Synology DS1821+ NAS Hardware Review

[Music] hello and welcome back and today i want to do a hardware review of the brand new synology ds1821 plus that's right it's that time again synology have released a new 8-bay device it's not the first solution they've released this year but i do think it will be the last recorded now towards the closing stages of december 2020 this is the last solution that we're seeing them released for this year now obviously the 2020 2021 range has not completed so there still may be more to come from this brand in the early stages of next year but let's talk about this eight day let's talk about what we like let's talk about what we don't like and ultimately let's find out if this device deserves your data so what do we know about this device so far well it is the follow-up to the popular eight bay plus series from synology now they revisit this range every two to three years we've been covering this particular style and tier of synology solution all the way back since 2011 or 12. the 1811 the 1813 the 1815 the 1817 the 1819 and the 1821. if you noticed a pattern there of course you did eight bass from synology is one of their earliest successes and with the um release of this eight bass series originally arriving with intel predominantly as their processor of choice it has become this lovely little middle ground for smb users or small medium business as well as prosumers too to take advantage of a decent bit of hardware a decent bit of capacity and arriving at a price tag that for a business user wasn't the end of the world arriving with three years of manufacturer's warranty and a price tag that's about 800 850 without tax and including tax closer to a grand depending on where you are in the world and your tax codes of course um this device does seem a little you know more than double the price of maybe the likes of a 9 20 or 4 base series there so does this device justify that price tag now we did talk about the ds18 sorry the 1621 a couple of months ago when that was launched and i will highlight if you have watched that review prior to this you were going to hear a lot of things you've already heard because the 1621 and this are really identical if i had to show you what the 1621 looks like when looking at this it looks a bit like this like that it's just the same device but with two less bays now there are other things to bear in mind extra bays i mean a higher density of storage and therefore you can saturate the connections a great deal you know higher you can fill up that bandwidth and it does allow a lot of advantages in terms of overall capacity long term now the the cpu about mentioned they've upgraded to a ryzen here it is the v1500b uh a quad-core 2.2 gigahertz amd based processor it's ryzen embedded server grade processor there so it's very very efficient but it doesn't have embedded graphics inside that's not on board now i think it is a big big jump from that of the atom that came before but there's no avoiding than a number of us looking at synology's more recent 1621 xs which you know with a price tag knocking around at you know 15 1600 quid did arrive with a zeon quad core and did arrive with 10 gbe this doesn't have that this has got that uh ryzen based processor which still gets the job done tremendously well running the entire catalogue of synology applications as well as arriving with support within clubflex media server and other virtual machine based appliances that cpu does all of that on top of that it arrives with support of ecc ddr4 memory with four gig by default and it can be upgraded all the way to 32 gig of official synology ecc ddr4 memory now ecc or error code correction memory is memory that when data passes through it it checks before and after and if there are irregularities it heals itself it avoids things like bit rot and stuff like that but the grander scale of this device and its eight bays of storage is both a blessing and a curse in a number of ways let's get talk about the good stuff first so first and foremost those eight bays there mean if you populate this with just traditional hard drives you are going to get some great performance if you even if you go for the most basic you know wd reds and yes i'm talking conventional magnetic recording if you do populate this with standard class wd red drives you're going to saturate a 10g connection if you install the card inside easily on top of that there is the added benefit of m2 nvme caching if we remove some of these base and move those there you can see that this device embraces those nvme ssd caching base those two little slots there in the background there it means that you can install m2 nvme ssds inside this device you can bestow the high performance high iops and low latency that those nvmes provide but as a means of caching on the overall storage once you've got your big old raid set up which arguably are you know really really high performing as a raid it should be said that there's still mechanical hard drive they have those limitations so the m2 nvme caching and set in there will benefit frequently accessed files larger databases uh just got smaller files inside um you know kind of um small i o uh less random stuff on top of that you've got the benefits of shared drives if you are going to be utilizing this as kind of a migrated alternative from the likes of google drive dropbox that sort of thing and shared drive activities the ssd caching will be a huge benefit there but just you're not going to see that in multimedia really so bear that in mind now laboring on that subject of storage we can talk about the fact that this supports synology hybrid raid that's right this device does support the ability to have mixed drives um in your raid environment which on day one i can imagine a number of you going who cares there's no way i'm putting mixed drives inside that on day one are you mad normal raid if you were to install this device