Synology 4-Bay NAS Guide - 2021

[Music] hello and welcome back and yes at the title card suggests today we are going to talk about the four bay nas systems from synology i'm going to talk through the latest generation of four bays that you can currently buy right now in summer 2021 and hopefully tell you guys what is the best four bay for you but before we go any further let's be honest about this if you are looking at barna forbay nas from synology although they have several options currently available at the moment four technically five i would say let's be completely straight this is the best one this is the salon gds 920 plus and although they have a lot of different nas solutions and although this solution is about a year old now at the time of recording i've got to say this is still the best forebay out there this video is not a video entitled the best solology for bay nas because that would be this one this is about going through all of the four bays and comparing them all what are their pros what are their cons and hopefully help you decide which one's best for your data and your budget but there's always going to be the overhanging subject that this one the 920 plus is just going to be overwhelmingly the best at everything and there is a reason why it's the most expensive it's the reason why it features on so many of my videos so do bear that in mind but let's talk about four bay nurse solutions a number of people again when you make that jump from the cloud service providers your subscription by paid ones you're moving towards your own private server one that you want to access remotely or via the internet you want to use it for media you want to use it for business you want to use it for surveillance you want to use it for backups and it's with that in mind that it's worth highlighting that this solution along with all the other synology forbays out there provide a huge amount of software and services for you straight off the bat and before we talk about what makes them different we should talk about what makes them the same so it's worth highlighting that all of the four bases that we're going to talk about today all of them include the following firstly they all arrive with support of dsm 6.2 and the sm-7 so you can pick and choose which one you want to go for there on top of that they all arrive with support of synology's hybrid raid system salons your hybrid raid or shr allows you to mix and match the hard drives inside these systems so although you wouldn't do that on day one maybe you'll get a four bay like this and pop two hard drives in at the beginning and then after that you add more drives later on down the line you might find you want to install bigger hard drives and traditional raid configurations will not allow you to mix and match bigger drives it'll only see every drive as the smallest available drive but in shr you're able to mix and match those drives a few years down the line if you put bigger drives in you're able to take advantage of those larger storage drives as you add more and more drives and again all of the four bays arrive with support of that on top of that there is support of the majority of synology's own applications so whether that's using uh photo stuff there particularly if you're going to be taking advantage of ai based photo recognition all of them arrive with ai photo recognition and thing recognition luckily there was enough horsepower and even the lowest level four-way from synology in order to take advantage of synology photos or moments in the other version dsm 6.2 also surveillance with all of these systems arriving with two camera licenses you can take advantage of that surveillance platform and all of them they start with the least amount of memory i believe but one gigabyte of memory which is still lots to be getting on with for a bunch of cameras in your home or business whether you're using the music apps the photo apps or synology video station all of these systems do provide a great base level of multimedia support throughout your home over dlna or remotely with handling of both 1080p and 4k across all four systems but different extent and certainly when it comes to transcoding or using third-party apps like plex media server if you're going to take advantage of synology's own sweet the collaboration suite of application i'm pleased to confirm that pretty much all of those applications rated from synology office so as you drive synology chat mail plus all of these applications run on this system along with as mentioned the audio and the video apps and of course download station as well there's even support of that great multi kind of access and multi backup tool hyper backup on all four of these systems to allow you to create a very bespoke and very evolved backup strategy for your system not just all of the devices that backing up to the nas but the idea that the nas is backing up onto other systems but that's pretty much what all four of these systems have in common even though they're different pricing and in some cases use different chassis they all arrive with support of all of the things mentioned but you didn't come here to know what they've got in common you wanted to know what their diff what makes them different and whether you should spend extra or save a bit of buns on the other one so let's get this off the table get the graphics on the screen and have a look at all four of the current generation of four bay nasa's and compare them so on the table here we have all four four bay nazis and of course the least expensive there at the end of the s420j it was first revealed to us at the end of 2019 this system arrives about 299 yes i'm going to be talking in dollars just because the majority of people who watch these videos are based in the u.s i thought it just made it easier for you guys but currency conversions will obviously improve that for you but 299 dollars for the j series there at the end next up we have the ds4 one eight this is a nas that's more than three years old this is uh knocking around for about 330 to 350 shopping around next up you've got a much newer i think just over a year the ds420 plus that knocks around for about 430 to 450 and finally at the end of the table there is the ds 920 plus again generally you look around and you find it for about 550 to 550 but it is a system that tends to be on sale during prime day and black friday and seasonal