Synology DS1621xs+ NAS Hardware Review

[Music] hello and welcome back and today i want to talk about a really good nas and this is a device that i first talked about almost a year ago when it was first unveiled at synology's event over in taipei this is the brand new ds 1621 xs plus now it has changed since the first time we saw it last year and we've updated you with regards to specifications and what it can and do and what's changed and more throughout the whole life cycle of this thing's development but there are a lot of nazis that i've looked forward to as much as this to get unboxed this is going to be the first part of a series of videos where we're going to get real deep into this device and find out what it can and cannot do now to give you a bit of a pre-face before that and put it out there straight away this is going to be a very long video just like some of my other earlier technology launch videos is going to be a long review but there will be a 5v5 quick version of this video hopefully live in the next day or so but this is the long haul review of the hardware that we've got here today now the reason this is you know a nasa i've looked forward to for such a long time is simply because synology until the last two or three years a lot of their product portfolio didn't really seem to have that flow you looked all the stuff that they had and they had a lot of stuff at the low end a lot of twos and fours and then they had this big disparity in the middle they were filling with until at empowered five and eight bay devices and then there was this enormous jump into this 12-base thing the ds3617xs still one of my favorite synology announces they've ever made possibly till now so that disparity in that big gap in their portfolio left a lot of you when you were trying to buy an ass for the first time in a little bit of difficulty you were looking at the right plex nas or a business now for surveillance and vms and stuff like that and when you looked at the portfolio you were kind of right well i know i don't want the low twos and four bays and i really like that celeron stuff they got going on but it didn't really seem to excite you and it didn't have a lot of storage potential so you looked at the ones in the middle those atoms i mentioned and you went oh cool so you know five six eight blade devices and a 12 that came later and then he went oh that's really good but that in patel atom seems a bit ancient to me it's not really moving forward for me and it's not really doing it and then you were forced to look at that three six one seven which was like two to two two thousand to two thousand two three hundred quid and it was a twelve by you're a huge amount of storage and it had a zeon and four land and pci upgradability but it was a large amount of money to leverage towards something you've got a lot of future proofing but the number of you just didn't like the fact that you had to make this jump from about 12 1300 nikka to suddenly having to spend another grand to try to get good internal hardware without having to go to like some 12 bay or a rack mount and that's why this was such a big reveal last year when it was first unveiled this device known then as the s1620xs plus it was this six bay form that we see here it features that intel xeon cpu and that is a four core xeon that can you know 2.1 gigahertz per call it can be bursted up to 2.7 per core well over 9000 uh scoring on cpu benchmark that cpu as featured in the 3617 was a serious contender in terms of now cpus it has aged a tiny bit but in terms of nas development that's just allowed them to eat a lot more out of it in terms of the r d there in the background of those first party apps on top of that the device at that point when it was launched had four 2.5 gbe slots on the rear and a number of you like me were like cool synology's moving into this plus gigabit environment and then we didn't hear much of that and as this device started to get closer and closer to hopefully not being vaporware which a number of numbers are worrying about and actually becoming a physical item we heard that the 2.5 gpu ports had been dropped in favor of 10 gbe or 10 gig or 10 gb ethernet whatever you want to call it but long story short this arrives with 10gbe on board now this is a 6-bay synology nas with 10 gbe a xeon based processor ddr4 memory we'll talk about that a little bit more later on and it even has nvme ssd caching bays inside this thing is a beast and it doesn't make you have to buy a 12 bay storage device this time this time it's arriving at very similar you know ritual price point to that of the two and a bit years old ds301axs that's about 1300 nikka depending if you shop around you're probably going to go to 14 maybe even 1500 in different regions of the world so again that number is flexible i'll try to get something more accurate at the top of the screen there but that is a lovely mid point there between that you know one thousand one thousand two hundred spend and that ridiculous two thousand two hundred at the other end and this gives you those six bays so again six base is a lovely number in terms of raid 5 ratix and if you do take advantage of a number of uh synology's own kind of storage systems but do bear in mind this device does not arrive with support of synology's hybrid raid it's got btrfs going for it which is great uh for a lot of the background stuff lower impact uh snapshots there in the background the ability to create duplicate shared folders very very quickly and uh file self healing but bear in mind that uh btrfs it you know it's not as um proven i think to a number of people as ext4 so they have allowed that flexibility but a number of their key applications in their product portfolio arrive with