Synology DS1621+ NAS Drive Hardware Review

[Music] hello and welcome back and today i want to review the brand new synology ds1621 plus it's the latest six fader jar in their entire portfolio of distinction devices and serves as a middle ground between that of some of the four and five bay disk stations that we've seen and then more of the heavy business opening the door to enterprise stuff of the 8 bays to 12 base and higher this six bay solution is presented to you as a kind of mid gr mid-range solution they used to learn term smb small medium business but also a lot of home users will be interested in a device like this the growth of popularity in configurations such as raid 6 have allowed a number of users to be able to have huge amounts of data and still maintain two safety nets or worth of data that is two drives of redundancy now this system that only arrives with um raid configuration options and its own kind of handling of that but it also has synology's own synology hybrid raid or system already built in and i know a number of you have been very interested in a the synology platform overall in terms of all of the brands out there because of their software and i'm pleased to say that this device does support the entire range of synology software in dsm and again is it perfect no of course at this price point arriving at around 750 to 850 pounds depending on where you're buying in the world your tax system wherever you live and of course whether you're going to put ssd or hard drive media inside the price point this arrives back for a six space solution gives you a very robust you know well-made solution but it's not going to challenge the likes of the ds1621xs overall and some of those bigger units as well this is presented as a solution that gives you a lot of functionality but it's kind of mid-range solution that will give you support of all of those applications first and third party or at the same time if you're looking for high-end business you may have to spend a little bit more so what we're going to do today is we're going to unbox this bad boy we're going to take a good look at it see what it has and what it hasn't got we can talk a little bit about that cpu inside i know a number of you uh contacted me about ever since the reveal around about a month ago now and we're going to talk about who the target audience is and whether you should get this for your data so let's get it out of the box first before we wrap it on and yes this is going to be a long review guys um generally these hardware reviews do go on for quite a while but i will be filming my 5v5 video shortly after this which will be way more crazy than this so before we go any further i know you guys get bored about this i do like talking about the synology packaging and yes it's a big brown box and yes that is super dull but this is the kind of solution that generally will be purchased via an e-shop you know somewhere online and consequently a lot of brands don't bother doing anything with the external packaging lastly because by the time people see it they've kind of already spent the money but this device i've gotta you know give them credit and i've harped on about this before even though they've got that brown box design that would be very easy to just replicate across the range with sticking a label on it although there is a label all of the details on the outside of the box are distinctive to the unit they relate to this very device on top of that the lots of information about the warranty which is three years which can be spent extended to five years uh with the payment of a little ad on there at the beginning on top of that lots of information about uh the ports the connections and stuff like that but very little information about the inside synology is a brand that likes to keep things as simple as possible for the end user without too much tech speak thrown at them and kind of this does it for me in this regard so let's move that out there we've got our accessories and a very large piece of foam and again i do talk about this in other videos but please please please do bear in mind when you do buy a nas brand um when you receive your unit try to see just how much attention they've paid to the external packaging because these are devices that are quite susceptible i would say to shock damage in transit with or without the drive media inside and any damage that can happen through shock in transit you're not going to notice on day one but it's detrimental long term so again another tick from me the fact that they've gone the extra mile in terms of external packaging on this device so there's our accessory box we've got a quick start installation guide and again it does tell you how to set up the device for the first time as will i probably in a follow-up video to this but i've never really been overly keen on synology kind of adding this little paper detail in here because it doesn't really tell you anything and it does direct you you know pretty much all the time to go to the online platform which the online platform platform probably makes a lot more sense environmentally i've got to say you know it's updated regularly so it's the most recent information when you've got dsm 6.2 going into this 6.7 a dsm 7 it makes a lot of sense i'll grant you but there are some regions in the world where they get lovely paper manuals for these things and again earlier this year when i'm talking about some of the japanese versions of these devices and you get whole books detailing it and i know it seems silly but a lot of the time people want the information in paper form but again environmental either way it could you know there's arguments for both sides not very good arguments on my side um here we have two rj45 cables this is a cat5e this is a 1gb enabled nas and i know a number of you aren't overly keen on that and i've got to say i kind of hoped that this would be the device that would open the door into 2.5 gbe or higher but it does have four lan ports on the rear and it does have a pcie upgrade slot so it you know you have potential to upgrade and move forward and again