Synology DS1821+ vs QNAP TS-873A NAS Drive Comparison

[Music] hello and welcome back and today i want to talk about the synology ds 1821 plus and how it compares with the newly released qnap ts 873 a now both of these brands do have a lot of solutions for smb small medium business and of course prosumer users as well and these two are very much a sweet spot in terms of overall storage available and the hardware that allows you to pretty much do everything the brand says that you are capable of doing now both of these solutions are available right now at time of recording in february um sorry march 2021 wow this year is going quick um march 2021 and both of these solutions being eight bays of sata storage do bro provide a huge amount of storage potential they do also have price tags that are actually surprisingly similar both arriving at around 1 000 1 100 or so dollars and again doesn't quite factor in all the different currencies and different tax out there so do double check first but both of them although being very similar in architecture with the same cpu and the same amount of storage available have actually gone very very different directions in terms of what you get for your money now i don't know you for one of them in the studio with me today although we have already made videos on both of these devices so right now we are using the graphics as you can see on screen but today we're going to talk about ultimately what makes these two such different nas devices and hopefully help you decide which one deserves your data and of course your money now before we go any further let's talk about what they've both got in common i'm not going to talk too much about software in today's video largely because i've done so many videos on quts and qts and dsm 6.2 and dsm 7 that to go over that now for a number of you that have already learned about all that stuff it's not really fair you have to wait a crapload of time listening to that so do check out those videos where i've gone into so much detail about the individual applications you can learn a lot more about which one of these is going to gel better with you in terms of software just know that synology has a larger focus on software for your money than qnap i'd say when you buy any synology product it's 60 software 40 hardware and with qnap it's more of a balance 50 50. the synology is far more i would argue a little bit more intuitive definitely more user-friendly of the two but the qnap a little bit more of a learning curve but ultimately for more configurable and customizable again i would say nintendo sega i would say uh console gamer pc gamer but again check out my other software videos to see more about that but what have these two got in common well they're both great business solutions in terms of uh utilizing all of the files that you're gonna generate in your business there can be some web servers email servers that can be used for surveillance they can be used for multi-year backup strategies with the cloud local nasda nas nasty usb they both have virtualization applications in virtualization station and technology virtual machine manager that can use first party vm tools to host multiple vms as well as utilizing the likes of hyper-v and vmware to port over or support or effectively clone third-party vm images and vhds and vmdks and stuff like that so there's lots of ways in which you can enjoy virtualization both of these devices also support multimedia as well for photos videos and music with lots of dedicated applications some of which involving ai some of which involving metadata scraping to create a really really evolved multimedia platform for home or business they've both got surveillance applications in qvr pro and surveillance station and qbr elite as well with two camera licenses included on the synology in between two and eight depending on the application you choose available from the qnap both of them are upgradeable in a number of ways that we're going to talk about later in the video and they both arrive with three years of manufacturer's warranty that can be extended to five years two very very good solutions for home or business needs both of which can pretty much do anything that the brands say their systems can do at these two systems not only if you've got the right sort of storage that can really support you for a number of years that can be expanded as well um but also a decent enough bit of hardware there to support a multi-user multi-application simultaneous environment so now you know what they got in common you want to know what's different well both of these eight base solutions although they arrive with the same cpu and support very very similar peripherals from the outset the file system option from the beginning is very very different with the synology arriving for the choice of ext4 or btrfs as the file system of choice now ext4 we know about ext4 one of the longest standing file systems not just in storage but just generally btrfs as an option does provide a number of more file management nuanced um back-end sort of stuff that you won't see the benefits but you'll feel the benefits so for example you've got stuff like fast self-healing much like the ecc memory includes if um corruption of data is noticed on a minor level it will compare transmission of data as it passes through it beginning in the end and heal files as necessary and again this isn't going to be like a recovery of data scenario here but it's for the avoidance of data corruption and bit rather can happen later on on top of that uh shared folder duplication and recreation far far more quicker but probably one of the best things is background snapshots having a far lesser impact on c systems um resource utilization so more snapshots and less of a feeling of slow down when they're being generated lesser nazis when you enable snapshots will generally feel a little bit of a lag when snapshots are being recorded and maintained in the recycling of them long term so btrfs removes a lot of that but it has to be said the btrfs within the marketplace is less desired than ext4 at the business level because it still seems a little green uh by comparison to ext4 btrfs has been featured on more and more platforms but it has to be said that a number of business users will go straight to the ext4 option for performance it's the same with this device arriving with synology hybrid raid or shr this system does arrive with that great fluid rate system where you can mix and match drives but again as useful as that can be bear in mind that it can lessen the performance just a little bit and that's one of the reasons why synology doesn't include shr on them or grandiose ranges like the uc or sa or fs series now what are qnet bringing to the party there on the file system well they've got ext4 they don't have that fluid rate system there they go with the traditional radio raid 1 raid 5 red 6 ray 10 etc etc but what they also bring to the party is zfs now um zettabyte file systems at ifs there that is far more desirable storage industry-wise zfs always has been a popular choice um zfs does bring the ability um for a triple parity raid uh there in the background so again very useful raid said as well but one of the