Synology DS1821+ Review - Virtualization, Backup, & Security

your bits are rotting away you don't even know it well synology's here to help with that eight three and a half inch drives in a box plus a box of cables let's take a look [Music] you losing all your data it is the darkest timeline after all rocking an ocz agility three some of the first two and a half inch sega drives this 120 gig say to three i mean this is pretty old uh these have all died darn near all of them so if you've got one of these you're on borrowed time what if i told you you could buy a box plug it into your network set it up one time basically forget about it and every time you're not using your computer it's being backed up it's being backed up locally so it's backing up at wire speed or as fast as your wireless network possibly is so if it's like 802.11 ac and you know like 400 megabit it's gonna back up at 400 megabit that's pretty much what you get with the synology nas this is not the first synology nas that i've taken a look at we've actually done a lot of videos surveillance station you can set one of these up with ip cameras diy there's no subscription costs or anything like that these things will run two cameras for free after that you've got to pay for a license but that's some really good stuff you can combine that with something like the ingenious power over ethernet switches have a really killer surveillance system with cameras but it can also back up all of your documents you can also run virtual machines we looked at running virtual machines and doing some really cool cloud connected stuff you can run that next cloud and some other things you gotta be a little bit careful when you put that on the internet because you want to do a little bit of application filtering you want to do a little bit of firewalling you want to do a little bit of work to make sure that your applications are going to update seamlessly because if you don't eventually um you're not going to update an application it's going to have a security issue and then everybody's you know going to be mining bitcoin on your on your nas and most of the ones that i've looked at before are really big but i really can't stress enough that these appliances are great for sort of set it and forget it backups and they're also available in very small configurations you can have one that's just two hard drives a very basic mirror where you've got two mechanical drives that mirror one another those don't really have a lot of cpu horsepower for fancy things like you know running a home lab or virtual machines or anything like that this one this is the ds-1821 plus so the way that synology does their model numbers you should know that that means it's got eight three and a half inch bays first you've got your synology quick installation guide because when you pick up one of these you're also gonna have to pick up your own hard drives or your own ssds or some combination and not just any ssd will do you're going to want a nas grade ssd at least i mean we did the other video on that where we tested one of these to failure using a software program called anvil these ssds lasted for about 4.5 petabytes in the best case scenario so it'll handle 4.5 petabytes of writes and it depends on the capacity too because the smaller the capacity the less the less writing you have but the one that's around a terabyte so we've got 400 gig for this nvme the synology nvme this is a fiasco based micro controller there are four flash chips on this pcb and again the name of the game here is endurance give the two and a half inch sata one as well it's pretty feels pretty heavy doesn't necessarily mean anything but the name of the game is endurance that's going to last they also have a nice synology warranty to go along with it so it's like that's why you would do that now when you're picking hard drives there's some things that you ought to know about picking hard drives for these things one you're going to want a nas rated hard drive i know the temptation is to get the cheapest hard drive that you can possibly imagine but you shouldn't do that if you're going to cheap out you should just shuck your hard drive yeah i mean what do i mean by that well sometimes it's cheaper to buy an external hard drive than it is to buy an internal hard drive and sometimes the external hard drives are the same you know nas reliability drives the problem is that if you buy an external hard drive it's in a usb enclosure and when you take it apart they're not going to honor the warranty on the drive which really kind of sucks so you're throwing the warranty out but sometimes you can save upwards of a hundred dollars per drive especially if we're talking about capacities that are you know 10 12 14 terabytes per drive that's nothing to sneeze at us it's a nice to have at that level of capacity it was a little bit of a kerfuffle you should be aware of on some of the lower capacity drives like two terabytes four terabytes things like that for writing information to them they use what's called smr shingled magnetic recording we did a separate video on that if you're worried about buying the wrong thing you should definitely watch that because that'll that'll that'll get you clued in but generally you want nasrated drives because they're ready to be on and operational 24 hours a day the desktop class drives are typically only rated the motor is only rated to be on about eight hours a day so they'll die in three years you pretty much set your watch by it so i've used seagate iron wolf pretty good also used the helium filled wd red drives those are also pretty good so pick up a nas class of hard drive for your nas now another rule that's important to understand is capacity because as the hard drive capacities have gone up the data transfer rates have not gone up so the data transfer rate of a four terabyte hard drive is roughly the same it's close since within spinning distance of a 14 or 16 terabyte hard drive so something dies and you have to and your you know your storage is half full let's say you've got 16 terabyte drives and all of you know the entire thing the entire capacity of the nas is full which is gonna be more than the capacity of any single drive um you're gonna have to write half of that drive and if you're writing half of that drive at roughly 200 megabytes per second it could take a day it could take longer if it's not an ideal situation as it often is so as a strategy if you have a lot of mechanical hard drives you should