource consumption and that allows you to make sure everything's encrypted without worrying about your system running too slow so do look out for that but we talk about speed we can get to the third important bias point if you're looking at buying your first nas and i'm sorry to harp on and that is memory we all know what memory is i think it's basically the arms of the system how much it can do at a given time it's like the fingertips really it is the memory is when certain processes are being actioned and worked on at that time they live on the memory it's more complex than that but that's the best way to describe it in a nice crayon english so when you buy a nas it will arrive with an area of memory so more affordable solutions like the j over here will have a very small amount of memory half a gig 512 megabytes but the more aggressive than that and by aggressive i mean more powerful more advanced cpus more bass will have more memory such as 2gig of memory here such as 8gb of memory here four gig of memory here and that's because the more memory you have at your disposal the more processes you can do it's not just about the number of simultaneous connected users it's also about the sheer number of processes you can do and once again the more graphical manipulative tasks that you're going to be running particularly surveillance or virtual machines they require a lot of memory so do remember if you're going to be using your nas for any kind of visual assisted work i would say definitely at least two to four gig and if you are going to run virtual machines surveillance containers anything like that i would strongly recommend eight gig and more also if you're looking at qnap systems that support zfs if you do go for a zfs nas and you don't have at least 16 gig of ram you won't be able to take advantage of inline deduplication if you don't know what it is watch another video it's too complex for this one basically it's backing up lots of sources to one place and only keeping one copy now when it comes to memory you will notice that some nazis will have more memory than others but this nas will have a better quality memory i hate seagulls so when it comes to the memory that you're utilizing generally if the modern generation of nasa's all have ddr4 at either 2 400 megahertz or 2600 megahertz that's the speed at which um it's responding now modern generation synologies in the plus series and above start arriving with ecc memory error code correction or error correcting code not this device is the 980 but the one behind me now these devices allow them when data is passed through the memory it does a quick check as an extra bit some at the beginning to compare the memory that passes through it and therefore it can repair files that there are any kind of bit problems all the way through you will have to spend extra for error code correcting memory but i do recommend if you're a business user buying your first nas and you want to make sure that your integrity of your data is maintained at all times next we can talk about uh when you do buy a nas the connections all of these devices have ports on their rear and the rear connections of ports have differed wildly over the years now those of you who are buying nas for the very first time very rightly ask you know a question that anyone that's a network junkie will go of course not but it's actually quite a reasonable question which is these devices have got usb ports can you just connect to this device over usb no you can't why can't you though a lot of people just get really annoyed about that it's because of the host client relationship in a device once you're connecting to it if you connect to this device with your laptop in that connection relationship the device you are utilizing is the client and the nas in this situation is the host you are communicating with it and it is the ultimate control now with these usb ports if you connected this device to your computer you're connecting a host to a client and it won't see it it has to be the other way around if you're a host device then you can see all the usb devices but if you're connecting to this device as a client your pc your phone or whatever you'll you can't connect to it via usb you can only see this device externally now these usb ports can be used for multiple things they can be used for external storage drives such as external usbs and hard drives while i try to break something there you can connect those up and they allow you to not only make that drive storage network and internet accessible but they also allow you to um use as a backup to backup storage from the nas onto those usb drives on top of that you've also got network upgrades you can attach network upgrade some nas devices to add such in this case the usb from qnap that allows you to add a 5 gigabit ethernet port to your system but most people when they think of the connections on a nas system it's worth highlighting that most people just think about network connectivity now network when you have a nas is this device connected in your local area environment like a switch or it's being connected to a router now a switch looks like this this is a box that you might have in your home or business environment and this has lots of different devices pcs cameras servers all that stuff all connected so they can all communicate together you might connect this to a router or a modem and that brings in the internet ultimately it allows the exchange of packets of data