Synology DS1621xs - Install all the things! (Plex, Pi-Hole, Windows, Docker)

these little nas devices specifically from synology have come so far in recent years that i'm getting closer to the point of where i start to question the idea of owning your own server unless you like to tinker of course owning your own server building it from scratch managing it and dealing with the higher power consumption is even worth it so in today's video i want to talk about the synology dia 1621 xs plus and how it is possibly bridging that gap between small nasas that usually can't really do too much to full-blown servers that we rely on for a multitude of different things and why you don't really necessarily need a big server anymore [Music] what's up youtube jason here with bite my bits and this is the synology ds 1621 xs okay it's not this is actually the previous model i think it was a 1618. synology sent this to me a long time because i had one need i wanted to back up my entire house everything in my house with the exception of like the primary media content but everything else including image backups of all of my computers and critical data on my servers you know bmb related content assets that i use all the time etc they sent me this device with the help of western digital providing six 14 terabyte hard drives in order to back everything up i've made videos before that in the past you can see those at the end screened links or the cards above and yes full disclosure synology did provide me with not only this old nas but the newer nas model that i'm talking about today and the expansion 5 bay dx517 unit as well so also more stuff but i'll get to that in a minute however they are not dictating the direction of this video and or manipulating my own opinions on said devices so with that said this is the old one i'm talking about the new one i can't talk about the new one now without bringing down a lot of active things that i have going on in the background right now i am uploading all the photos and videos from my phone it's analyzing it using their ai technology it's breaking down photos with you know people places and things like literally like like hey this is food and and this is bob it's kind of crazy but all this is going on right now and i got a lot of stuff to back up so i'm just kind of letting that run on top of that i have active backup solutions that are staggered throughout all of my households so bringing it down is just right now not an option but i will record some stock footage of it plugged in and blinking you see it like over there or something i had to have a prop though but this is the real synology ds1c plus it supports up to six standard three and a half inch hard drives comes stock with eight gigabytes of ram but can be expanded up to 32 gigabytes of ddr4 ecc memory it is scalable up to 16 drives with two dx517 units these units are connected via the esata ports on the back for the processor it's built in with an intel xeon d1527 four core eight thread 2.2 gigahertz processor that can ramp all the way up to 2.7 gigahertz inside it has the option to add two nvme cache ssds on the back it comes stock without any need of an expansion port although it does have a pci expansion slot available it comes stock with one 10 gigabit per second nick and two one gigabit per second nix you also get a total of three usb 3.0 ports one of which being on the front of the device now something to note here is that the 10 gigabit nic that comes pre-built in to the system is an rj45 no fiber no sf none of that it's rj45 so as long as you're using what is it the minimal is like cat 5e can do short distance 10 gig networking cat 6 is probably your best bet cat6a a little bit better because you know a i look for all of my devices to have rj45 because i have an rj45 10 gig network switch that has 25 24 ports and i like hooking anything and everything i can up to that switch but since we're on the subject of talking about some of the upgrades between what synology sent me first and the new synology this is the old one as you can see it has two 10 gig nicks here that utilize the pci expansion slot to gain that 10 gigabit per second connectivity so to me that was a huge upgrade from the old one to the new one just getting that slot built in and not having to waste your pci port so when i heard that i thought to myself hey i can add nvme caches that'd be cool oh never mind it has two of those built in already i do want to say that the nvme slots that you can access on the inside of the nas cannot be used to create an ssd volume you can only use these slots as cash slots the cash slots themselves if you use nvme cache with the synology nasa's it greatly improves performance but it's extremely hard to synthetically prove it when i got this drive i did a bunch of backup stuff i also started using this as my primary torrent downloading box right because i download a lot of ubuntu isos right and i share a lot of these isos because i want to play an active part of the ubuntu community and i want to share these you know free files for people to download hopefully at fast speeds right i try to move it to this and it kind of worked but it kind of didn't basically if you're familiar with torrenting there's a lot of file checks they make sure a a piece of a file is there if not it'll have to recheck it and if it messes up during rechecking it'll say it's corrupt or offline or whatever so you have to go in there you have to tell it to go again it's a big long thing so when i try to switch everything over to the old one i just had a bunch of issues with my torrent clients so i ended up having to either a just see just only a few of those ubuntu isos or b just use a hard drive that was already on my computer but when i switched over to the new nas and synology was kind enough to send me over two of these these things weren't didn't even pop up in the menu when i installed them the snv 3400 400 gigabytes nvme drives these things are amazing they make all of the difference in the world not right up front extremely hard to test synthetically