primary support for btr um not ptr bt-rfs ones like small t-zone virtual machine manageable again shr is not on the table with this device that is not available they do not consider it high-end enterprise storage worthy to do with that in mind but as this is an xs series box and i know i've been banging on for four or five minutes now it is worth highlighting this does arrive with five years of manufacturers laundry which is always good and because it's got the excess stamp there it means you are getting a business class server and again you can run the entire dsm portfolio on this both dsm 6.2 and when dsm 7 comes it's going to be great so this could potentially be the most powerful and most interesting desktop um nas from them in their distinction series but you're right i've been banging on for long enough let's have a look at the thing so again the six bay this isn't the first six bay nas that synology have uh released they released the ds1618 uh which was an atom powered four bay uh sorry an atom four core six bay and they released the ds3018xs as well what i think is the predecessor to this device and again that one it had four lan ports it had pci upgradability but it had a pretty good cpu and i remember being very very keen on it at the time because it was still trying to find that great middle ground and they had a dual core xeon d inside which is still a good processor but it's still not a zeon um inside if we open it up we've got two lan cables there lovely stuff on top of that we've got screws for two and a half inch and three and a half inch media all inside there and we've got screws for the trays we've also got a uk mains lead but we don't have any kind of external psu this is an internal psu device you know my feelings on that i quite like external psus for the sake that they lower internal heats um and they allow you to replace them in the event of there being a problem because the psu is probably the second most round thing in any nas system so personally i quite like external psus but i know i'm probably in the minority uh we have lots of foam for the internals there and again i will go into more information about the unboxing a lot more photos and stuff in the nas compare link in the description we've got information on our first time setup of the device in the guide as mentioned there's five years of manufacturer's warranty with this device that out we can pop that there that's the total content of our box another big old bit of foam there and we take a good good look at the six base chassis uh and again i'll carry on a lift off this isn't the first six bay that synology have ever brought to market but i will say it is by far the most powerful it also arrives with support of raid f1 so it does open the door to this being utilized for flash station utilization as well which is quite good we flip that down and there we have it there is your ds1621 xs plus now this device we bring it nice and close to camera for you guys as you can see the chassis is very familiar to the majority of other six-based systems from synology it's got that metal chassis it's metal all the way around we've got the synology logo there and again that is ventilated there on the side so again that assists passive ventilation no there's a logo on either side if you look at the front of the device and bring that close to the camera we can see there the leds at the top for general system access and each of the individual network ports there are two 1gb port and a single 10 gb port all of them are copper so 10g base t and rj45 1g copper if we look at the rear of this device we can see those ports as well and again those ports we've got them along with expandability there by those esar supports with this device supporting two of the dx517 expansion chassis connected to either of those allowing you to add another 10 days of storage in this product's lifespan to the already available six bays and on the side there we've got usb ports that can be utilized by a small number of compatible devices and again you can use those usbs for adding to your you know multi-tiered backup strategy or there's some network interface improvements you can do there with wireless dongles but not many of those left and you can make non-network devices network supported if you will but there's not a huge number of devices supported i would rely on those pretty much predominantly for storage there's no kvm support on this also i didn't touch on the fact there is a pcie slot there on the end there and that pcie slot is pcie gen three times eight so again around eight thousand megabytes per second single lane access which means if you do install uh some of the cards that are available from synology right now so you've got 10g and dual port 10g cards up the brand new e10m um sorry e10 g20 t2 uh the new generation two port 10gb upgrade card there's also ssd cash cards in the m2d20 and that combo card the 20 e10 i card but of course this has already got 10 g that just now allows you to add another 10 gbe port if you choose or even double port if you go down that road um on the front left we remove the trays and surprisingly these are plastic trays and again screw holes for two and a half inch and three and a half inch drives especially if you're going to go down that flash station route drives are easy to install the sides of these clips do come straight off and then you install the drive inside and pop the clips either side into there and then again this supports sata drive this isn't a sas box so you've got six bays there the very latest um nas hard drives currently at 16 tb seagate iowa 16 tbs with 18 and 20 tb drives just around the corner uh thanks to hamr heat assisted magnetic recording um that's going to be part of their