Should You Still Buy the Synology DS920+ NAS?

hello and in today's video we're going to do some sharp focus on this the one and a half year old ds 920 plus from synology you might be looking at this video because you're thinking about it on black friday or prime day or christmas sale or any sales or maybe you're just thinking about making a plunge onto a brand new nas and you're thinking about this even though it's about a year and a half old so in today's video we're going to go for the good the bad software the hardware and hopefully help you decide whether this device still deserves your data right now [Music] so for those of you that aren't aware this is the snazzy ds920 plus it's the latest generation of their kind of middle of the pack pro schumer features without the heavy heavy price tag solution in synology's portfolio the ds 920 plus is part of kind of a series of devices in four bays that have been knocking around in a very similar iteration for this for a few years way back to like 2015 give or take and this is a quad core intel celeron based nas it arrives with four base that can be expanded it arrives with support of like 98 of the synology application dsm-7 and ultimately it's a device that we have noticed in the last 12 months or so appears whenever there's a big sale knocking around and even though this is a family series that get refreshed every 24 maybe two two and a half years within its iteration before a new generation system comes out the 920 has been spectacularly popular in the 18 months or so that it has knocked around worldwide now right now not in sale or anything the price tag knocks around around the world for about 500 pounds or about 550 to 600 american dollars uh to about 900 um australian dollars and then you got your euros to the bulk of europe it knocks for about 600 euros to about 650 depending on which region of europe you're looking at and then you've got canadian dollars knocking around for about seven 750 canadian dollars so a lot of you might hear that number and say that's not cheap that's by no means a low number that's actually quite a lot and i agree with you a lot of you out there looking at budget solutions just for a bit of multimedia it's a bit high but once you look at the general scope of network attached storage devices you do find that that number is actually quite well placed it's a good target number for those of you that want a little bit of everything plex media server hyper backups there backing up to usb cloud nasda nas and more synchronizing with your third party cloud to dropbox use your google drive taking advantage of virtual machines taking advantage of surveillance second advantage of media other dlna your music your photos uh your videos that kind of stuff all of that in that price tag for about that you know 500 pounds using my own country at least here mark is actually pretty much the sweet spot for most buyers that want to move away from cloud not to something a bit prosumer however this device as mentioned is about a year and a half depending on where you are in the world and a number of you might be thinking right now even if it is on offer should i take the plunge or should i hold back a little bit there because it is a decent bit of whack when it comes down to it so today i'm going to talk a lot about this device i am going to go into the software later in the video i'm going to talk about reasons it's still very very good right now and a few little reasons why it might be looking a little bit tired a little bit older maybe a little less appropriate to you and hopefully from this you decide whether you should go for this device so straight away the hardware inside is actually still pretty good for 2021 bearing in mind this is a nas server and um therefore the components have to be a lot more efficient they have to last a little bit longer they've got to conform within that price tag there and the cpu inside there that quad-core celeron is still pretty good for your money it handles transcode it can do a little bit of vms it can multitask very well it's got um aesn like encryption behind it and it runs solange's latest software dsm-7 very very well indeed particularly for the compact nature of it and that cpu in conjunction with the 4 gig of memory by default is actually pretty darn impressive not only for the price tag but just for how well the sm 7 eeks out a lot of its performance from it also this device um particularly the four bays with some of the earliest generation to take advantage of those nvme slots to allow you to install little nvmes inside to improve the performance down the line now whether you take advantage of that on day one or you're going to take advantage of that later on that kind of upgradability is actually quite handy particularly when drives like this are regularly on sale the likes of the seagate iron wolf series the likes of the wd red sn7 700 series these nvmes allow you to vastly improve the performance of your device later on so when you are buying this if you are slightly worried about its ability three four five years down the line do know that you can scale things up talking of scalability you can expand the storage on this device so again it is a four bay but you can knock on another five base later on with the dx-517 arguably not the cheapest method that expansion alone knocks around for about 300 350 nikka um but still nonetheless it's nice to know that you can expand this storage and not think to yourself i don't really want to flash the cache when it's