two cables inside there we have keys because the drive media inside here are kept inside spring-loaded and lockable trays a couple of keys there and again when you lock these trays and we'll talk about a little more later in the video but if someone is going to try and steal a drive the locks on these systems are not hugely robust they're not metal operated they're plastic clipped and they can be broken so bear in mind that the locking mechanism on a device like this is more about preventing error and drive removal by accident than malicious intent because it won't really stand up to that and this screws there for two and a half inch media because three and a half inch media will go inside with the click and load trace i'll show you later on finally we've got a uk mains lead this device does have an internal psu so again no external power brick and i think you guys have heard me time and time again i quite like external power bricks they're way easier to replace and the psu is the second most frail part of any nas so me personally having an external power brick thereby limiting the amount of heat generated inside the device uh potential uh vibration and stuff like that inside and on top of that just the ease of replacing it in the event of a dead psu which we you know it's you know no one's fat no one's perfect are they but again it's internal psu and a number of you would be quite pleased about that so we've got okay evil's got our keys got the screws got our information there let's take a look at the nas itself pop it there it's a little more in the box but again more protection there inside and it's worth highlighting this device i know i've kind of half alluded to this on the price and maybe it's already appeared at the top of the screen but this again arrives at about 750 850 depending where you are in the world which is quite comparable to its predecessor i mean again the the device that came before this one which is still currently available is the ds1618 plus and the 1618 plus is a very very good nas it features an intel atamore and denverton depending you know wherever you want to refer to it cpu inside it and it is very very similar to this in a number of ways but it's arguable that there are two or three things inside this device that set them quite far apart and given their release schedule of um i think it was just shy of two and a half years between them i think there's been a lot of upgrades made inside this device but they will look very very similar and i do of course have a comparison video coming soon uh but i'll cut that nice and nice and short if you own the 16 18 plus you don't need to upgrade in my opinion if you don't and you're looking at them both get this one but watch the video if you want so remove the bag have a look inside there i'm going to take a good look at this six bay disk station now now a number of you may already be aware synology kind of has a very good design rhetoric there you go this bag doesn't want to play the game they've got a really good design rhetoric i think they're very aware of the power of their brand and they're very aware of what they designed here in the chassis these are systems that are going to be going in home or business environments and although they may not be regularly accessed or when they are accessed it won't be in a point-to-point means like this they do understand that it has to look a certain way and the majority of their systems have that very same disk station chassis like this one now this six bay the ds1621 plus arrives in a metal external chassis and it features all of the things that we've come to expect from synology on these devices such as that lovely side mounted cool in there based in the synology logo with a nice mesh panel inside for passive cooling on either side of the device the front of the device has got multiple leds for each of the individual network port and a couple of them there for system alerts and system access we bring that to the front we can take a look there we can see there that chassis is very very similar to that of its predecessor and the ds1621xs plus we've got a power button there at the top no lcd panel technology doesn't really go in with real-time lcd panels and i personally am a little sad about that because i quite like looking at a device and knowing its ip just a click of a button particularly when you have a multiple network a device such as this yes you can find out that information over the network connecting to it remotely via the switch or whatever but it's so much quicker to be able to just click click there it is on top of that when there's alerts lcd panels can often give you real-time information about the nature of an alert be it temperature based be it drive based your raid intrusion stuff like that so i quite like the idea of an lcd but i know synology goes very very very heavy in with network and internet only access so i never really expected that so there's our six bays there on the front it's worth highlighting that it doesn't need all six space to be fully populated you can run this on a single drive if you so choose uh there's one of the trays there and again it supports traditional raid configurations like raid 0 raid 1 red 5 raid 6 ray 10 route 50 raid 60 but it also supports synology hybrid raid and that's shr and shr2 for those that aren't aware synology hybrid raid gives you the ability to mix and match drives inside which you're almost certainly not going to do on day one on day one you're either going to fill it partially with drives or fully populate it with the same drive be it a seagate iron wolf or a wd red or a toshiba nas there are lots of drives out there but years down the line you might start running out of space years down the line you might have half populated this and you want to fill it with some more drives and in that time the cost of drives has gone down and the total general storage capabilities of hard drive media has gone up currently at 16 to 18 tbs two to three years down the line never knows what we're going to be looking at as a minimum for hard drives or ssd consequently the ability to