externally now the reason i bring that up is because most nazis for the home affordable ones arrive with one gigabit ethernet that is 100 or 109 megabytes per second transmission but a lot of more modern generation nazis that have arrived in a 2020 2021 series the ones that as network interfaces have improved on computers laptops uh gaming rigs and more we're starting to see increases in 2.5 gbe and 10 gbe and these ones that will provide around 270 or so megabytes per second all the way up to well in excess of a thousand megabytes per second throughput now it's worth highlighting that just because you buy a nas like this one here the 872x just because it has a 10gbe port does not guarantee that your communication with that nas is going to be 1000 megabytes per second that is known as saturation that is when you have a network connection on a nas and whatever the full bandwidth the pipe is think of it as a water pipe the pipe that you can fill it with 1 000 megabytes of water if you have a nas that has a 10 gbe port the only way you can fill that is to fill your system with hard drives taking advantage of techniques such as raid it allows you to effectively multiply the speed at which the drives inside work so you might have a single hard drive giving one to 200 megabytes per second performance and if you add another drive in that raid group it can increase your total read writes there somewhere between 70 to 150 megabytes per second now with each preceding drive you add alongside having parity and redundancy which allows you to uh create um data spread across these drives in a way that if a drive dies the system can rebuild your data and your data is safe on top of that those multiple drives will also allow you to vastly improve your read and write speeds and therefore saturate that 10 gb connection so if you do look at a nas that has larger network connectivity bear in mind one that you're going to need to populate it with enough media or the most performance intensive media to maximize that connection but two bear in mind you have to make sure you've got a cpu inside that can push that throughput and i do recommend for a 10gbe nas if you really want to hit or exceed 10g across multiple ports that you go for at least an intel or amd 64-bit x86 processor but of course another point when it comes to nas is that they are upgradable a number of these devices along with being able to add a little port there to add better in network connectivity you can in some cases such as in the case of this 72x and a bunch of other known as smb or small medium business nazis you can add more network ports you can go ahead and add pcie cards to add more connections later there are other things you can do with cards like this what i'll touch on in a while but ultimately what i'm saying is that and nas if you want to increase your network connectivity throughout the lifespan of your product you can look at nasa's that have pcie upgrade slots but the thing you really really need to take on board with those is simply that not all pcie slots are built equal when we look back at that pcie card you can see that little gold line there that is the pcie slot oh sorry the pcie lane that's going to connect into the slot there now this little row here depending on the architecture of the card it will limit the performance between the card and your system so take this card this card has a 10gb port it's also got nvme ssd caching base but we're going to hold off on that for now so 10gbe port there requires um that pcie to transmit at least 1000 megabytes per second this card happens to be a pcie gen 3 x 8 card now for those that aren't aware pcie gen3 times eight provides eight thousand megs how can you know that well the pcie generations when you're looking at a nas you'll be given a number it'll be pcie gen and there'll be a number times another number so in the case of pcie gens pcie gen 1 is 250 megabytes pcie 2 is 500 megabytes pcie 3 is a thousand megabytes and pcie 4 which is only really starting to arrive on the scene is 2 000 megabytes and all you need to do is take that first number pcie gen 2 and when it goes times you just times the thousand by that so for example a pcie gen two times four slot will be pcie two so uh 500 megs times four so 500 times four equals two thousand so when you buy a nas with a pcie slot do bear in mind if you're going to be upgrading it and adding more network interface cards if you're going to be using ssd caching that we'll talk about in a bit make sure the pcie slot that you're going for is at least pcie gen two times four or in most cases pcie gen three above gen three times four or gen three times eight that i think gives you a nice balance there the amount of network connectivity and allows you to have at least between two thousand and four thousand megabytes per second throughput between the card and your system now i mentioned ssd caching another thing that a lot of people aren't aware of within the lifespan of your nas product you're actually able to scale up its performance in a number of ways but one of the most recent innovations is ssd caching that is when you have a bunch of hard drives that might have larger capacity and they have a lower price point are slower in performance than traditional ssd these days so you can have ssds installed inside and this is for example an nvme ssd and you can install these inside some nas's now and what they do is they provide the benefits of their faster access speeds their