Quick Look: Synology DS920+ NAS! w/SMR FRAUD Information!

hey who controls the spice control wait no that's not right it's the ssd it's the ssd in the nas he who controls the ssd in the nas controls the access time or the speed look networks are getting faster all the time synology has got a new offering let's take a look it's a new nas experience would you say it's nice and accent no no i don't the punisher has been dispatched to my location if nothing else you can't fault synology for having a well-packed product this is the ds 920 plus and there have been a number of design improvements over the last synology nas that i look at now that to be sure it's a different class of model this one is a less expensive model the suggested retail price of 549 550 and that's before you add m.2s or extra memory or hard drives or anything like that to be sure you don't have to add extra memory it's just that if you're watching this on level one chances are you're a power user and it's like yeah let's add some more memory we've got seagate iron wolf drives here got an iron wolf ssd this is the sata ssd and then we've also got upgradability upgrade options there are two m.2s in the bottom of this one here and one there you can use that for caching at the rear i o we do have one usb 3 port and one esata port the esata port is pretty awesome because you can use that with an external hard drive that you can do external backups to another drive that you rotate so this can be plugged in all the time and then you can have an external drive that you know your really important stuff is copy to and then maybe you take that to a safety deposit box or something like that it also has all the built-in cloud backup stuff so if your internet connection is not garbage depending on where you live and you can actually upload data and they're not going to yell at you about the bandwidth caps then you can back up to amazon s3 glacier synology has their own online backup stuff which is a better deal than amazon stuff hell you can even back up to lenode i mean you can you can copy it anywhere because it's linux you can set up rsync it'll only transfer the stuff that has changed there's also one other usb3 port on the front now before you get excited to think m.2s i can get gigabytes per second no this is dual one gig so you're gonna get about 225 megabytes per second maximum off of this unit it's not technically smb multi-channel but i wrote a guide for that and you can still use that guide because hey it's just linux under the box the processor in this thing is the intel celeron j4125 four core it's two gigahertz but it'll burst up to 2.7 gigahertz it has four gigs of onboard ddr4 but you can't expand that to eight gigs with another four gig module so our configuration here is with a sata ssd that works completely fine if you'd rather use sata instead of m.2 because the m.2 is more expensive or whatever that's totally okay if you're wondering hey is that a m.2 ssd that's pcie or sata you can use either one there's actually two m.2 slots so double check the manual of course but the m.2s you know sata or pci express either one whatever works if it were me i would probably reserve all of my three and a half inch bays for mechanical spinning rust storage and i would use the m.2 slots on the bottom also really excited by this if you take out all the hard drives which i had done just a minute ago there is an extra sodium slot right inside here so if you want to do an 8 gigabyte memory upgrade you can totally do that and it's i mean it's so easy it's such a no-brainer if you're going to run any of the other pieces of software on this that i've demoed in the past like you're going to set up you know next cloud for file storage or any of the plugins in this or the dvr having extra memory just makes this device that much more responsive i love that you don't have to take it apart to pop in a new ddr4 sodium of course it's got two big fans at the back so it's not gonna be super loud of course if you get too fancy with it then you will even with extra memory you will run into cpu limitations because at the end of the day we're talking about it's an embedded celeron processor it's not super powerful it's powerful enough for the job it's powerful enough to be a network video recorder dvr it's powerful enough to run your file server it's powerful enough to run modest media servers and i'm going to be doing a lot of transcoding with this on the fly but you can run modest media servers there's a plex plug-in for it so there's a lot of software options right in the box you do get an ethernet cable and you get a power brick this is a proprietary power brick so it's a four pin type situation you'll have to keep up with this but maybe that's nice because if the power supply dies which if there's a lightning storm or any little hiccup at all uh the number one complaint from nasa units like this is oh my gosh the power supply died because abc xyz it is not a standard power supply i mean it can't be in a package this small but it's an external power brick so at least if something goes wrong you're not in a situation where you're going to be scrambling to find a power supply to fit you know model 37 it is a synology 4 pin power supply so you can just go on ebay and order another one if you need to its output is 12 volts 8.33 amps 100 watts basically all right education time and this is something you can use no matter what kind of network attached storage you're building you may have heard about the kerfuffle around shingles magnetic recording smr drives some vendors were pushing out drives that were labeled as safe for nas network attached storage but were in fact smr drives ismr drives are not safe red s that's probably not always going to be true but at least as of right now today that's basically true seagate iron wolf nas hard drives the six terabyte the st 6000 vn001 these are not shingled magnetic recorded drives which is great what shingles magnetic recording means is that the information is packed so densely on the drives that they literally can't uh change just one thing so like you have a chunk of information that's quite large and whenever you have to update something in the middle the drive has to pull all of the information out in the chunk zip to the middle in a you know in a memory buffer somewhere change the one thing in the middle and then it has to ride out the entire chunk again the problem which is not in itself a huge deal but the problem is that when you've got multiple physical drives so i've got three iron wolf drives in this synology container in this enclosure