only four bays you can upscale that later also in terms of storage this is one of the synology solutions that arrives with something called shr synology hybrid raid that's when you can mix and match your drives inside now obviously you're not going to do that on day one and i will touch on this a little in the software um tutorial in just a moment but with the race inside this maybe on day one you fully populate with it wd or seagate hard drives four tvs or something to keep it budget and a few years down the line you start running out of space a normal rate configuration like a raid 5 or a raid 1 will not allow you to mix and match the drives if you try to introduce larger drives the system won't see it it will only see the amount of capacity that's available to the smallest drive and by that mean you could put three 10 tb drives inside this and one one tb it will only ever see every drive as the smallest available drive so one one one one you're going to lose out shi allows you to mix and match larger drives so if you did put in 10 10 10 1 you would still have to have 10 tb of safety net there on the raid that redundancy but you'd be able to take advantage of the other 10 terabytes on each of those extra drives so again a huge amount of scalability and ability to really conform your storage in the system's lifetime even in this device that's about 18 months old now another thing to bear in mind when this arrived on the scene the latest generation of the software dsm-7 which at the moment is looking no trademark um is it wasn't even available but it's one of the best devices in their desktop series outside of devices that use xeon processors and stuff like that to handle dsm 7 and its graphical capabilities the sm7 runs great on this in fact why should i talk any further about that let's flick over to the software taking a closer look at what you see when you log into the synology now as you can see that even though the ds 920 plus is a little bit more of the affordable end of their entire portfolio it has to be said that it's still an absolute banger of a now showing off a lot of features and functionality there's dsm-7 in all its wonderful glory and straight away i've already got all the apps to show you so remember this is one of those uh nas devices that support synology hybrid raid that is like a traditional raid configuration where you've got your multiple drives but bearing in mind that shr lets you mix and match different kinds of drives in terms of speed performance and when it comes to upgrading later down the line making things a great deal easier in terms of volumes you've got support of things like snapshots there in the background and of course btrfs being a file system of choice meaning that things like background snapshots on the shared folder level are considerably easier if we have a look at any of these shared folders we've got created here we can go ahead and do lots of different features and functions directly from within the file manager all of it possible on this relatively affordable nas then you've got the more tailored level aspect of things when you want to deal with different kinds of files photos video music all of them are pretty well covered on this system at the lower end it has to be said that probably of all the different multimedia applications music is the one that's maybe not treated with the priority with the height of the others with audio station looking a little bit um dated compared to a lot of the other apps but still providing a lot of the features and functionality as well as the inbuilt dlna media server that helps you with universal universal plug and play and digital living network alliance devices like playstation 5 like amazon fire tv and more indeed if you are looking at those sort of services to stream your media do bear in mind that there are lots of applications supported there on the synology platform they're one of the few apps out there available on amazon fire tv then you've got things like vlc media player and dg's upnp application for fire tv all of which allow you to enjoy the media on your nas let's not forget plex media server 2 i'm sure a number of you are looking at a nas like this during maybe a black friday sales event end of year sales event or prime day who are considering this nice and i've got to tell you in terms of what you're paying for this is a great little plex media server it's not going to smash out much of the you know 1080p hdr sort of content and higher but if you're looking at traditional h.264 um this is going to do a lot of that multimedia and in most of the tests that we've performed previously this device has managed to knock through the bulk of our 1080p and early 4k stuff very easily and even playing back of movies with the scraping of metadata in plex media server without a plex pass is still very much possible here with all that information readily available using the default system tools that are available to you included in your price if you don't want to go for plex media server as mentioned with those applications supported on the likes of amazon fire tv android and apple there we can go straight into video station their own alternative to plex media server with no paid extras the whole system lets you take advantage of that transcoding has a very similar design and feel to that flex media server with all of the features such as the scraping of metadata the gathering of information cast list description of episodes and more all being made possible within video station