be able to mix sata media within a system and still get the best output is definitely desirable and it's one of the main reasons that shr has been such a boon to synology them and drobo are two of the only brands i know in the nas sector that have fluid raid systems like this so each one of those bays as mentioned supports three and a half inch and two and a half inch media if you have a three and a half inch drive you can just pop them in you just put it inside there and the sides come off that tray if you have a close look you can see those screw holes there for two and a half inch media which means you can install traditional ssds inside here and again you can utilize them for raw storage or utilize a couple of them for caching or you can utilize different methods of multiple uh volumes on top of this system if you are using a 10 gbe setup you might be able to run a few ssds in a raid and some traditional hard drives and use 10 gbe to get a lot out of it but you will need to upgrade by this system to do that the trays themselves are spring-loaded these are plastic tray but i will say it's a nice high quality tray there but as mentioned earlier the locking mechanism is plastic based so again if you pull it hard enough it's going to unlock it is just for prevention of raid degradation if we remove each of those trays and again all of these led all these drives have leds based on them not just the top and those led lights can be adjusted up and down in terms of brightness if you're going to be in close proximity to the device if we remove all of those there we can take a close look inside this device now on the back there you can see that main pcb backplane that connects all six of the sata ports there's no cabling this is direct sata connector to the drive for each of them but you can also make out there on the side on the other side i should say let's see how well you can see that you see those two lit areas there they are the nvme ssd bays inside this device that's right as this is part of the newer generation of synologies in the plus series pretty much all the plus series devices arrive with nvme ssd caching bays inside that means if you utilize an nvme generally pcie generates three times four you are looking at three to four thousand megs per second throughput at least in terms of read right it's going to be a different story inside here for caching and those ssds provide tremendous performance and tremendous iops heights while lowering latency quite significantly of course they don't have the overall storage capabilities of traditional hard drives with their mechanical parts but platters and a lower price point the reason nvme ssd caching has become so popular is it allows users to leverage a couple of ssds against a huge array of hard drives and improve their performance and again that performance is only really felt in smaller file types or regularly access files such as in a shared drive synology themselves have their own range of ssds that this device supports and you can install a couple of those to cache the overall storage raid uh storage pool and the volumes they're in but it is worth highlighting you cannot utilize those nvme bays for raw storage technology have been very firm on this and i know it is an area of contention for a number of you that you cannot utilize those nvmes for storage there's lots of arguments for and against but we won't really go into them here because i've covered them in so much detail in other videos but it is just something you have to bear in mind so on the base on the device you can make out that usb 3 port there just at the bottom and again although it can be utilized for a number of usb accessories and there are three usb ports on this device i will highlight that that usb port is predominantly utilized for usb backups there's a dedicated usb tool built into this device for usb copy which allows you to run a myriad of different backup versions between an external drive and the nas and that's both directions you can run a one or two way backup between the two devices to regularly backup individual selected folders uh on the nas to a usb or vice versa or a sequential uh sorry a differential backup where you connect to the drive and it will automatically back up from a location you pre-designated but only back up the changes since the last backup and then you've got time managed backups or whole system backups where it will create a historical tree of backups over time and again that's the least desirable one of all of them i think it's the amount of space utilized but usb backups as old as they might sound to me are an important part of a multi-tiered backup strategy because you've got nasda cloud nas to nas and nasty usb with numerous tools from synology in their dsm platform supported on this device now on the base of this system we've got there that panel and inside there that covers the two memory slots inside this this supports sodium memory and that's ecc memory that we're going to go into a little bit more detail later on but it does have those two individual slots all on the base and we've got even more ventilation in the cis in the base of the device as well as ventilation there just on the lip there and in between each of the drives the passive cooling system of this device and along with the ones on the side is very very important because drives and indeed the cpu and memory and all the components inside this device with their own heatsinks the hotter they get the less they're going to perform you need to keep things as cool as possible and you've got active cooling fans on the rear you know drawing air over all of those components but you need that air to go somewhere you need that air to work with all of the passive cooling around the system and therefore maintain that great operational temperature inside now if we look at the rear of this device we can see those two rear fans there and again those rear fans can be set for automatic rotation so they can adjust with the internal temperatures of the device or they can be increased or decreased manually i personally recommend not really