it has to synchronize that right operation because there's a redundancy too like i'm going to write some information some extra information is generated in the form of a checksum and the information is striped across several different drives the problem is that when you're juggling that many drives with that shingled magnetic recording operation it is very tough to get the software just right so that you don't have a performance penalty situation because then everything becomes as slow as the slowest drive to manage that one of the fixes one of the workarounds for that is to explicitly tell the host operating system hey these are shingled magnetic recorded drives you may have to change your right strategy for how information is written to the drives it's literally the right performance of those drives except in sequential write operations for when the space is empty basically the performance is terrible in every situation except that but in a nas situation even when the drives are empty the performance still isn't necessarily great because of that synchronization overhead so in general you'll see drives that are labeled nas and when they're labeled nas it means that it is safe for use in an ass because it is not shingled magnetic recording now eventually in the future they're going to get the firmware right because i think that was as much firmware bug or bad firmware design as it was a problem with shingled magnetic recording because shingle magnetic recording is not going away the density and the cost of flash memory falling and the type of density that you're looking for in mechanical hard drives only mean that you know smr is not going anywhere we just have to manage it better in terms of software so i think that it's probably true that as the software gets more complicated you will see nas units like this that better support flash memory and the nas units that are able to deal with flash memory a lot better will happily accept smr drives and the performance will actually be pretty good sorry to go off on a rant there but that will be useful no matter what kind of nas you're building is you need to explicitly check that it is or is not smr make sure that it is not smr if it's labeled for nas 90 of the time it's not going to be smr but you still got to double check because of shenanigans in the marketplace so with three six terabyte hard drives in this unit that gives me 12 terabytes of usable space if i'm going to use one drive for redundancy i've got the status here that's all good if my cash drive dies well i might lose something that i recently copied to the system but chances are no it's probably fine because the ssd is just used for caching so i've got my 12 terabytes of storage and six terabytes of redundancy you know we could put 20 terabytes in this thing with larger hard drives we put 30 terabytes in this thing with larger hard drives 16 terabyte hard drives are a thing but hey six terabytes not bad once you got it hooked up the easiest thing to do is to just go in your web browser to find.synology.com which will actually scan your local network to look for the device one beep is good when you first turn it on the power light's gonna blink for a little bit and then it'll be one time like that then it'll boot up it's literally a computer it's just a computer and it's booting now there are a ton of really cool software features of this thing that i've covered in several other videos i mentioned the ip camera thing this can also be a vpn server you can deploy that because it does docker and linux stuff if you want and some virtual machine stuff if you want and because of that it gives you a lot of flexibility it's also supported by vmware so if you're running vmware esxi you've got like a home lab you can actually back up your vmware vms which in the free version of esxi vmware does some things to kind of hobble the backup situation so that you know things are a little weird but the synology is able to use the ssh connection you can enable ssh on the free esxi you can back up your vms here of course if you've got one of the pay for additions even like the hobby license of vmware esxi then the synology is able to use the vmware api and back all that up it's got a really nice browser that has a timeline history snapshot thing so you can browse through multiple different versions of your virtual machine to look for a file that you might have deleted a week ago or two weeks ago or whatever that's synology active backup for business there's also hyper backup which we've covered in the past you can do the off-site backups there's really a lot of flexibility here if you use the g suite the google suite online and you're just paranoid about google accidentally deleting your account one day and then blaming you for it which i mean it doesn't happen all that often but it does happen every now and then it's like i don't know what happened to our amazon ec2 instance it was just deleted when you use find.synology.com to find an ass then from there really you just set up a secure password you really need to pick a secure password and configure your software it's all point and click you you could start with the synology active backup for business but active backup for business really means you have a lot of computers in your house and you would like to back them all up well active backup for business is really what you should use and there's no license fees or subscription fees or anything like that it just works you mentioned plex media server if you're more of an itunes kind of person and or family yes it can be an itunes server as well you can have all of your media on here and because it acts like an itunes server then certain stereos and you know maybe some of the higher end sonos stuff you can see that with this it's a little tricky i prefer to just have an smb share so it shows up like a windows computer and you can access all of that and it just works like a regular file share just like a regular computer but you can host your music on this and share it with other devices and be able to play it back that kind of thing because really everybody needs some kind of home nas and synology just happens to make an ass that i don't disagree with it works well now depending on what your needs are and how you want to configure your nas um how you set up your drives may vary a little bit so like i say i've got three drives here my only option the really the only option that makes sense is raid five that's going to give me one drive's worth of redundancy my only other option with three drives would be a two-way mirror so i've got