without any paid extras and all kept in-house next up you've got photography and of course in the previous versions of synology dsm not just on the 920 you had photo station and technology moments both of which have been announced now into synology photo synology photos takes advantage of the bulk of the features and services of both of those platforms with a few things still yet to come on the 920 you've got everything from gif and live photo view viewing and playback you've got the ability to really bit go particularly deep into the metadata of the images that you utilize with the different things that you uh the cameras uh be they smartphones or more all being retrieved from that and all of this being done offline on top of that you can go into the albums mode and the 920 i'm pleased to confirm takes advantage of person recognition where you've got the ability to find photos of people that are tagged within the albums of your nas and go ahead and give them names and then all of those photos for both the past and the future will be uploaded and tagged with those people to give you the ability to catalog your database and all of this being done with faces being recognized remember that not the names of the files but faces being recognized and again all of those features and functionality and if you are um you know amateur or even you know semi-pro photographer that wants to share your files and photos with um other users you know be it like you know shoots that you've created that you profit from you know as a business person or once you to share with family members and friends all is possible from this interface here with lots of different timeline views smart filtering tagging and more the 920 still much like a lot of nazis with the sm7 and telangie photos has yet to implement the smart tagging application that was available in moments which is a bit of a bummer but hopefully that is going to be coming and they have increased the level of file formats in photography that are supported in photo station that weren't available when the application first launched moving away from multimedia you've then got how does the 920 run for surveillance and i'm pleased to say that it does run very well we've already attached a couple of cameras to this for another video that's coming up soon and again we've got that pan tilt zoom control there so we can go ahead and if i move my arm there in the background you're able to see right there that we're all running fine with all of this happening in the web browser there are desktop applications out there but you don't need to use them you can just go ahead and manage all of that in the browser and the 920 seemingly has the amp from power in the back end to do it you only get two camera licenses but again that's not really exclusive to the ds920 that's something that's pretty much the standard on 95 percent of synology nas with the ability to go back into the old timeline views and look into the past there there's me this morning getting all set up for work it's that straightforward and again all of that is reading available straight off the bat there so again lots of features lots of functionality for surveillance and lots more that you can add in its own dedicated app center and so many tools are supported on the 920 there's a very good reason why the ds920 still continues to be one of the hottest nozzles in their lineup it's looking a little dated it has to be said in terms of its hardware but in terms of software support it still does a banging job with great support in hyper backup to connect to nas to nas backups nasdaq cloud services and with that dedicated usb backup tool that the system arrives with you can go ahead and make sure that you've got a multi-backup solution in place ignore that i had to pull out the drive for another video but with the ability to create tasks very very easily featured on usb or if you're going to be creating new tasks that take advantage of backing up between other nases cloud services and more it's all featured here you've even got access to the more enterprise level stuff in the form of active backup suite which not only allows you to backup physical servers virtual machines linux servers and more you've also got support in the application center by supporting the likes of google workspace and microsoft 365 all built in it's a great system there that allows you to take advantage of i would say about 98 of the hardware and software available from synology and although in this video i've barely scratched the surface of things like synchronization with cloud by m um by bolting on cloud storage um hybrid share that allows you to bolt on that c2 service download station and many many more applications all supported on this system right the way down to virtual machine support and container support with their own dedicated applications the 920 in terms of software has still got a lot to be said other good things to talk about is the fact that this system also doesn't feature any of that drive locking that we've seen recently synology of a lot of their enterprise level systems recently particularly rackmounts have started saying that you can only utilize their hard drives which is something we're slightly worried is something that's going to affect stuff in the future this nas doesn't feature that you can use any old sarah drive from that compatibility list which is extraordinarily large so there is a lot to be said for this device in 2021 in terms of what you're getting for your money and if you can see