touching that setting but it is worth highlighting that if you lower the rpm of those fans it will lower the noise of the device just the tiniest pinch it's not the nev ahead sorry it's not the noisiest snazz but i will say that because this is a metal chassis and a 6 bay and he's going to generate a little bit of vibration noise and the more enterprise level drive you use probably above 8 or 10 tb they have far more players and dedicated 7200 rpm and generally you will find they will be noisier drives the system can't really do anything about that to click some words of the actuator and the arm inside the drive reading those platters like crazy but just bear that in mind so yes you can lower the fan noise but one i wouldn't advise it will allow you performance almost certainly and two the main noise doesn't come from the fans it comes from the drives vibrating throughout the system going back to that rear there we can see that power point there for the internal psu there is our two more usb 3 ports then again those are usb three five gigabits per second and i will say and remind you once again these cannot be used for direct access a number of you do still ask about connecting a nas via usb to your pc or mac system it's not going to work the relationship between the connected device on that usb port and the nas is very different with the nas acting as the host and the connected device acting as decline usb protocol on a ps pc or mac system works the other way around and that is why you cannot communicate with this nas with that usb port the direction of the language just isn't going to work for you but there are numerous peripherals that can be connected to a synology nas from wireless dongles with few of them being supported if i'm honest but also you have gotten some network adapters and you've got ups's and making non-network appliances such as printers and scanners and stuff making them network accessible you can even assign these usb ports to a virtual machine inside the device which i recommend next to this we have four 1gb lan ports all of them using copper rj451gbe and they can be link aggregated or port trunks to combine them that means that each of them will give you one gpu and you can connect to multiple uh different network ports on your switch and have a failover if you like but a number of users will typically use those for link aggregation to turn 100 megabytes per second or so to 200 megabytes per second or so to 300 to 400 so on and so forth but this pcie slot here on the end pcie gen 3 x 8 so again that means that you can upgrade this device we have 10 gbe dual 10 gbe because the cpu inside this device does support it on top of that you can add um an ssd cache card but it's worth highlighting that again you've already got two nvmes inside now very much now six bays is going to give you the kind of raw throughput in your storage pool that you're going to need that many nvme cache base but i do recommend looking into plus gigabit connections for this and there are a few other third-party cards from companies like intel and melanex that go up to 20 25 and 40 gbe and we're hoping to do a test on this but remember you have only got six hard drive bays inside this so even an enterprise level hard drive that promises 2 to 250 megabytes per second typical if you have even a decent raid 0 which i would not advise on this each added drive will only really give you 120 to megabytes per second increase with each drive so even enterprise level drives you're going to cap out at 1 000 megs anyway without ssd utilization so look into 10 gbe but i think that's about your option on this i'm going to go higher than that because i don't think this is a system that can give you that but there are ways and means one of which is thanks to those esata ports there are two expandable esata ports on this device that allow you to add five drives to each of them with the dx517 from synology which is about 350 to 400 quid um give or take and each one of those connected via esata six gigabit will allow you to bolt on another five to ten drives of storage to the existing six bays inside this device now in that scenario you might do very well to get an upgraded card beyond this but if you are already looking at that amount of storage on day one i don't advise down for a six by eight i think you should go bigger early doors um and that's really it for the ports and connections on this device um there are things i quite like about it in terms of physicality on the external i like the chassis i've always liked the chassis i kind of wish there was an lcd but that's just my problem maybe higher one gpu would have been nice but again where that sits in the price point and the fact that this device arriving again 750 850 and then you've got like the device behind me the 16 21 arriving around four to five hundred quid more and that's a 10 gb z on nas you've got to find its place in a portfolio so you kind of see where synology have gone for the price point on this and try to put as much as they can into that price point while still maintaining dsm to a very high level and still giving you hardware that can support dsm to the highest degree at that price point it can now that's pretty much it for the external on this let's talk a little bit about the internal hardware on this this device arrives with a great cpu inside there it's as it's an amd ryzen based cpu it's the v1500b it's a quad-core 2.2 gigahertz processor there and it supports ecc ddr4 memory now it arrives with four gig it can be upgraded all the way to 32 gig with a couple of official 16 gig sticks inside keyword there official synology aren't overly keen on third-party memory because they you know they find it difficult to support people on an unsupported configuration so again they do maintain that you should utilize their own memory inside this device i will say that cpu we haven't had a chance to fully test it yet i've only just got this here for the review this is fresh to my eyes as it is to yours and we will be doing software overview performance comparisons uh with that of its predecessor and of course