newer generation of drives again they will be supported on this but currently you are looking at six times 16 tb drives maximum although you can run with a single drive you can run multiple rates if you choose with their own storage pool and volumes they're in but a lot amount a lot of storage options and of course you can fill it up on day one or scale it gradually over time if you choose now we talked about that cpu earlier on that cpu is a lovely bit of kit and it has arrived on a few previous rackman and one desktop now system from synology in the past that cpu doesn't have graphical embedding on it it doesn't have any kind of dedicated graphics so it doesn't have a transcoding engine but it makes up for it with raw power and again the cpu benchmark score and there's a lot more information about that cpu both in the nas computer article in the description and when we go into more detail during the testing of this device both with the caching system and 10gbe access speeds using ultrastar drives now if we have a look inside we can see those saturdays let's try and get that light the right angle you can see those rear fans there are right over each of the sata connectors they're going to provide plenty of cooling across the drive media when this device is in operation if you look at the other side you can make out those two sodium slots there for your um sorry those aren't the sodium what am i saying i was reading i've stopped my head there if you look at the inside there that is our nvme ssd caching bays inside so they instead of putting the memory slots there you can see there right now those two nvme ssd caching base pcie gen three times four each of those bays slotting directly there into the side you don't even need a screwdriver as well they're clipped in at the top and again there'll be loads more information and then as compared uh video and that's compare article in the description and again those nvmes cannot be used for raw storage they are only for caching now why is that in the smaller generation units one could argue the cpus and the pci liens lanes open to them kind of limited the speeds and performance but i think generally in this case even though the cpu and the chipset does open the door to that functionality synology have just stopped at the door because they want to focus on those caching improvements and what ssd caching brings to the table in terms of improving internal speeds of your slower traditional hard drive array by leveraging against that with the higher iops and performance that are possible from ssds as a kind of hybrid storage and dsm-7 is really doubling down on caching it's one of the main reasons you are seeing nvme ssd based in pretty much all of the newer generation 20 plus series from synology and it looks like the 21 plus series is going to go that way as well um inside there's not much more than that the main controller board at the back leads and is connected to another controller on the inside and again we've got that pcie slot there uh the device arrives with eight gig of ddr4 memory and that's ecc sodium ddr4 memory at two thousand six hundred and sixty six megahertz uh technology themselves state that this device can support up to um uh 32 gigabytes of memory but what i will say is that cpu does go a bit higher that cpu has the potential to get up to 128 but of course that is across multiple 32 gig slots so i don't think officially you should exceed that really on a cpu like this but i'm sure a number of you will try hell i probably will try myself and let you guys know um the nvmes it will support i at the moment you can get them up to about 4 tb but synology does have their own range of ssds in the sm v 3400 series right now they're available at um uh 400 gig i think is a maximum capacity but i'm sure that will get higher over time and again if you go down the flash station route you can populate this with some of the sat 5200 uh synology ssds as well now if i'd say what i like about this device obviously the fact that it's 10 gigabit ethernet something synology have always been slightly arm's length at um i love that it's included inside this device i think it's a very good move from them trying to incorporate this they've always been a company that has seemingly prioritized internal performance um more than external but it's nice to see that 10 gbu slot and then of course taking advantage of that higher end pcie slot there on the side does open the door to more 10 gbu slots more nvmes for ssd caching inside and using larger internal drives because you will have to scale your ssd cache alongside both the memory you've got available and the hard drive storage and of course having a zeon uh in the middle of the sonography disk station range for me very very good indeed and the fact that it's ddr4 error code correction memory is always good five years of warranty it's great to write home about nvme ssd caching base but again the pcie being available with nvmes inside and 10gb on the outside means this has already got the base level internal and external top performance speeds covered the pcie just lets you leverage in either way or both even more that said it's not going to be for everyone even though it will be able to utilize the entire gamut of dsm's own platform to the very highest degree not having bt rfs i'm sorry um shr will annoy some of you synology's hybrid rate system of having a fluid rate system where you can incorporate larger or faster drives in the devices lifespan obviously not on day one but when you start running out of storage space and you want to add new drives you know three four five years down the line shr has always been good for that mixed matching and i know a number of you aren't going to be overly keen on