discounts where on prime day earlier in 2021 we saw discounts on this of about 10 to 15 percent which isn't a small number we saw lots of discounts we highlighted lots of and of course here on the channel i am going to be doing what i did uh last black friday and prime day here i'm going to be making a video every day in an article highlighting the best deals i've seen out there for you guys to go for but it's not all going to be good there are reasons not to go for the ds920 plus i think if you've stuck around with me in this video for this long and you're that close to pulling the trigger stick around a little bit longer because it's not all roses first and foremost again it's a constant annoyance this system only takes advantage of one gigabit ethernet which i know a number of you might go i don't care you know my router's one gpu my switch is one gbe i'm not going to be putting out more than one gbe my external internet connection is not going to do all that but a number of you want that scalability and we're seeing not only a lot of systems starting to rob and a lot of routers as well particularly from isps as well arriving with 2.5 gigabit ethernet connections on them but we're also seeing wi-fi six grow exponentially we're seeing a lot more advertisements on tv we're seeing a lot more hardware taking the extra steps to highlight wi-fi six indeed even the latest amazon fire stick features wi-fi six as does the latest generation of consoles so all of these systems getting faster and faster and you own a private server that's limited to one gigabit ethernet that's a bit of a bummer you know and yes it's got two ports and yes you can link aggregate but that would require a switch and a managed switch and it's a lot messing around a lot the less tech minded want to knock around with another thing that people are less keen on with this is although all the great stuff i said about those nvme slots at the bottom bear in mind you can't use it for storage you can only use it to improve the read and write performance inside this device which is key there you can't create a storage area with these nvmes which means that although they're super fast they're only going to be superficially beneficial and they're only going to be improving performance to files that already exist on the hard drives you're not going to be able to access that area of super fast storage for super fast vm super fast this super fast the other which is a real shame and lastly it's worth talking but this also gives a lot more towards usb this system has got kind of limited utility for these usb drives there's a usb on the front there we've got a couple of i mean now we've got another usb they're on the back and on the face of it they're great stick on some external storage and bang you're done but apart from backups there's not a huge range of things you can do anymore now you can still attach ups's you can still use a very small number of network adapters that can only go to 1gbe even i think usb printing is largely absent in a number of different usb hardware peripherals that were supported in previous generations of synology software are no longer supported on this system you can't attach new and improved ethernet adapters you can't attach wi-fi six adapters there's all kinds of things you can't attach to this and to make matters worse it's usb 3.2 gen 1 which is 5 gigabits per second which on the face of it might seem fast enough but with more and more external drives with ssds inside can push out significantly higher than that that's a hell of a bottleneck for a device that arrived in summer of 2020 when you know we saw devices already out there in the mainstream that were providing 2.5 gigabit ethernet solutions at 1gb prices usb 3.2 gen 2 at ufc 3.2 gen 1 prices so it seems that synology although it rained things in to keep within that price box you know within line of its predecessors like the 918 the 916 these seem like very strange choices that may be will be readdressed and improved upon in a follow-up to this perhaps the es922 plus but i can't see that arriving till at least spring of next year so if those three barriers that i mentioned there the 1gb the nvme limitations and the usb limitations we've seen in current upgrades in dsm-7 don't sound like your bag you might not like this but apart from that they make up a very small percentage of reasons why this should be purchased it's a great box and the 920 is probably one of their best four base they've ever released and although it's regularly in sale they don't do that because there's something wrong with it they do it because it is it's their reebok classic it's their adidas black it is the constant recurrent and most popular nas i would say in their portfolio and they're not making it too shy a thing to be known about but this has been should you still buy this device in 2021 and particularly now we've got black friday sales prime day sales end of year sales and more so if you are interested in this again there'll be links in the description and the free advice section as well and again do bear in mind we cover most of the sound sections in this and we do generally find this on sale in multiple locations so if you're curious bring us a message but otherwise thank you so much for watching i hope you enjoyed it and i'll see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 15,414

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Id: vldV7VKCg6A

Length: 21min 43sec (1303 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021