all of my information on all three drives and all three drives will work in kind of a standalone fashion that's kind of maximum redundancy but these are six terabyte drives i'd only have six terabytes of usable space 12 terabytes of usable space is a lot better than six if i opted to put all four mechanical hard drives in here then i could go raid 5 or raid 6 or even raid 10. raid 10 would give me 12 terabytes of usable space and be very fast which with a on a nas that's only got dual gig interfaces you don't really need raid 10. i like raid 6 because raid 6 is a little bit more resilient than raid 5 but when we're talking about only a four drive setup and i usually go for raid 6 with five or more drives with four drives raid five and you take a little bit of a gamble if you get some corruption it's possible that you could have enough information to reconstruct what was corrupted it's just that you don't know which copy of the data is good which copy is corrupt with raid 6 because there's an extra redundant copy of the information there's basically one set of redundancy information with raid 5 and 2 sets of redundancy information with raid 6. raid 6 is better able to detect a corruption type situation rather than just an outright drive crash recover from that so raid 5 will recover from drive crashes raid 6 will recover from drive crashes or one of the drives has not crashed but has silently corrupted some information and some file systems like zfs deal with that this you know these don't deal with cfs because linux doesn't deal with zfs out of the box you basically have choice of btrfs or ext4 which is the standard linux file system so out of the box you plug this in you go to findoutsynology.com you got your drives plugged in you go to the file explorer and it says whoa you don't have any volumes you need to set up a volume and because you know this setup i don't really have a lot of options i'm just going to pick raid 5. you set that up it gives you the option to say hey do you want to make the ssd part of this volume you don't actually want to set that here you want to let it build and create your volume from your mechanical drives then you want to go to the ssd cache option at the bottom and then it'll say oh yeah there is an ssd in here do you want to add that as a cache you depending on how you set it up you could have read write as an option being able to cash rights is nice but if things go horribly wrong well you're going to lose a lot more information with a read cache it's going to help you in all of your read situations and it's basically never a dangerous situation in terms of writing information to the nas if the ssd dies or is surprise pulled or anything like that the caching will also help the recache will also help if you're running things like multiple virtual machines that's really where it's it's going to help you a lot it is possible because of the vmware integration for you to even use this as a vsan witness the way that you set that up is pretty straightforward you just set up your witness appliance on one of your vmware nodes and then you just use the synology active backup to back up the witness appliance and then restore it in place meaning that it's going to run on the synology i mean we've got a relatively anemic cpu here but for a witness appliance it's basically okay so you can set up your witness appliance actually on another vmware node back it up and then restore it but it's going to actually run from the synology which is pretty mind-blowing and pretty insane so that's been a quick unboxing and overview of the features that you get with the ds9 18 plus so if you do want a diy you know some people are going to come in the comments and be like i can diy this with a raspberry pi yes you absolutely can diy this with the raspberry pi it's not going to have nvme storage it's not going to have some of the bells and whistles and the software is going to be a lot more diy so it's going to take you a lot more time to set up but you know there is the 4 gig raspberry pi which is like you know 45 i think which is maybe a signal that synology should bundle more than four gigs on board i mean not eight gigabytes maybe it's where they should start heading i think they're going to do that or already are doing that on their higher end models but at least we've got the sodium slot so we can upgrade this to eight gigabytes of memory and it's gonna be a little more expensive to move from four gigabytes to eight gigabytes in the raspberry pi but this does a lot more stuff than a raspberry pi a raspberry pi would be a way that you could sort of get your toe in the water the raspberry pi doesn't have four sata bays and an appropriate power supply and you know you're going to spend at least 300 on the raspberry pi solution and this is better in terms of time management and complexity and reliability and the cloud services and the cloud integration backing up g suite from a raspberry pi it's not a fun experience and it's a very command line oriented experience whereas with this you just put in your credentials and it does it for you so so i definitely think there's a market out there for people that are looking for the ease of use bundled with the nice delicious linux underbelly so good job synology it's a neat product it's going to be interesting to see what kind of use cases and like i say with the sata ssd plus the mechanical hard drives i would configure this differently i would go straight for m.2 storage and then all mechanical hard drives are like two mechanical hard drives to start and leave two bays for later upgrades or later expansion you can mix drive sizes but i don't recommend it it would be more beneficial if like you started with two drives and you know two more of the same size drives later it's not gonna be enough space just go for four drives of of everything back it up to an external hard drive via the usb 3 port or something like that because by the time you know probably a 12 terabyte usb 3 external hard drive uh in a year or two is going to be like 99 bucks so you can just get one of those back everything up then get some 20 terabyte hard drives load this thing down with four 20 terabyte hard drives and then use that as your nas because 20 terabyte hard drives by then will probably be like 250 bucks you know hello people watching in 2022. i'm well this is level one i'm signing out and i'll see you later

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 57,838

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: WV2xQl4cKTI

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 22 2020