Synology DS1621+ vs DS1621xs+ NAS Comparison

[Music] hello and welcome back and today we want to talk about two six base synologies released like a month apart today we're going to be looking at the brand new ds-1621 plus and how it compares against the ds-1621 xs plus released barely a month apart from one another both of these are 2020 nas systems part of their 2020 2021 portfolio from synology both disk stations and they're both using the very familiar six bay chassis of the disk station series in fact these are probably only about the third or fourth six bay that synology have ever released they brought six base to the market back in mid 2018 because a lot of people like to take advantage of raid six raid 6 being a two disc parity level with hard drives reaching capacities these days of frankly astounding proportions i mean we're talking about 18 tb and 20 tv drives right now the result is that between these two systems a six bay fully populated in a raid 6 still gives you four bays of frankly enormous storage and today i want to help you guys decide whether you should be buying the 1621 plus or the xs version of it but a quick disclaimer straight off the bat you've probably picked up already all manner of background noise behind me i can't do anything about it there is building work happening right here connected to me and try as i might i'm trying to limit as much sound as possible leaking through and playing with the edit but there's just not a huge amount i can do so i apologize if throughout the course of this video you can hear those guys outside going at it hammer and tongs against that wall so i will try my hardest but regarding these two nas devices they are incredibly similar so similar in fact in the intro to this video even while talking to you i thought they were the other way around they both use exactly the same six base chassis they've both got metal chassis they both got 250 watt psus they both support the same sata drive sizes they both got m2 nvme cache bays inside they both featuring 1gbe although there's a little surprise extra on the xs and they've both got pcie upgradability as well they're very very similar boxes even on a software level with both of them arriving with a great amount of support from disk station manager or dsm currently in 6.2 at the time of this recording with seven on the way at the end of the year they both arrive with access to the collaboration suite of absolutely chat replacing whatsapp and skype sology office to replace microsoft 360 office 365 and uh google docs they've got synology drive that great one portal synchronization and backups tool that lets you pin and stream file data in the same way you can with onedrive and office 365 as well as a ui and a um multi-uh drive data opening system much as you would find in google drive or dropbox what i'm saying is these two are very similar and that goes even further into surveillance station both supporting a huge number of cameras with two licenses on day one both of them arrive with support virtual machine use with multiple vms being utilized and deployed thanks to society's virtual machine manager they both arrive with that great synology cms multi-system overview as well as active backup suite which is that enterprise grade very very advanced backup and overseeing synchronization tool that allows you to backup vm environments with hyper-v and vmware it allows you to backup physical installations on pc and desktop and mobile applications um clients all of these systems and applications from synology and dsm run really really well on these devices and with both of them being six base and both of them arriving with the same support of drives and both of them being expandable up to a total of 16 hard drives in a total array thanks to connecting two dx1 517 expansion chassis over isata they are incredibly similar but you didn't come here to find out what was the same about them you came here to know what was different because let's face it with a price difference of nearly 100 between them it's mental the 1621 plus arrives about 800 to 850 pounds including the vat but not for the hard drives or ssd media the ds1621xs plus is about 1500 quid about 15 maybe to 1500 pounds there there is an enormous disparity between them for two devices that seemingly on the face of it give you the same thing right so let's find out how they justify that price difference because let's face it if this is going to cost more unsurprisingly it is the better of the two when it comes to having either one of these this gets more done it has more resources to do it and therefore it can get more done overall in the short and the long term it also arrives with a greater degree of support in a number of ways and it's internal and in many cases external architecture make it superior as well but is it enough different so first thing is that cpu now it's already flashed on screen i'm sure but the pair of them arrived with very very different cpus time was that the architecture between the xs and the plus series was pretty much the same over the years and things have mixed up quite a great deal now the xs arrives with a xeon based processor inside there it's the same xeon that we've talked about before and it's a quad core 2.2 gigahertz xeon based processor although it doesn't have embedded graphics it can be burst up to 2.7 gigahertz per core and that is an a an x86 64-bit processor inside there with support of ddr4 memory and 8 gig by default and that's ddr4 error code correction memory or ecc built into it as well that can be upgraded over two slots up to 32 gig of memory which is going to be music to the ears of surveillance and vm users indeed now i've already mentioned the m2 nvme slots inside both of which are pcie gen 3x4 but ultimately means that you can utilize lovely ssds inside this device and leverage the high performance high i opt in low latency of those ssds those two against the six hard drives inside which are arguably going to be lower priced and larger capacity but always slower due to their mechanical nature and a great caching system that sometimes you brought to the table which is even more evolved than ever in dsm 6.2 and 7 on the way and in the likes of synology drive and general access use in conjunction with that ddr4 ecc memory and that cpu make the 1621 quite a powerhouse of a machine however that cpu has been around the synology devices for quite a while it's not the newest xeon out there by any regard it's still a very very good cpu but it is not one of the newest now in the case of the ds1621 plus however the cpu inside is newer but nowhere near as powerful in the grand scheme of things it is uh the ryzen