probably have multiple layers of redundancy multiple extra drives so this is eight eight drives if you're gonna fully fill this up i recommend that you use two maybe three drives for redundancy so you'll only have five or six drives worth of capacity now to be sure the pedantic among you have probably already started typing comments but the parody information and the redundancy information is spread evenly across all of those drives it's not like you have a single parity drive or a dedicated parity drive or anything like that so for air configuration i'm gonna go with wd red helium filled because there's there's the non-helium filled version in the helium filled version wd red for this and that's what we're going to use for our initial setup but the real magic with this ssd it's under the hood we're going to pop the top all right so internally we reveal a little bit more of the mystery the mystery that's going on here so our unit is equipped with a single four gigabyte dimm we will be upgrading that it's a ddr4 2666 4 gig ecc so this is an error correcting them which is very nice remember on some of the other models that we reviewed previously it wasn't necessarily an air correcting dim this one is an error correcting them and do you know why it's an aircraft condemns because the processor in this is ryzen yeah ryzen so we can put up to 32 gigabytes in this thing via two 16 gig ecc dems that's on my short short shopping list all right so on this side this is pretty much the only thing interesting you can see with the cover off you get a pizza express by eight slot now synology has an accessory that's a 10 gig network plus m.2 slots which is awesome but this thing actually has onboard m.2 so you don't have to use the expansion slot for m.2 if you don't want to this is super easy know what i like about these trays they're toolless you just pop your hard drive in you're good to go with our drive trays removed you can see the m.2 slots they're over here on the side it's pci expressed by eight connection so by four by four for your two m.2s they just snap right in that is a tool is installation the nice thing about this m.2 placement is that you get airflow you see there's these two giant fans on the back and they don't really spin that fast so this is a device that's designed to be on top of your desktop here have a listen so that sound profile is with drives installed plus this thing up and doing stuff now to be sure if you hit it really hard it is going to ramp the fans and it is going to do a lot of uh stuff to try to bring the internal temperature down so be aware that it can run a little louder than that depending on the ambient operating environment that you're in if you're in a warmer room the fans are gonna have to ramp up that kind of thing but if it's not really super busy the fans are going to ramp down you're barely going to hear it which is a nice feature in terms of i o ports you've got one usb 3 5 gigabit port at the front here you might miss it but it's easy it's right there it's easy to miss but you know be aware of it at the back we've got two e-sata ports those are for connecting more sata hard drives you could actually do another enclosure synology makes another enclosure that you could daisy chain into this one if you need more physical hard drives we've also got three usb ports and we've got four one gig ports and the really cool thing about this is you can just plug in those multiple one gig ports and get a speed benefit if smb multi-channel is not working for you for some reason we did a whole other video on that all that still applies it did seem to work better for me when i remoted into this thing to enable smb multi-channel um and tweak some of the settings but out of the box i was getting a performance benefit from just plugging in multiple one gig nics for all of the different stuff that i was doing between vm backups and local smb connections and everything else that was trying to juggle pretty much the only reason that you'd need to remove the top is to install that 10 gig networking card and your you know additional m.2 so this thing you could really have it kitted out with four m.2 ports which is kind of nuts in a maximally configured sort of scenario i mean at that point you're basically running a pc i mean it's embedded it's embedded verizon so i mean of course in terms of the specific hardware config that we're dealing with on the rise inside of the world is a ryzen 1500b so you know if you're a follower of nasa appliances this replaces the intel atom until adam had some problems with stuff dying and then the warranty ended and then they would replace it and then it would just die again the same way it's nice to see ryzen embedded in here let's let's let's stay positive ryzen embedded that's good four cores eight threads but don't expect too much that's still a 16 watt tdp but if you want a quiet machine that's going to run on your desktop efficiently and well and for years to come i'm not sure you want something that runs hot it's just going to be loud 16 watts is really easy to cool with two giant fans so good job synology now the other reason that you buy a chassis like this is the software the synology software is the special sauce it's linux under the hood so that means it's going to support things like linux md multi-disk which is pretty tried and true pretty battle hardened it'll support btrfs if you're into btrfs or butterfs it's a sort of resilient healing you know redundant file system the way that it runs btrfs is it runs btrfs on top of some other stuff to handle the multi-disk redundancy so what btrfs is good for is detecting bit rot this is definitely the easy button solution synology has invested large mountains of cash i'm sure in making their user interface as simple and easy as possible it's very easy to add external applications if you want to for example mirror this synology to another synology somewhere else it's really easy to do that's what i'm planning to do with this i'm planning to outfit this with some really large drives and use this as an off-site mirror for some of the stuff that level one is doing so this is this is a pretty good chassis for that and uh the software platform because it's linux well if you want to go off script and ssh into it and do stuff with the command line you can because it's it's basically a glorified desktop pc the only thing it leaves me wanting for is you know some kind of a video console port or something like that that i could just you know