Synology DS1821+ NAS - Should You Buy It

[Music] hello and welcome back and today it is another five by five today i want to talk about the brand new sonology ds 1821 plus it's a new eight bay releasing right at the end of 2020 and today i want to talk about five things i love about the device and five things i am less keen on if you've not seen these videos before and you don't know the formula let's be honest it's not exactly brain science but a quick disclaimer straight off the bat i don't have the unit physically here in the office i have got a unit it is being reviewed but unfortunately because of our shr testing i can't disconnect it right now and the problem is rather than let you guys have to wait longer for this video it will make a lot more sense to get it out there before i get the hardware review and stuff done first so let's go ahead with this 5x5 also another quick little disclaimer if you did watch our 1621 5x5 video pretty much with the exception of one all of the 5x5 is the same so if you've seen that video maybe skip this one because you kind of know the results already but without further ado let's get on it the reason number one that i quite like this device is of course that ryzen processor synology making the jump away from the atom series of devices let's face it it's about bloody time they did that they took way too long to do that and when they finally made the jump they did the jump properly moving over to that quad core v1500b processor that cpu gets the job done it's a much higher score there on cpu benchmark and in test from plex media server to virtualization to the synology collaboration suite of applications and dsm performance in general inside and outside of caching it has to be said that that processor does get the job done and in the 1821 when everyone heard about that six bay that came with that processor a number of you were just like well six is nice but i want eight so the 1821 gives us that rising and more storage to play with reason number two that you might want to get the 1821 and one of the reasons i like it is of course synology hybrid raid the fluid rate system that i am still to this day astounded that no one has got behind right now the only company i've seen approach fluid raid is drobo and drovo is a brand that i don't know if you've noticed they've kind of gone a bit quiet recently um now uh synology hybrid raid gives you the ability to mix and match drives and in an eight bay that is especially attractive so whether you fully populate a device partially populate a device and then want to add drives like europe it's fully populated exchange bigger drives later on the ability to modify the amount of storage in your raid configuration with bigger drives and allow the raid to take advantage of more and larger drives is advantageous traditional raid will see larger drives only as the smallest drive so if you had an eight bay filled with one one terabyte drive and seven 10 tbs which will be weird if you did that a traditional raid would only see eight tb would only see every drive as one tb shr always allows one drives worth of redundancy equivalent to the largest drive so if you filled the rest of that device with 10 tbs you'd still have 10 tb of redundancy but it would still then be able to take advantage of the larger drives shr being on this 8b i know you're thinking well it's a synology nas they've all got that it really isn't the case a lot of the largest synology nasties do not have shr on board because synology feel that shr because of that fluidity of raid the performance is slightly lower than traditional raid also synology feel that larger and more enterprise arrays are generally purchased fully populated and when they do replace drives they replace all the drives at once now that's just not a guess that's synology themselves quoting why shi is not in all of their devices but it's good that it is featured here on the eight bay device reason number three that you might like the 1821 as much as i do is because of nvme ssd caching now whether it's dsm 6.2 or 7 on the way where the hell is 7 ssd caching is something that is now pretty much everywhere in network attached storage we've reached a point where improving the network interfaces on the back end there and yes i will touch on that later um is improving a lot more affordably so that the internal performance of most of these nas systems needs to be improved as well and you can't just rely on cpus anymore you need to give that storage a good area a good sandbox buffering area to play with and the memory in the cpu to do its thing an nvme ssd cache on this device allows you to not only have the eight bays of storage but two nvmes installed inside and therefore present their improved iops read write performance and low latency to benefit the larger storage hard drive array very useful indeed and definitely a feature i'm glad is on this eight bay because it was sorely missed in the predecessor for those that took advantage of upgraded knicks or even link aggregation on the lowest level reason number four and i almost said it there that you might like the 1821 plus is that pcie slot it has not only an upgradeable pcie slot but synology went in big with a pcie gen 3 times 8 slot up to 8 000 megabytes per second throughput between a connected card and a whole system now on that lane it is a fantastic upgrade a lot and that allows you to not only add 10 g which is nice of course a thousand legs but you can add a two port 10g 2000 megs that's lovely or you can add a 20 25 40 gbe network interface ports with qsfp cards that could allow two 40 gig ports on this device and still have full transmission bear in mind of course you've only got eight by so saturating that bandwidth is going to be