v 1500b it is a quad-core cpu just like the other one it's a 2.2 gigahertz cpu just like the other one and it's non-gpu embedded just like the other one it doesn't have the turbo built in but it does have a ryzen embedded architecture so although it's not um comparable classically against ryzen 3 5 or 7 it's still a server grade equivalent that's designed to be on 24 7 unlike those other cpus this is designed to be an efficient cpu a cpu that's designed to use a lesser amount of power to get the jobs done compared to those higher-end horizons again not as powerful as the xeon and doesn't rate us highly on cpu benchmark in fact if you look at cpu benchmark that xeon rate's quite high but not perfectly high and in fact neither one of them has a direct listing on cpu benchmark only comparable results which again still put it with the xeon in favor it does arrive with ddr4 ecc memory which can be upgraded to 32 just like the other one but it only arrives with four gig by default so that's half the memory and a cpu that isn't quite as punchy that said you can upgrade the cpu or the memory on this device quite easily with lots of official upgrades out there they're not the cheapest though with a four gig memory module retailing for about 80 quid knocking around and that's quite a large chunk of change for just four gig of memory now apart from that between these two cpus there isn't a huge amount of difference with regard to their internal hardware they both use very similar internal controllers but the real next big difference between them comes down to the rear of the devices now if we turn them around you can see probably immediately one of the biggest differences between them which i'm sure a number of you already know about prior to watching this video and it's to do with these connections here they've both got usb 3 ports that can be utilized for ups's can be used for external storage can be used for usb backups can be used by a few kind of office devices like scanners and printers and stuff like that i've even done some experimentation with that great um great um driver the bbq over and github has been putting together for users to take advantage of 5gbe adapters on these devices and there's a video in coming for that one but it has to be said the big big difference are these connections on the 1621 you have got four one gpu ports that means each one of those in one gigabit ethernet architecture can give you around 100 megabytes the capping out of 108 109 in some cases they can be link aggregated to give you four to around 440 megabytes per second on a perfect environment although it is worth highlighting so you at six drives you really are hitting the saturation point in a number of ways especially in a raid six now linking those together to get that 4gbe is something that you can only take advantage of with a managed switch that is a switch that allows you to bond ports together and take advantage of link aggregation or something known as port trunking there are alternatives in the form of load balancing which allows lanes to be used kind of concurrently but it's not quite the same and you won't get those big speeds it's more about sharing and partitioning jobs one after the other now in the 1621 xs we still have two 1gb ports so again one 200 megabytes per second there good for you but then you've got a 10 gigabit ethernet port and this is where it's at because that gives you a megabytes per second inside there 10 gbe is something that synology up until recently has really kept to arm's length and has only now started rolling it into a few other devices it's still only in the excess and i still think it'd be a long time before the likes of a standard plus series will get 10 gbe but a zeon powered 10 gbe nas that has m2 nvme cache in size inside is definitely something to write home about now again this is a 6 by nash and you're just at the tipping point there where 10 gbe is at its maximum if you fully populate this with ssds slightly different story you're gonna get in excess of a thousand quite easily but we even with enterprise grade 7200 rpm drives with 256 megabytes of cash if you did put six drives inside here raid 5 ratix environment you're just gonna exceed a thousand megs so the 10 gbe on here is just enough now you could take advantage of the envy uh the pcie slot here and introduce a two port card this will support that but then you are gonna have to move away from traditional hard drives because you're just not gonna fill and saturate two lines of 10 gbe on this one support is just enough to be perfectly frank on this now is the 10 gb e port justifying a lot of that price difference and i would argue no because synology have their own range you know that the back plane have already removed for another video but synology have their own range of 10 gbe cards one and two poor out there now this card retails i think for about 120 130 quid if you shop around it is quite a decent little pcie upgrade as well doesn't utilize any of the lesser grade that might bottleneck the card i think it might be pcie gen 3 on that card double check that but again i tested it before it does have a pcie though there is more than enough to completely fill that 10 gb e port there now that means that this system with another 120 quid let's be fair you can add 10 gbe with another spend of around 80 quid you've got another 4 gig of memory on there so at the moment you've spent about 200 quid more here to get it to have 10 gbe and that eight gig of memory that this has as well so at the moment you're sitting around a grand grand 50 for this so there's still 500 pounds give or take difference between them where is that other 500 pounds well i'd say shared across two things one it would be that cpu which is still a zeon which is still a great business cpu with each one of those cores able to support a vm comfortably where i would be less inclined to believe though each core of that ryzen could support a vm and still leave one core on each for the system operating the dsm if you leave it behind another area of difference between them is the warranty with the 1621 plus arriving with three years of manufacturers warranty whereas the xs plus here has five years of warranty now you can get an expanded an extendable memory of another two years on this with the ew 202 or 201 one of those two i do and i do apologize that is where the price difference between these two devices lies it is that cpu and that memory oh sorry the warranty difference nearly anything you buy in any tech industry that has a longer warranty will always affect the price it's just one of those things that happens and these two are no exception apart from