with half or even fully populate it would say 10 tb drives will not allow you later on when that capacity is filled to introduce new drives one by one normal raid configurations like raid 5 will only see every single drive as the smallest available drives so if you had 110 tb drive and you replaced all of the others with 20 tb drives a few years from now it will only see them all as 10 tb each synology hybrid rate is able to take advantage of available capacities in those larger drives as long as it can maintain one drive of the largest available capacity as redundancy it will then afterwards absorb and allow all of the extra capacity to be utilized now obviously on day one you're not going to take advantage of that but if you half populate it so you can install more drives later on which isn't unusual in an eight bay or you're someone that wants to fully populate this on day one and then a few years down the line slowly introduce new drives periodically as your budget allows shi's hugely beneficial now shr is something that a number of users buy synology products for it is arguable that they are disappointed that it's not available in higher excess models but synology themselves do point out that as good as shr is it doesn't have quite the same performance as traditional raid it may have that flexibility but just bear in mind that even in this device with this great little cpu inside the shr doesn't quite give you the same oomph as traditional raid now it is worth highlighting while we're talking about storage we can talk about the file system btrfs this does arrive with support of bt rfs as its file system of choice you can put ext4 but btrfs with faster shared folder recreation lower resource consumption with background snapshots and file self healing akin to what we talked about earlier on with erico correction memory these are all great benefits on this system and something that synology's range of applications really do take advantage of but going back to the things about storage that you may not like that may maybe a bit of a curse this is a metal chassis bear that in mind so if you are going to fully populate this device you should bear in mind that metal chassis if you use noisier hard drives will amplify things that little bit and if you are going to be in close proximity to this device you are going to pick up on that noise case in point as this is an 8 bay whether you are looking at wd red pro or ultra style drives or you're looking at seagate iron wolf iron wolf pro or exos drives know that pretty much all hard drive brands out there agree that in a server arrangement the minute you reach eight bays you should look at more enterprise grade hard drives ones that are designed for larger heat larger vibration and ultimately larger interaction in those reconfigurations as well with lots of activity at once consequently if you were to follow those guidelines this is a device that on day one you're going to populate with enterprise drives and that metal chassis will amplify that noise just that little bit so bear in mind if you are going to be in close proximity to an 8-bay like this you're going to hear it you can hear those clicks hums and words and the device will go into stamp it will go into idle it will only do those things when it's being accessed but there's no avoiding that factor and it's something about the metal chassis that people continuously year on year seem to forget but a metal chassis does have other advantages heat dissipation on this device is taken care of very very well and again with that lovely vented design there on those sides where synology have got that dust mesh filter there with air being able to pass over all of the storage bays inside there you can probably make it out the fans directly mounted behind the sata connections for each of those storage drives is also a massive plus two it maintains internal temperatures exceedingly well and the devices fans although adjustable automatically in case you know there is a bit of a hum or click or were of those drives and the hard drives annoying you it is recommended you leave them be because this system works at its best when the temperature is nice and low and fiddling with those fans in the settings which of course you can do may affect performance long term now we talked about the m2 nvme caching inside we've talked about those hard drive bays there and it is worth highlighting that these trays are plastic click and load they are spring-loaded as well and of course they have got a lockable item there on the end the accessory box i should mention as well does arrive with keys for those trays if we have a look at the accessories real quick we've got the keys there for locking each of the individual bays we've got two cat5e lan cables rj45 we'll touch a little bit more on land connectivity later on we've got screws for two and a half inch media because you may have noticed those trays have also got two and a half inch screw holes there but traditional hard drives go in really really easily you just pull the clips off either side put that there you grab your hard drive you put the drive inside click it sharp and there you go the trade goes real easy around the drive and there you go your hard drive is installed nice and easy you shouldn't really shake a drive like that and they slot straight in simple as and again this system does run with even a single hard drive inside what a waste but it's nice to know you have that flexibility that you can part populate on day one and then take advantage of those extra bays and of course synology hybrid raid to do more later on now also we've got a uk mains lead because this is an internal psu nas it's got 250 watt psu that isn't just supplying power to those hard drives and the fans that would be amazing overkill there's a couple of other bits and bobs inside this device worth talking about on the base we have got here a little panel here