nightmarishly difficult but that upgradeable card there allows a lot of opportunities down the line and hopefully one day one day synology will let people take advantage of faster access storage cars with inbuilt nvme slots on them in that lane that could really take advantage of that 8 000 megabytes megabytes per second throughput there on that pcie lane reason number five that you're probably going to like the 1829 plus and this is more about people that like synology is brand generally and have decided to invest in their hardware where it sits in the portfolio is very neat i've said this every few years or whenever i release an 8b plus series nas it sits really really well between you've got the two day the four bay the five bay the six bay the eight bait the twelve bay etc etc in the desktop form of at least now because of that they've restructured their parameters in the plus series where you've actually got a really nice equilibrium between each of the tiers of their storage portfolio the consequence is that the price difference between each tier is actually quite relative to the size not just the number of bays but the storage capabilities and the hardware that surround them at each tier and this eight bay is a lovely price point between all of them but you can just go that is my entry point there very very interesting it gives you the features you need for business certainly and that cpu and hardware combination inside and upgrade ability with everything from ecc memory inside to the upgradability of that pcie card and your storage means that the price when you're getting in that portfolio it's very well placed and that's why the um eight bay series from synology is always typically done well and i think we'll do better than ever now because it's fleshed out the portfolio on either side a great deal better but it's worth highlighting it's not all good of course there are things about the 1821 plus that i do not like and i'm sure a number of you would agree reason number one that you might not like the 1821 and it's not the one for you let's get it out there it's one gigabit ethernet it's one gbe nas box in 2020 come on guys and this is an 8 by as well so you cannot give people the excuse about the saturation point of those 18 are those eight storage bays this is an eight bay device it's cot eight storage bays one gbe at this price point i think that's a little bit less keen on 2.5 gbe and we've got dedicated 10 gbe devices now with the 1621 xs knocking around about 16 to 1800 quid if you shop around that's got 10g on board that's got five years of warranty and a z on a bunch of that stuff and at that point that's when things go a bit crazy on the portfolio scale because this being the 1gb nas at that price you know near enough a grand without the storage that's a big ask at 1gb on eight bay device and that's definitely one of the things i don't like about this device and i really thought this gen would be when synology would turn things around or 1gb in their disk station plus series devices reason number two you might not like this device as much and again this is far more general to the whole range and it's one that i say a lot so i'm sorry to keep saying it to you guys but those nvme is only being used for caching not a fan not a fan i get it and some of the lower tier celeron devices where the pci lanes that are presented to the nvme base you've probably only got you know pcie two times four or you can get away with maybe something a little better but generally on those celeron devices because of the pcie lanes of those cpus and the chipset the result is they can't get the most out of those nvmes on the smaller tiers and therefore giving them as raw storage synology might not want to be the brand that gives pcie nvme m2 base and then saying oh but it's throttled because of the cpu lanes i get that but on this system on this horizon there's enough to play with to be able to take advantage of those nvme bays for storage maybe not pcie three times four or greater but definitely close enough to justify their existence as a storage pool as a volume and therefore as raw storage capabilities and i know a number of you will say what's the point if it's only one gbe there's still a lot you can do to with internal performance on those nvmes vms plex media server and high performance databases would take advantage of the nvme performance internally so it's a real shame that synology of blankets sticking to this rule the nvme based uh u2 nvme are only being utilized for caching now they've got a flash station series that takes advantage of sata ssds and they have sata and sas based devices that can take advantage of sas sata i'm sorry sas 2.5 inch ssds for storage so i don't think it's a giant leap of imagination and before anyone says in the comments there's github patches that allow you to use the synology nvme base that is true and i did want to make a video about it a while ago but when we did the testing it just wasn't stable enough and i didn't want to recommend that so until synology sign off on an official way of doing it if they do i'm going to stick by this nvme for only been for cashing that sucks guys so reason number three that you might not want to buy the 1821 right now the end of 2020 or during 2021 is the expandability now on the plus side this eight bay can have another five bays battered onto each side via the connection of ee sata that's esata six gigabits per second connectivity knows a five bay jbod devices the dx517 so you've got eight bays of storage chuck and another five chuckling another five you've got eighteen potential bays of storage and you can spread your storage across them and with the benefits of shr it gets even better but there is a 12 by expansion out