that the build quality is near enough identical between them both in terms of physicality the amount of noise generated the 250 watt psus and that pcie upgrade slot but that does i it does open the door to a couple of things that are worth discussing now neither one of these two systems are suitable for the e10 m20 upgrade card both of them will allow you to install that card however you'll only be able to take advantage of that one 10 gbe slot on the top because even though it has the two nvme bays inside this card both of these two already arrive with nvme ssd base inside the system doesn't allow you to take advantage of those extra slots you can't use them for raw storage you can't use them for you know additional caching they're not visible the result being that these two systems that pcie slot is pretty much dedicated to upgrading your network interface and that means synology's own um two port cards um taking advantage of intel or millinux dual port cards these systems are designed with that pcie slot to add two more slots one if you're lucky but be realistic two now as i mentioned earlier on you're not really gonna be at saturate either one of these two devices beyond about 12 maybe 1300 megs in a six bay in a raid five or raid six so even then that card is largely superfluous so what you're really asking here is this system you're going to use that for that slot for either a 1 port or a 2 port 10 gpu card so what are you going to do to this because if you add a two port card to this system that's already got 110 gbe you're not going to use it you're not going to need 30 and um 30 gbe link aggregated or separate connected to this device you're just not maybe as a failover but that's about it and even then you're still going to get away with 20. now whether that factors into your buying decision or the idea that you want to upgrade on day one oh sorry have that upgrade available on day one or schedule it out down the line when your budget allows that's a different conversation but i will highlight one last very important difference between these two devices that never ceases to amaze me every time i have to say in a video and that is b sorry s h r synology hybrid raid the xs does not have it this has support of jbod just a bunch of drives raid 0 raid 1 raid 5 raid 6 rating and red 50 and raid 60 and then the weird raids this has support of all of those plus synology hybrid raid now for those who aren't already aware synology hybrid radar shr is the ability to introduce multiple drives inside and you can mix the drives normal raid configurations such as you know raid 5 and raid 6 as mentioned only allow you to use the same drive capacity so if you filled this device with 10 tv drives so you've got 60 tb there in a raid 5 or 86 you'd have 50 or so you'd have either 50 or 40 terabytes of space now if you tried a few years down the line to introduce larger drives say 20 or 30 tb god forbid down the line if you try to introduce those drives years from now to replace the other ones that are in there as they start filling up the system will only see those drives as the smallest available drive ie 10 tb and you will end up having to replace the entire system with larger drives and offset the data elsewhere and bring it back whereas on an shr enabled nas you can introduce larger drives and after you've introduced one because the first one will still count as the largest parity drive but after that if you introduce those larger drives like the 22b we mentioned this the shr can absorb all the extra storage and will give you the storage benefits it won't just class every new introduced drive has the smallest available drive in the array and shr has been frankly one of the most popular features uh for synology buyers out there when i talk about these things year on year is what people want the most it was one of the biggest complaints uh for the reviews and the comparisons that we had about the xs plus it's a great nas but a lack of shr just annoys people in fact so much so that i've reached up to outer synology several times on this and their response has always been the same s hr as great and as fluid and as flexible as it is doesn't give you the same top tier performance as traditional raid it's just shy of it five to ten percent here or there whether it's a raid 5 and a raid 6 versus an shr and shr2 a one or two disparity but as good as shr is for flexibility most people that buy enterprise level solutions re install all the drives on day one people will go for the plus series and the lower tiers in the two and the four base they generally well if not half populate then they gradually populate whereas enterprise users will fill the drives on day one and replace all the drives on rotation every few years whether it's reasons of durability which are more applicable to ssds or simply because they've run out of warranty and as they're covered for the three or five year warranty is pro and standard drives can be they then replace them out with a new series of drives each time and in that scenario shr has no real intrinsic value and then the more important variable is performance and that's where excess lives but choosing between these two is not easy because there's a huge price difference between them and the money you save going for the 1621 go towards some serious terabytes and go towards some serious upgrades of memory of network interface cards can go into those nvme ssds there's lots of ways in which that budget can still be spread into this device in the long term but do know that this at its best with all the bells and whistles and all the cylinders flying will still not quite hit the performance of this more so in third-party environments but also within technology's own dsm with both of them providing great performance but this is still going to win the race this isn't a torso here this is going to win regardless this on it today is still not as good as this day-to-day and that should be the big takeaway performance versus flexibility that's the big takeaway thank you so much for watching i hope you guys have enjoyed this video do let me know if you have because it does help me understand what you guys like on this channel click subscribe if you want to learn more and visit the links in the description to nas compares for the full guides and comparisons on either one of these nazis and of course the links to spam.com 25 years and the beers the nas experts to get hold of your nas today i will see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

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Id: fZitd-i190c

Length: 22min 42sec (1362 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020