sales so that price point isn't always as concrete as you might think now despite the fact they do or at least three of them look incredibly similar i will highlight that the internal architecture actually does differ in a number of ways first and foremost we can talk about the cpu the cpu you know let's be pretty cool spray displayed it is the brains of the outfit and two of these systems arrive with real tech based processors these arrive with support of the rtd 1296 a quad core 1.4 gigahertz arm based processor 64 bit and it also arrives with solder ddr4 memory you can't upgrade them but the j at the end there has got one digital memory and the four one eight has got two gig of memory it's quite strange the two systems released so far apart have got the same um cpu inside but that extra memory does make all of the difference it allows it to take advantage um of btrfs something that the other two end of the table have definitely got under the hood but that cpu which arrives with support of 4k transcoding less so in the j because that memory doesn't end up being quite a bottleneck um that cpu is still able to take advantage of a number of those newer applications thanks to it being a 64-bit processor but they're always going to pal in comparison to this end of the table the ds420 arrives with a dual core intel celeron processor and that is the j4025 which is a dual core 2.0 gigahertz processor that can be burst when needed after 2.9 gigahertz that's a big old jump there when you need it inside also arrives with ddr4 remembering it's 2 gig of ddr4 memory that can be upgraded up to six gig of memory which is not a lovely little high number they're a bit weird i'll be honest six gig doesn't sit well with me as a memory upgrade but it does take advantage of that ddr4 266 megahertz memory now if you want to go you know double down a little bit and it should be noted if you looked at the price point they are still on screen that it's still quite similar in price to the 920 the 920 arrives with the same family series processor but it's the j4125 processor which is a quad core 2.0 gigahertz cpu that can be burst up to 2.7 so a little bit of a dip there in terms of the boost but it does arrive with 4 gig of ddr4 memory that can be upgraded to eight gig so again great base level resources and a greater expandability of those resources now why are these cpus better it's not just that there are higher frequency over the 1.4 gigahertz featured on the arm-based processors there but it is the fact they are x 86 64-bit processors they have embedded graphics so they have an area of the processor that is dedicated to graphical manipulation whether it's enjoying 1080p or 4k media whether you're going to be using it for virtualization for surveillance ultimately anything graphical or more complex visual data these devices are going to use less resources doing it some of those tasks can be done by the arm or arm-based nazis but by no means to the same degree and i think that makes a huge impact with people that takes advantage of these nazis and want to use them for multimedia reasons and don't realize that even relatively low level multimedia requests i can use a lot of system resources so it all comes down to whether you're a single or multiple user environment whether you should go for those ones there but the hardware architecture on these isn't just better for those reasons there's also of course the fact that the 920 at the end has nvme ssd upgrade slots you can add super fast ssds inside that system to bolster and improve the internal operation speed particularly on more common accessed files you will have to you know let it run for a while and burn in before you can really see the advantages of caching but it is most certainly there and not only is it on the most expensive unit but it's also available on the 420 the ds420 kinda serves as an alternative to the old play series and its price point although closer to that of the 920 there it does still manage to arrive with a lot of the features that we've seen in previous generations of play and the high end nine drive supported four bay series there now all of them arrived with support of the current generation of 18 tb hard drives that go up to 20 tb if you like but i would highlight that the expandability of the 911 at the end there should be highlighted the 920 it can be expanded by another five bays of storage using the dx517 and i would say that although it's not quite as good as using an eight bain as it's still quite useful to have that scalability in your products lifespan and if you are buying an as and you're saving a little bit now thinking you can have more money to spend later on and you didn't really want to buy an 8-bay or a 12-bay that expandability on the 920 is going to be of use too many people out there and it's something i think it's a real shame that we don't see expansions being supported on more nas it feels like something synology do to upsell their devices rather than something that these other devices aren't able to do but again without having the tech specs in front of me or knowing about the pci lien of pcie lanes makes it very hard for me to make a conclusive um statement on that but i will say that i think it's a bit of a dip that expandability isn't more widely available across their ranges um now when it comes to network connectivity when these devices are attached in your network environment all of them take advantage of one gigabit ethernet which is a real shame because i think one gbe has kind of overstayed it's welcome in network service particularly now that the hard drives and ssds in these systems promote the performance threshold in the several hundreds of megabytes per second and once you factor in a raid configuration one gpe is just a little bit underwhelming overall and although all of them use 1gbe i will highlight that almost all of them have got two lan ports the only one that doesn't is that j series at the end the ds420j has got a single 1gbe lan port there on the rear it's also got two usb 3 ports which you can use for expandable storage a very small number of supported peripherals particularly in dsm-7 and you can attach ups and stuff like that to it but expandability as mentioned is only available in the e sata connected device there so it's something that you physically can't attach an expansion even to test it out but the other three devices your 418 