there known as the dx one two one five uh ds one two uh one dx one two one seven um these expansion devices in rack mounted desktop form a lot of them use an external sas type connector that is obviously what you're going to need when you've got that large amount of storage there i will double check that external connection as well but the external connection there is greater than that six gigabits per second of e sata now i get it you would use two e sata connections on this device to add five and five because you wouldn't go greater than that for two five bay devices but given this eight bay is for business let's be honest we've moved out of home you know on the upper echelons of prosumer and into business and enterprise or maybe soul working photographers and stuff like that or video editors this is where two five-day expansions with own dedicated mains power on them it's nowhere near as desirable as adding a 12-bay expansion device with a single power connection there to this 8-bay now it's not impossible we've seen other devices take advantage of that large storage arrangement with atom chipsets like the 2419 plus it's not impossible but it is certainly something they've kept in within their portfolio and it's a real shame that there isn't more flexibility in that expansion other than having the two five days yes it's gradual i know a number of you will say an eight bay that you can add five and add five is more gradual upgrade i get that but a twelve bay that you can gradually add drives to as you need them i would argue is way way more gradual because it allows a spectrum of going eight bays nine ten eleven twelve seven four and fifteen all the way up and i think going up to twenty drives long term makes more sense why it's not possible in this who knows maybe they can tell us but that's my third reason reason number four you might not buy the 1821 right now it's because it doesn't have a gpu equipped cpu i'd like that cpu i really do but a cpu inside this 8-bay not having um any kind of embedded graphics and there are an embedded graphics version of this um ryzen soc processor the fact that it doesn't have embedded graphics i think is a little short term and i get why in a way some of you have done that because of their portfolio they've left embedded graphics uh the lower end tiers there that have got your 920s your 720s your solaron systems they even dabbled with pentiums back in the 916. i get that and at business they look at file processing more than anything and hand file handling so that's why you get your xeons and indeed the ryzen soc but for me not having an embedded graphic cpu on this eight by given the number of people despite business concerns that will utilize this device for home media for plex media server for editing of visual files i think a non-embedded um cp uh graphically embedded cpu is a little bit short term and particularly if you're going to take advantage of 10gbe video editing you know and editing photos and stuff like that and thumbnail generation and stuff like that shadow files that sort of thing i think a graphic embedded cpu would be far more useful in those concerns and it's one of the limitations i think one of the few limitations i would say of that um cost effective server grade cpu inside this device reason number five and the final one why you might buy the 1821 uh you might not want to buy the 1821 is it is that metal chassis once you reach the eight bay tier you are dealing with enterprise again i'm going to stop saying that word but you are dealing with business level stuff and synology dame that this is a device where you need um this kind of metal chassis now whether that is for heat dissipation or it's a design and image thing i'm not sure but both the the six bays and the eight bays that are all in metal i've had them running and running them here in the studio and when i've had the four bays in plastic chassis and this one in the metal the metal ones just made more noise and it's unavoidable and whether you are using non enterprise grade hard drives you know like wd gold or pro series um i wolfs or reds even if you don't use noisy drives this system generally has more of a harm and clicks and worse and vibration than that of the smaller plastic chassis now i get it some people prefer metal chassis once again because of the more rugged nature they feel they've got more rugged and secure product and of course the heat dissipation that comes from it this is a three-year warranty device like the majority of the plus series so i don't think we can talk about rugged and stuff like that and maybe because of the eight bays the heat generated you know heat dissipation is something we should consider so i know a number of you are thinking yeah metal go all the way that's not a minus for me and i get that but i do know there's a large contingent of people that will buy an eight bay like this chucking the 10g card chucking the dual port 10g something like that and want to edit on this device on the fly and they won't be going through a switch they will be directly connecting to this device and those users are going to be able to hear it you're going to be in relative close proximity unless you run a 20 meter cat cable and you users will come away from this a little bit disappointed by that metal chassis but this has been my five v five five reasons to buy the ds1821 plus and five reasons not to let me know you guys think and do check out the article in the description click like if you enjoyed the video click subscribe to learn more and i will see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

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Id: 9kOmXQpzQLs

Length: 17min 55sec (1075 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020