but i did two tests actually when it comes to editing files on the nas server like using the files off the server importing into adobe premiere pro i tried that and initially i still had issues with premiere pro starting the playback of a video file so for example i would hit play and it would just it would kind of stutter a little bit and then it would start playing smoothly it's like it had to access it or something and then it would start going but with the ssd cache as long as these video files were kind of smaller files if i was going through a very specific file and constantly pulling from that constantly playing it scrubbing through it it over a short amount of time but over amount of time it got better became a usable experience without having a bunch of delays every time i hit play which is all well and good but the biggest thing for me is because i don't really always edit off of a synology nas the biggest thing for me is when i added the the synology cache into the new one i added all my hard drives i redirected all my download folders over to the nas because it's always seating it's always writing and it's kind of some of the isos are a little bit more popular than others those little bits of information are put on the nas as objects that are accessed frequently and i have noticed very rarely if at all maybe once or twice it would actually pop up an error and say that there was an issue with the file but my ssd cache is going full send i mean it's just always being used and that is the only thing that i'm running 100 like all during the day is those torrents so that was a huge improvement for me in this old one you had to either pick with your pci expansion slot a 10 gig nick or an nvme ssd however since then they've come out with a combo unit but that's not here or there because i don't have that right now with the newer one coming with a built-in it is a downside yes that you can't use these nvme drives as its own volume meaning you just can't write random data and you really don't have a ton of control on how the cache is handled but on the flip side of that synology just kind of handles it based off your usage automatically to boost the overall performance of your server which brings me to plex if you know anything about plex plex requires a lot of very small metadata items anything from post to arts metadata etc that it has to constantly read and write all the time it's primarily read but you get where i'm going so initially when you start accessing a newly installed plex media server with a ton of content there's going to be a lot of poster arts it's going to be a lot of metadata you're going to have to pull scroll through and probably suffer a little bit depending on your setup some slow speeds which by the way part of the synology let's deck out jason adventure of theirs they sent me two two terabyte enterprise level ssds that i ran in raid zero not that it mattered too much but i just wanted the most possible space i ran and run and raid 0 to get the most capacity that i use for things like virtual machines because the new one can handle virtual machines very easily the new one can handle docker very easily and having the option to add on ssds to install docker on and all these you know different apps that i'm running off of it i mean it's kind of nice but if you don't have something like that and you're running your primary plex media server off your main volume which is going to be possibly a raid 5 or a raid 6 configuration you will notice some slower speeds without beefing up your system with cash drives cash drives of which are these i already showed you those never mind by the way if we're talking about all of the ludicrous items synology sent me for this video let's also talk about 32 gigs of ram which i thought was i don't want to say dumb believe me i'm a man of excess i have 128 gigs of ram on my computer i don't know why i was okay with 64. but it could handle 128 so that's what i did i buy things that i don't necessarily need because i just like the idea of having more than i need it's weird welcome to america but i upgraded the 8 gigs that came with the unit to 32 gigs again thank you synology for sending me this hardware and i originally thought what the heck am i going to use 32 gigs of ram for in a nas i just don't know and i was wrong let's just go to the chase i was wrong during my testing i installed a vm that ran windows 10 that ran blue iris was able to get everything up and running i was able to assign i think nine or ten gigabytes worth of ram to this this is a four core multi-threading cpu so i was able to get everything up and running and get blue iris running in a virtual machine because i had that extra ram to spare if i didn't have that extra ram of spare i would have been just s out of luck side note though even though i did get it to run one of the things with this nas is that it does not have any sort of built-in gpu or hardware accelerated transcoding which means it drastically affects things like plex or blue iris which is kind of resource intensive especially if you don't have a gpu to offload a lot of that you know horsepower that it needs to encode and you know decode video so the 1621 doesn't offer any kind of hardware acceleration so it kind of sort of gets in my own opinion gets labeled more of a jack of all trades master none nas versus some other nasa's that synology offers that do have intel quick sync thus supporting hardware accelerated transcoding and is able to handle you know transcoding streams on plex much more efficiently since i am talking about that let's talk about some of the results that i got from plex originally when i tested this i'm gonna just go out and say it a little embarrassing i was only able to get five streams and an unreliable one 4k transcoded stream out of the 1621. now these are all transcoded streams back to the future being transcoded from 18 down to 2 megabits per second and the 4k being like 60 megs all the way down to 8 megs per second so i was struggling to get one 4k stream and i was struggling to get a sixth