the higher unit over there we will be doing 10 gbe tests as well which i'm quite looking forward to but i will say for that cpu that it is a far cry higher than what we saw in its predecessor in that atom deviton that and again as i mentioned in the reveal the cpu inside this device kind of beats it in a number of ways it has more threads it has more pcie lanes overall it has a higher clock speed it is can handle a more and better instructions overall with that cpu and that ryzen although it isn't technically like a fully fledged ryzen 357 favoring more of an embedded soc i will say it's still a great jump from that of the atom that came previous to c3538 so we will be finding out more about the capabilities of that cpu in a general access cent with things like plex surveillance 10 gbe and how it's it's compared to the other units around it in the family but for now gotta say i'm quite pleased with that cpu could it be improved of course the fact that it doesn't have embedded graphics is a real shame but i will give synology a little bit of the benefit of the doubt on that because this product in this family line and again i am talking like the eight base like the uh 1819 uh the 16 18 the 2419 in between a lot of the units that have celeron processors and then above it you have system with xeons there's been this area in the middle that's always had um atom and denverton based processors and they um don't have embedded graphics for the most part so the result is that i wouldn't have expected um an embedded gpu cpu on this anyway so as as much as i would have liked to have seen something a little bit more if you thought when i am d to some of the radium powered stuff it's still good to see the cpu and i do think it's a suitable upgrade over the atom while still maintaining that price point um now what do that cpu and that memory bring to the table in dsm well first and foremost it arrives with the support of the entire synology dsm um software catalogue we are talking the collaboration suite all of that stuff about an office drive chat calendar and all of those applications then you've got moments soon to be synology photos photo station video station music station then you've got some of the more business-led backup tools active backup suite hyper backup these tools that allow you to create a very very detailed backup strategy and then you've got support of synology c2 in a number of ways and 6.2 as a backup medium but then you've got hybrid share in dsm 7 coming soon that will allow you to get that cloud storage with the appearance of localized storage with intelligent caching in the background synology drive brings a lot of intelligent background caching and file pinning thanks to office 365 collaborations and hopefully in 2021 we will be seeing a lot of those features being integrated into osx because i know a number of mac users who use the synology client apps i'm still waiting for it you know they're still there in terms of third-party integration there is um i'm looking forward to testing plex on this but i think it will still outperform plaques on its predecessor but how far it beats the likes of the embedded celerons some of those pentiums and stuff we've seen before even the xeons that don't have gpu but raw power behind them it'll be interesting to see how this performs but i will say 1080p should be fine on this 4k though the jury's out at this time now in terms of synology apps other target software on this that people may be buying it for surveillance station you've got your two licenses supports up to 40 cameras yum yum it also arrives with support of the vm platform synology virtual machine manager which i know comes as very very good news to a number of you because this device has that very much a target this series this family from synology has always had virtualization and virtual machine deployment very much at the front lines and this device carries on in that vein now what we really need to wonder about this device now for the future is one is this cpu going to become the cornerstone of the majority of those family units the rs 8 21 or 22 whatever it calls itself uh the 12 bay half depth version synology makes a real conscious effort when it comes to introducing new hardware values into their product portfolio range that that cpu or that memory cpu chipset combination they eat as much out of it as they can for dsm and as the years go by they get more and more out of that hardware we've seen it with the atoms we've seen it with the celerons previous and now we're going to see it with this i hope so be interesting to see one how often we see this architecture appear on those other units below and above it and moreover what can technology do with this new architecture but i'm going to get things set up now for some software testing of this device here for youtube in terms of hardware i'm pleased with this device i would recommend it as mentioned at the top of the video if you are an existing 1618 plus user i'm not sure i would recommend a full upgrade to this right now if you are looking to upgrade i'd say go for something a little bit bigger or maybe this bad boy right here the 1621 xs if you are looking at a brand new six bay and you've got a budget of maybe a grand to 1500 quid including storage media you could do a lot worse than this i think this is very very good now for that and it definitely delivers a lot of what synology promised in dsm and at the same time not exactly kill the wallet but do you agree let me know if you enjoyed this video click like if you want to learn more click subscribe do visit the links in the description to nas compares to find out more about this device we've got the full written hardware review of this and more comparisons between this and other like price devices that have been released before or at the same time thank you for watching i hope you've enjoyed this video and i will see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 17,842

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Id: dvhirkHzFf0

Length: 30min 57sec (1857 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020