the idea this doesn't include it also the fact that those nvmes srt cache only may nickel some of you particularly with an arc um uh architecture like this drop device has another one uh not only count on is the fact that they've gone for uh adding two dx five um one seven expansion so two five by expansions bolted on either side and not the 12 by expansion the dx1215 that expansion device is a 12 bay expansion so rather than having that one expansion available for 12 bays they're asking you to go for two five bay expansions each they're going to need their own power and their own dedicated slots which yes one could argue it's better to have five drives connected via one esata six gigabits per second connection but the 12 by uses proprietary um external sas and it gets around that and gives you 12 good so that's not really much of a counter argument and finally some of you might not be overly keen uh the similarity between this and the 12 bay device and the number of you although you bought the 12 by the 361 7xs because of the cpu and the memory combination a number of you bought it because it had both that and 12 bays of storage and when you look at this some of you might not think six space is enough storage me personally that's only a negative i give out there for you guys because me personally i like this happy medium of raw internal power internal performance measures external performance measures and six bays in a modern age of the size of the latest hard drives these days six bays is good and even in a raid six you're still gonna have four bays that you can fill with four six eight ten 16 tv drives that's a lot to write home about but otherwise i really like the ds 1621 xs plus we'll be doing more with this i'm just going to grab myself a screwdriver and in this video taking it apart let's take a good look inside let's get the top of this chassis off and again it's secured all the way around the edge by multiple screws you have to remove from the rear it'll be good to see how clean the inside of this device actually is generally you find with devices like this that cooling is going to be paramount especially with xeon based processors which generate quite a lot of heat because they're quite powerful when we were talking about the sa 3400 recently it was a 12 core cpu there it had quite the most phenomenal um heat dissipation via a heatsink that was embedded onto it so generally you find very few synology nozzles will feature a active cooling fan and i don't think this device will i think we are going to be looking at a nas that is going to be using a heatsink on top of that and it's a completely metal chassis um although some of this smell is going to be used for heat dissipation so it does help with some of that temperature cooling it is worth highlighting that this is still a metal nas it's going to have six bays down the front and the two fans and if you start putting enterprise grade hard drives in this it's going to be noisier than a plastic chassis not because of the nas itself but because the drives you utilize will click were hum particularly enterprise one 7200 rpm sort of sizes with multiple platters to have that dense storage that vibration is going to feed through the device it tries to dampen it as much as it can but metal chassis with enterprise drives they're always going to be noisier and if you are going to utilize this for 10 gbe point to point like you're a video or photo editor that's connected to this directly from 10 gbe or using a 10g adapter you're going to be in quite quite close proximity so bear that in mind we remove the metal chassis there you can see the filters there that we talked about earlier on with the logo move that over there we can take a good look at this device internally so on that side we can see that pcie slot there and again that pcie pcie gen three times eight so you can get some decent length ones inside there those card again there are melonex and intel supported cards but technology are quite you know keen on people utilizing their own pcie cards they don't limit the compatibility on those cards inside this device by any means but they do like people using supported configurations so they can you know provide support when it's needed on configurations that they're clued up on and again i know a number of you don't agree with that there's an argument on both sides um on the other side we've got a big old psu there now this psu here is what keeps things you know moving internally you've got a very demanding powerful cpu inside there you've got six bays nvme and even 10gbe is going to generate or going to consume quite a lot of power whilst in operation and we're going to go for a complete strip down on this device so we can take a good look at the internal cpu and more and of course on the base of the device we've got a little slot there that gives us lots um a nice metal covered by where our two sodium ddr4 ecc memory slots live but this has been my hardware review of the dx1 ds1621xs plus i have looked forward to this device it has not disappointed me thus far and i am looking forward to seeing when we get this on the test bench after we dismantled it and put it back together again whether it will live up to its quite heavy going reputation i hope you guys have enjoyed this do visit the last computer link in the description and visit the guides at span.com if you want to get hold of your nas 25 years in the business and know what they're doing click like if you've enjoyed the video click subscribe to learn more and i will see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

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Id: sy9OyHLeyHs

Length: 24min 2sec (1442 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020