but i did have a reliable five transcoded streams out of the plex media server it wasn't until i realized that i used the synology nas for the surveillance station which pulls cameras and backs up 100 coverage of those cameras so it is always recording video all the time so there were a lot of things that were still running in the background that skewed those results once i fixed it i was able to get seven very reliable transcoded streams almost got eight but i'm going to go back to seven because those are reliable and i was easily able to get one 4k transcoded streams almost two but definitely just sticking with one now seven transcoded streams on a nas at this price point honestly is not that impressive there's other less powerful devices that handle hardware acceleration that can pump out way more streams than what this thing can do but this is pure cpu horsepower there's no hardware acceleration so this is going to be focused more on virtual machines i'm actually running docker and then pi hole started routing things through the pile that was kind of cool i think i'm going to take this one to work that way i can install pie hole on that easily and then finally have some better internet browsing experience at work on everything including my phone and i recently discovered something called memories that you can download in the synology app that allows you to take everything on your phone all your photos and videos and upload them directly to your nas which is kind of cool you can do this with this one as well but i didn't really discover that until i started digging into like hey you know my cpu is just kind of chilling at five percent most the time unless i'm really hitting it with plex so uh what am i going to do with this xeon processor to really realize the entire benefits that it offers and that's where multitasking comes into play you have to throw a lot at this nas in order to get the most out of it sure it's not going to get you 20 encoded streams on plex or anything like that but it'll transcode let's say five transcoded streams while encoding the surveillance station video also running docker and pi hole on the side backing up and using ai to identify certain aspects of your photos from your phone kind of weird but i'm letting it do its thing right now it like says hey who who's this person who's this person and it'll like tag it and find it and just organize it's kind of cool i'd show you more of my photos but i don't really want you to see all of my photos you know personal reasons one major thing that i want to actually explore using more i've kind of sort of set up but i have to go to work and some other places to really truly appreciate this feature it's the synology drive feature pretty much you can download a client and you can access you know the the files that you have on your synology nas from any computer that you have it connected to and it just allows you to easily drag and drop files between your home nas and your other let's say a work computer or a laptop or something you have out in the wild part of the whole synology dsm ecosystem is that whole ease of use ease of connectivity which is why a lot of people buy into small devices like this in fact if i had to give you like a top whatever reasons as to why to buy a synology it would always be about size synology nasa's are literally designed from the ground up just like most nasa's out there to use as little space as possible that means every single thing in here for the most part is as small as it can possibly get while offering as much as it can like hard drive storage that's not only synology synology qnap western digital pr series i mean all these nasa's they're designed from the ground up to be small also they're designed from the ground up to be the most power efficient meaning that they're only going to provide you with the power supply big enough and efficient for its needs it's not there to give you 1600 watts of power and you use 200 but on top of all that you have synology's own management system dsm it makes installing things simple yes it can get complicated you want to install docker you want to install pi hole you want to install things that may or may not be supported or not you know officially launched by synology or whatever you can complicate things but for the most part adding on to the feature set of a synology nas is extremely easy managing and connecting to it externally is extremely easy and that's what you buy into you buy into the ease of the ecosystem itself but more specifically the ds-1621xs plus well i mean it's a little pricey i'm not gonna lie you can check out the links in the description down below for updated pricing but for the most part it runs about sixteen hundred dollars which is not cheap for a nas what you get with that is a powerful xeon processor albeit a slightly old processor but a proven good processor nonetheless you have the option to upgrade it with memory ram ssds expansion units to your heart's desire and gain tons of space tons of usability and a nas that could do you know pretty much a little bit of everything but all at the same time it's easy to migrate from older synology units to newer synology units just in case you don't know what i'm talking about i did make a video about that cards above however that does not mean that the synology units at least this specific one doesn't come with a few i'm going to consider misses cons or just things that i wish would have been different the first things first is the usb copy feature there are another nas that has an easy copy button i think it was a really small one had two of them because this one doesn't have it here but being able to plug something into the front usb port hit the copy button and just automatically initializes copy and everything off of that usb drive over to the nas was super nice now you can set it up to automatically copy it as soon as you plug it in but even though i didn't really dump that much time into it i wasn't able to get it working personally at least i couldn't get it working for an sd card that i used for