and that's got those two sodium ddr4 slots there the system arrives ddr4 ecc memory but it's worth highlighting you don't have to use ecc but they use ecc in this so if you're going to pair a memory module with this it's strongly recommended that you go for synology's own memory inside there and to stick with ecc memory inside also i didn't touch on it earlier on this device does have three years of warranty but it can also be extended up to five years if you you know you really care about warranties and no want the company to back you in case something goes wrong later on that is an option open to you now the system oh yeah there is also a usb port there on the bottom we'll talk a little bit more about usbs in a sec but let's have a look at the rear of this device now as you see there there is a lot of room being taken up by those fans those fans take up the lion's share of what's inside this device and again the rest of it wrapped around it is quite well presented for a device that is largely cooling there's a lot going on down here for example we've got those two ecc i'm sorry esata connections they're on either side and they allow you to connect the dx517 expansion device five bays and the dx517 and you can attach one here by esata six gig connection and another one over here via another connection on the other side now that is another area of contention for me on this device and again this is something once again not a day one concern this is a day 1000 or 2000 concern but adding the five bank expansion it has its own power supply and it's connected via esata but synology does have a 12 bank expansion there is the 12a dx1215 and that is a 12 by external sas connector that goes into here and but it i say into here it's not supported by this device you can't connect it to this now a number of us who like to scale up these devices it was one of the reasons people quite liked the vs2419 because then it was a 12 bay that you could add another 12 bays on this is an 8 bay that allows you to add 10 more drives on at 350 to 400 odd quid a pot for each of those expansions and they're jbod as well so that's quite a lot of money to connect this to and quite a lot of storage you're missing out on without being able to attach one or two 12 bays now that has been done before if you look at the old ds 3018xs that allowed you to attach two 12-bar expansions and i appreciate that a lot of the limitations of these connections come down to the pcie lanes of the processor and the chipset but it has been a long-term query that this device doesn't support those larger expansion devices and to have an 8-bay that can only be expanded by 10 drives only a fraction more than it has by default and you need to have two main power support um supplied boxes external to this device expandability on this has always seemed a bit fragmented as far as the eight bay range is concerned something that's a weird jump and maybe somebody should look into a mid-range expansion between the five and the twelve that is supported but case of rasa r the usb ports here on the base are worthy of discussion don't think you're going to look at those usb ports and go wow i can connect to via usb on my computer you can't don't think about that the usb ports on these devices are largely there for external storage devices for ups devices uninterrupted walls power supplies and of course for other third-party proprietary connected hardware peripherals or which there isn't a vast amount and with every variation of dsm that arrives there are fewer and fewer third-party usb peripheral supports you can assign those usbs in a virtual machine environment you can utilize them for external storage and again thanks to things like the usb copy application and that great hyper backup application there's lots of things you can do to improve your backup strategy over usbs with one and two-way sync in either direction but the usb connectivity does seem under-used in my opinion on the synology platform i think this is a great solution but usb from synology is something we've not really seen them really take advantage of and particularly given that their entire range uses traditional usb 3.2 gen one they name a convention of usb changes but ultimately five gigabits per second on usb a lot of devices have started embracing the newer 10 gig generation of usb particularly because storage drives and external nvmes and external ssds are becoming more affordable i'm surprised synology is still maintaining usb standard three here when maybe drop one or two of those usbs and start embracing the greater uh performing usb connections out there and including usb-c connections as well um another thing is those lan ports in again this is an area that's gonna some people are gonna love and i know some people don't the 1821 plus continues the utilization of one gbe standard gigabit ethernet and although there are four of them that support link aggregation and load balancing so again up to four 440 megs per second on a supported switch environment a lot of people are wondering at the end of 2020 a box that cost near enough a grand without the hard drives should arrive with greater than 1gb especially when they've produced a fantastic 10g solution region recently now in place of that we have the pcie upgrade slot now this pcie upgrade slot can be utilized for 10 gbe but it can also be used for greater density connections and greater quantities of connections and a lot of that is to do with the fact that it is pcie gen 3 x 8 that means up to 8 000 megs throughput via a connected card to the host device so again with the involvement of fiber channel being supported with the iscsi manager being changed to sand manager in uh dsm-7 the beta at the moment we can see that maybe synology is going to look at fibre channel card rather than looking at third-party hba cards and an 8-bay like this particularly with the ssd caching inside and particularly with