basically use it as a linux computer but i don't think most people would use it that way so you know i get leaving off the video connection because most most people don't need that and the magic of the synology app center means that even though linux is your base you can add on a ton of other functionality now i already mentioned surveillance but if you don't you know have another nas device that you're backing up to you can back up to amazon you can back up to glacier you get back up to synology's own subscription service which i reviewed previously and is quite good it's a good deal for the amount of capacity that you get so you could say create a one terabyte share off of this of like your most important super critical stuff and use the synology backup service and back up just that one terabyte of really critical like family photos and your finance stuff whatever you consider to be the most important it'll encrypt it with a password and it'll encrypt it in such a way that synology can't help you decrypt it if you forget your password so you set a password and then if you need to restore a backup or something like that from the synology cloud you're gonna have to give them the password or you're gonna have to reset up one of these and put the password in because when it pulls that backup down it's not gonna be able to restore it without the password which is pretty awesome that you know they have your data but they can't do anything with it without the password there's a whole universe of other applications beyond file sharing beyond everything else one of them home assistant we've been doing all these iot videos and right now i'm running home assistant on a raspberry pi and i've got a usb device that plugs into the raspberry pi to provide you know a z-wave and zigbee network interface how are you going to do that in a virtual machine in a nas well they thought of that their software actually makes it point and click for me to pass through a usb port on a virtual machine running on this nas on a raspberry pi i had to because it's inside a docker container i had to jump through a couple of hoops to map the serial port on the host to a serial port inside a docker container so it's command line spooky voodoo magic it really wasn't hard and actually there's a how-to on the linux level one forums but with this it was point and click i didn't have to do anything it was right in the drop down menu good job synology so i could put my you know z-wave zigbee usb adapter in one of these usb3 ports map it to a virtual machine and i was good to go the other thing is home lab so let's talk about home lab for a second this thing especially with the faster network interface for iscsi and as a backing store for vmware it works really well so if you want a home lab with one of these i mean the commercial use and like officially supported like when you get into like your commercial vmware support you really gotta dot the eyes and cross the t's to not make your life more complicated than it needs to be but for home lab let me show you something this is my dan case a4 machine eight cores and a bunch of ram then i've got my intel nuk that i reviewed a while ago and this is the fancy nook that's a pcie card and i've got two pci express slots here i can run two pci express by eight devices in this no problem i've got thunderbolt dual intel nick this one also has dual intel nick so right here i've got 16 cores of compute four cores of storage and i can run a vmware cluster because the witness appliance is running on this as a vm i create the witness appliance in vmware and then i use the backup facility in the synology because the synology is vmware aware it can interface with vmware even the free version of esxi and i can pull that witness appliance for the cluster to the synology and actually boot it up on the synology and then i can have my virtual machines running in both places vsan over the network have the images stored here and then if i lose either one of these nodes for my you know home lab compute system the other node will just spin up all of the virtual machines that went down when i lost another node but 16 cores and 32 threads in just the desktop space that you see here really is incredible for a home lab i mean if you're talking about apartment home lab and you don't mind spending a little money this is really a lot of fun and it's a good learning thing so like if you're getting into computers and you want to learn virtual machines and software-defined infrastructure and stuff like that a setup like this is pretty killer so there you have it that's been a quick look at the synology ds1821 plus and all the different stuff that you can do with it and actually you can do even more with it than i went over in the video but my fantasy configuration two nvme for caching eight eight terabyte hard drives 10 gig nick or off to the races don't worry there's a separate video coming with the 10 gig m.2 installation with this very chassis so we'll take a look at that some of the performance implications of that but i'm always really impressed with the fit and finish and the build quality from synology and their software stack they know what they're doing it's going to cost a premium to get their software stack but it's easier it saves time it's perhaps less headache if you have really specialized needs maybe it doesn't make sense but then you also need the expertise to set up that really specialized set of needs with this it's basically plug and play you plug it in you set what you want it to do and you're done and so like you know basic pc backups like i've got my laptop i'm always taking with me it might be lost or stolen at any moment basically whenever the computer's you know on the same network and plugged in and you're not using it it's going to be backing itself up to the nas it's really easy to set that up and that's a great way to uh store all your backups i'm well this is level one this has been a quick look at the ds 1821 plus thanks to synology for sending it over so i can take a quick look at it and sort of beat on the tires a little bit try to break it i broke it but in a good way it's awesome stay tuned for that anvil video and our 10 gigabit upgrade i'm wondering this is level one i'm signing out and i'll see you later

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 41,378

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: 3UZRMMcAP14

Length: 18min 0sec (1080 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2021