my main camera and since that would be the only reason why i would use it i just kind of sort of gave up on that another thing is expandability they still use the esata connection on the back there's a lot of other nas devices out there that use more advanced you know higher speed connections things like thunderbolt or usb type-c instead it's esata which is limited to six gigabits per second which means that if you get an expansion unit of like five drives you're you know possibly going to be slowing down your entire array because you have all five of those drives communicating through one single five or six gigabit per second connection another thing and this is a huge deal and something that i'm going to have to do to my new nas now because i did it to this one but i haven't done it to the new one yet and that is they don't include any rgb i don't know why they refuse it i don't i i've sent him like 342 emails to ask him to add rgb but they say no jason rgb stupid i disagree you may disagree you know this box right here might disagree but i think all the synology nasa should come stalk with rgb fight me but one last thing this is real talk that comes with this new synology nest it does not support shr now shr is synology hybrid raid i can still use raid 5 raid 6 raid 0 raid 1 etc but i cannot use their new hybrid technology which allows them to mix and match drives i have yet to have the option to play around with this and i really want to like if i got a 4 and 8 and a 6 and a 12 and like i want to be able to just throw what i have into a nas i want to be able to expand and add on later you know just just add to the pool of drives and just let it do its thing and whatever the fact that i don't have that option to play with which would be really nice i i mean it kind of lets me down a little bit i'm not going to lie the next nast i review from synology i would love to be able to play with that technology because i have four terabyte drives eight terabyte drives 10 terabyte drives 12 terabyte drives i like to just throw a mixed bag of drives into this thing and just see how well it works is there a big speed decrease when you're copying i mean i'd love to explore this new technology and see how reliable it is it's interesting to me so you know that's kind of a downside to this unit is that it doesn't support you know it's big it's beefy but it doesn't support some of the latest technology but before i close this video i do want to talk about the real things that i've noticed from this upgrade that i have truly appreciated yes the xeon processor is great and it adds a lot of flexibility when you want to use things like virtual machines i don't recommend using anything heavily extensive like you know blue iris for example the interface sluggy is all get out it's just not built to handle anything that's going to play video if you're just running things in the background like a database or something you know that's just going to be processing information vms in the synology nas is fantastic if you're running something that's going to require a graphic interface playing video or doing something like that you're just going to have a bad time i'm going to be right up front and say that so without any kind of hardware acceleration built in or quick sync or anything like that that's just something you have to deal with if you want to go down that route but surprisingly the biggest improvement is going to be the ssd caching i thought it was kind of weird right you can't control the cash you can't tell it what you want it to cash it's really even difficult to synthetically you know benchmark it the only thing you know is that the longer you use your nas the faster it seems to get and then you realize oh every time i load up plex it loads this metadata it's constantly pulling these photos and this information and now it knows it's hot data so it knows to load that data into its cache it knows that the torrents that i am seating some of them are way more popular than others so it automatically loads that data into the ssd cache making the iops way faster it allows it to read it without any kind of errors and it just it makes everything more reliable so at this point i'm just trying to find more things to do with the nas because i'm barely scratching the surface not all of the cpu is being fully realized in its capacity and i'm really kind of for suggestions if you guys have something that you run on your synology nas or things you might want me to test make sure to post those in the comments down below i even played with the idea of steam caching i was going to make a video about that but it's like all over youtube you have two options right you can either a set up like a docker or container and you can actually make steam caching part of one of those dockers and you can set it up to where if you download games from multiple computers within your network your nas will have a cache of all of those download files and it will automatically save it to where it's faster to just download from your nas than it is your internet option number two which i've seen a few of these videos on youtube is just installing steam files to your nas because if you're playing a game and you're playing a game a lot all of those common files they're going to be hosted on your cache drives those common files that are always pulled called hot data will be super responsive especially if you have 10 gig networking capabilities but that's it for today guys again any questions comments or concerns post them in the comments down below thank you for watching like and subscribe and have yourself a great day

Channel: Byte My Bits

Views: 31,869

Keywords: synology nas, synology nas setup, synology plex, ds1621xs+, ds1621, 6 bay, nas, network attached storage, ds1621xs+ review, ds1621xs+ plex, ds1621xs+ transcoding, 6 bay nas diskstation - synology, 6 bay nas, 6 bay hard drive enclosure, network attached storage setup, network attached storage for home

Id: Mkc6Yu1772w

Length: 25min 22sec (1522 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 19 2020