the two 5-pound expansions could saturate those large bandwidth connections quite well and this is going to be a great entry point into a lot of those services particularly the fibre channel stuff where the six and the smaller boxes that may have pci upgradability they're not going to be able to give that amount of throughput it's also worth highlighting one of the ways in which this is an improvement over its predecessor and definitely if you are looking at comparing the two of them and you've seen the older gen the 1819 at a decent little price it's worth highlighting that this device has the nvmes inside the m2 nvme base i should say allowing you to concentrate on just network connectivity upgrades the older generation it made you choose between m2 nvme caching upgrades or 10 gbe or going for that combo card where it was all on the one this allows you to concentrate far more on the network upgrades inside this device now that pcie upgrade slot is one of the things i've always liked about this device and it almost in my opinion makes up for the 1gb default on this device maybe adding 10g by default would have upped the price significantly but i think a number of users would have quite liked that rather than having to purchase a separate 10g card synology would argue that it does mean users can leverage how much they're willing to spend and there is an argument on that but i'm not sure i'm convinced to be honest now other things about this device that i like of course dsm what a platform it's still by far the most intuitive the most user-friendly the most slick the most enterprise grade software out there in nas notwithstanding the collaboration applications of synology office drive chat mail calendar and more on top of that virtual machine support and technology virtual machine manager in conjunction especially with active backup suite that great multi-platform backup one portable access point which not only allows you to backup everything from physical machines to virtual machines with more platform things supported in dsm 7 and the likes of linux and promise support of mac but the ability for a number of those platforms to convert that backup image into a virtual machine in the interim of a failover using the synology virtual machine software is incredibly beneficial on top of that surveillance station is still by far the best surveillance software available on nas and this device does arrive with two camera licenses which i know a number of you are less keen on but it is still an incredible bit of software and that cpu performs so well in surveillance station we did some testing with four reeling cameras i'm not sure what that video is going to be live by the time this goes out but um the 1621 that came before this did so damn well in surveillance station with that cpu but the cpu barely leaving 40 utilization even with all of those cameras on the highest stream settings out there it did incredibly well scaling back let's not just give we give it all compliments there are things about this i wish were changed for example the m2 nvme caching bays come on synology let us use those for raw storage i get it in the lesser devices your 920s your 420s and such they you know they the pcie launch the pcie lanes are being bestowed towards those m2s i get it that they may not be you know full three times four each because of the cpu limitations but in the case of this device those m2s have got a lot more bandwidth to play with and i think a number of us would like to take advantage of the performance benefits of those uh m2 nvme buzz you can botch it i know a number of you have highlighted to me that you can head over and get um unofficial apps that are allowing to mod this system to use the m2 nvme base as raw storage i would argue that's not a great idea when it comes to reliable storage if you're going to edit on them and it's a throwaway job that doesn't have critical performance or critical importance then maybe do it but there's a reason i don't talk about that on the channel because i don't want people doing that for raw data and losing everything but the 1821 class is a good system in my opinion but it is not like it's not breathtaking it is the 1621 with two more bays and if you care more about storage or want a more balanced point between performance and storage then this is a much more desirable box than the 1621 but if you can go there if you can spread the wealth if you can get the 1621 test plus i think you will see better for your money and i think for those of you those users out there that are looking at upgrading to 10g on day one maybe you should look at that 1621 with its xeon processor and its ability to um have 10 gb on the start and still i have the ability to add 10 more drives and ultimately you're only losing out on two bays of storage and that to me is the big difference between them capacity but this has been a hardware review of the synology ds1821 plus we are doing a comparison against the older generation very shortly and if you are interested in learning more we go into way more detail about this device and that cpu in the link in the description so do check that out of course if you enjoyed the video click like if you want to learn more click subscribe and of course if you are interested in getting a hold of one of these bad boys and you want to learn whether it suits your system and you need your hand held a little bit visit the guysband.com the data storage experts they've been in the biz for nearly 30 years free pre and post sales tech support they will hold your hand every step along the way and they'll help you make sure you have a solution that suits your needs yet it's a plug but it doesn't mean it's not true i will see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 22,000

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Id: 5B77e-nRk3Q

Length: 23min 49sec (1429 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020