higher eye ops um the increa sorry the decreased latency and they move the nas will move the most frequently accessed files that live on those hard drives they'll move a copy of them onto the ssd either partially or fully and then every time that file's being accessed either directly or within the context of a larger application it will improve the performance and therefore if you've got more frequently common access files or you're using a nas from home user to prosumer to business user the ssd cache can vastly improve the internal performance and save you having to fully populate a nas like this with just ssds which will be more expensive and faster but you'll have a lower overall capacity a lower overall durability and you'll just lose out overall ssd caching is something that is now available in even very affordable nas solutions with synology rocking a lot of m2 nvme slots in a lot of their newer generation nases and qnap having a vast array of nas solutions that have m2 nvme slots the extra store locker store series arrived with m2 nvme slots as well but much like qnap in some of their releases because the cpu they use um was kind of spread very very thin across the whole system those pcie slots are not true pcie three times four slot in other words uh around four thousand megabytes per second there may be pci gen two times two or two times four so sometimes they can bottleneck the ssds the tiniest bit it really does come down to the system you go for now i'm going to end this on the final point when it comes to nasa a lot of people definitely overlook you've been using google drive and dropbox and whatever four years and you've realized all this data i'm renting this space i need somewhere for this data to live long term there's a lot there i want a local server and they stick it in their bedroom they stick it in the front room they stick it anywhere but they don't realize these things actually make noise move that mic between the enterprise disks and the standard disks there's the enterprise disks and i can see the audio volume in the background dipping down they don't make loads of noise you know it's not like a drill or nothing but imagine your pc in the corner if your pc had a metal chassis and it was filled with eight hard drives all spinning at once at all the time that can generate noise also these systems because they're on for such long lengths of time will generate lots of fan noise as well and more enterprise level systems tend to have a higher ambient noise when they're in operation as well so do bear in mind that when you buy a nas system for the first time if you go for a nasdaq's medal chances are it's going to make a little bit more ambient noise also if you go for the larger capacity hard drives anything above 8 to 10 tb those drives have a tendency to make a little bit more noise that clicks hums and worse there in the background we did a whole noise test series on different hard drives earlier this year and i recommend you check those out and finally bear in mind if you go for a system that has trays that if the trays are metal that can also increase the noise dramatically however if you go for a nas that doesn't have trays and doesn't allow hot swapping a go you have to take it apart to put the drives in these systems have a tendency to weirdly make more noise even though they're a closed system and they don't have trays everything vibrates together because it's all one set piece and you will find that more affordable nas solutions can actually be quite noisy so bear in mind when you do set up your house for the first time that if it does make a little while it's running or the clicks hums and words of a hard drive that actually is normal and it's highly recommended that you deploy a nas somewhere in an attic or just out of your local environment so it doesn't annoy you but these have been my kind of key buying points about announced i know it's been a bit rambling this has been quite a long video but i think it's important if you've watched this all the way through to know that this isn't a small amount of money this is a decent bit of wallet that you're paying for one of these devices so you want to know that these devices work right first time and that they do the job that you want them to now do take advantage of the free advice section over at nasa compares it is a genuinely free advice service that i offer myself an eddie the web guy if you want to know what conan has to go for what your setup is and the best solution for you head down there and give us um a query down there it doesn't cost you anything it's completely free and it'll allow us to help you get the right data storage solution for you without you having to spend thousands on some high-end professional outfit thank you very much click like if you enjoyed the video subscribe to learn more and i'll see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 22,754

Keywords: NAS Server, NAS Drive, NAS Guide, nas help, nas guide, nas 2021, nas 2022, synology nas guide, qnap nas guide, nas tutorial, nas setup guide, synology nas setup guide, qnap nas setup guiide, how to buy a nas, nas buyers guide, synology nas, qnap nas, synology nas drive, qnap nas drive, nas drive guide, nas drive buyers guide, nas drive buy, best NAS to buy, best nas drive 2021, nas drive setup, nas drive for home, nas drive for plex, nas drive reviews 2020

Id: IUUxRAYwk60

Length: 33min 19sec (1999 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 03 2021