your 420 and 920 all of these have got two lan ports on the rear two times one gbe connectivity thereby effectively doubling your potential network bandwidth between your nas and a supported switch or a lag connected pc environment but i will say that even at that point with these devices having i hate seagulls um if all of these devices have got four bays of storage they can massively saturate two 1gb e ports and i think it's a real shame that synology in their most recent releases didn't embrace something greater than 1gbe i'm not surprised but i am a little disappointed by it um they've all got connected usb 3 ports there there's no usb 2 here present whatsoever they're all usb 3. so again if you do use external devices you do have usb 3. and i say usb 3. it's usb 3.2 gen1 gotta love that new naming convention but in terms of hardware architecture it must be becoming abundantly clear to you that the more powerful systems here on the end you know they do earn a lot of the extra bumps the the price tag for it with the nvme ssd upgrades lots the better performing cpu there inside the uh twice the gigabit lan connectivity of a number of systems there's a lot going for these and of course you've also got synology features like synology hybrid raid there but let's talk about the software because we've already talked about what all four of these software these devices can do what you can do on any one of these four systems but we've not really touched on that much what these things can do in of themselves something that the j series or the more affordable real technologies hit a wall really early doors so the j series everything i described at the beginning of the video that's basically it it can't do much more than that i made sure to just kind of highlight that that level of everything i said that all four of these can do that's what the 420 j can do and as we graduate through this range things change rapidly so the 418 although it's a lot older thanks to that larger amount of memory as mentioned it has support of bt rfs but it's more than that but thanks to the extra memory it can do more at any given time run some certain processes run more cameras it can just do more and although its price tag is higher than the 420 j it's not that much higher and i actually prefer the design of the chassis as well of that 418 overall it may be an older system but it's still got the two years of warranty that most of these systems have on the end has got three years that can be extended but still if you're looking at the 420 j don't bother just pay the extra and get the 418 or at least wait until whatever follows up before the 418 comes to market now once we look at the other end of the table that's where we see some real software performance not only in terms of versatility and responsiveness and just the general services offered by the device but seriously the things that these systems can run are so system unique we mentioned the ssd caching there of course these two devices support ssd caching in a big big big way thanks to those nvme upgrade slots and that performance extra translates exceptionally well into certain applications that can only run on these the biggest example of course is virtualization with synology's virtual machine manager vmm run obviously better on the 920 with its better baseline hardware and 4 core cpu early doors it allows virtual machine utilization although better on the 920 to still be available on both of the 64-bit x86 based processors so you've got virtual machines you've got docker and containers you've got 4k transcoding and 1080p transcoding in plex and natively using swazi's video station app gotta love that app on top of that you've got the entire access to their collaboration suite we mentioned earlier but better um multi-user and account uh support not once so more simultaneous downloads more shared folders more iscsi targets and lands and more um shared drives basically just more activity and more users even more mail accounts and more chat accounts in a lot of those kind of business applications for your staff and contacts to communicate and then on top of the support of hyper backup on all of these systems that multi-tiered backup solution these two have also got support of active backup sweep that great one portal multi-platform backup tool that can be utilized not only with other bare metal pc and desktop systems but can also be linked to some of those cloud software as a service sas platforms like office 365 and google workspace all of that could be integrated and backed up together on these systems and now we're starting to see hybrid share arriving in dsm 7 that also means that this these two systems here do a greater job of linking all of your different storage systems whether they're going to be used for backup synchronization or failover these two systems bring a whole lot to the party in terms of capabilities and more important than anything not only because they have those apps that these two don't but also it's the idea they use less resources why while they're doing them and ultimately it means you can get more done over time remember right the way back in the video we talked about the price difference between these that 420 was knocking around for about 299 dollars which again was only about to 250 difference at the other end of the table and i can tell you right now if you're gonna use your nas one two three times a week at least if you're backing up all your devices if you're watching a plex media server or knocking some cameras around spend the extra money and head to this end of the table because although all four of these systems are very capable you get what you pay for and the 920 and i'm sounding like a broken record is still one of the best four bays that you've ever put out there i should also highlight before someone corrects me in the comments i'm well aware there's a four bay i've not mentioned the dva three two two a gpu powered 1600 pound four bay i didn't include it in this because that's just way out there that's so enterprise it's unreal but if you are looking at the most powerful technical four by from synology maybe check that one out otherwise thank you so much for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 8,918

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Id: Uw1SDa24bPQ

Length: 19min 29sec (1169 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 18 2021