other great things that it brings is the removal of the volume layer now for those aren't aware when it comes to storage devices you have your drives you put them in a radii but all of them where you create individual raids they are known as storage pools they are pool of data now in traditional ext4 or btrfs on top of that layer you create these little containers of storage they can be the full size of the available storage pool that right there or it can be multiple pools now uh multiple containers and these are called volumes and from those volumes your data can live and you can choose that one's for surveillance that one's for that that's you can do all that stuff if you choose but that extra layer does have a small impact in terms of performance it gets greater and greater depending on the rate configuration and the complexity of creating the parity data as well as all the individual volumes on zfs it removes that volume layer you are dealing with the storage pool it removes the volume layer and ultimately that improves performance also it improves raid rebuild radar synchronization little rotary silvering that sort of thing there's ray scrubbing all of these things are much much much faster to be done with a raid five on say four drives rather than taking six to eight to 12 hours taking quite literally minutes to complete on top of that you have the added benefits within zfs of uh file compression in real time to save space so data moves to the nas and then it's compressed file to duplication where files that are the same from multiple sources getting sent to the system it will go right there's one of those we know what that file is we just record that it comes with all of those locations saves a lot of space saves a lot of transition of data and ultimately improves performance and saves time long term now as good as zfs sounds and the fact that this arrives with zfs as a choice set up with qtq uts hero it's worth highlighting that it is a hungry beast zfs requires a lot more resources to get the job done in fact this system arrives with eight gig of memory by default compared with the four gig and we'll talk about that a little bit more later on but it's worth remembering that even though it arrives with eight gig you can't take advantage of the full advantages of zfs unless you go for 16 gig minimum so if you want to take advantage of the full deduplication inline and uh inline data compression as well alongside the duplication you can need more memory off the back that's definitely a consideration there it's got zfs which i love but it's giving it to you with the proviso you're probably going to need a bit more memory down the line so after that we can talk about the cpu inside both of these devices both arriving with the v1500b that ryzen embedded processor it's a 2.2 gigahertz quad-core cpu and again it's x86 64-bit architecture means it can run the gamut can run gpu enabled resources such as virtualization and 4k but bear in mind it doesn't have embedded graphics so it's not going to be able to have a special part of the cpu to handle the more arduous and more resource consuming elements of data more visual data consequently it will use more power than the likes of say even a celeron to handle graphical tasks it doesn't have a specific tailored graphics tool on board so bear that in mind although both of them can run the gamut the full range of applications from synology and qnap bear in mind it is not a gpu assisted cpu now instead of memory both of these systems thanks to that cpu support ddr4 memory but it's worth highlighting both systems gone a slightly different way although both of them are arriving with 2400 megahertz memory it's worth highlighting that the synology arriving with four gig by default on a single stick can be uh is ecc erico correction memory that can be upgraded up to 32 gig over two sodium slots now ecc memory much like the aforementioned btrfs includes file self healing or bit self healing it takes um an extra bit check some there as data passes through it and again this is very cave man but passes through it and then if there's a change at the original um there a change at the final uh uh piece of information it passes through the memory and then repairs it ecc is used by a lot of industry professionals to avoid data corruption because small data corruption will always magnify over time as data passes through the system and you know even just generally chronologically as its access can be problematic and if you're dealing at a data center level or you're dealing with spreadsheets you are dealing with enormous databases that are comprised of infamous decimal calculations based on top of each other on the composite files underneath them ecc memory can be incredibly advantageous just bear in mind you've got four gig there and it can go up to 32 gig on the qnap there is an ecc memory you can install it but again it doesn't arrive with ecc memory it's got eight gig by default of ddr4 2400 megahertz memory but that supports ecc doesn't arrive with ecc so qnap giveth with our zfs but it take us informed uh in the lack of ecc now it is worth highlighting though that this system does support up to 64 gig of memory now that's a weird one given they're both using the same cpu there that cpu does support 64 gig from what i've seen but synology with their first party memory doesn't have a 32 gig single sodium module which might be the reason why they don't uh support more than 32 gig on there which is um not so sure about that i'm not a big fan if that is true but 64 gig in terms of virtualization in terms of surveillance in terms of a multi-user access environment for many of you it will be more advantageous than ecc memory so that may play a part but once again as mentioned remember the 8 gig inside isn't quite enough to take advantage of the full range of zfs advantages so bear in mind that if you're going to take advantage of that inline compression in 90 duplication particularly the latter you're going to have to ramp up to 16 gig there also in terms of internal hardware we can talk about nvme and pcie now in terms of nvme both of these devices have got nvme m2 slot inside but as is the case with most synology systems you can only utilize it for caching that he's taken the useful abilities the high performance high iops and low latency of the nvme ssds in a raid environment and present them to the more affordable larger capacity but slower mechanical hard drives in the main raid storage bays those eight bays on the front so as useful as that isn't solange you've really done a good job eating as much performance out of that but those performance benefits are only really going to be felt by smaller file access and definitely more regularly accessed files big um single images and blog data and uh just large video files anything big it's just too big to see the advantage there it's the small it's the databases it's the spreadsheets it's the wide array of files where you are accessing many many small and largely unnamed files at any given time and again some virtual machines will see those benefits as well rather than single images that's where that caching will be at its best now in the qnap again it's one of those things you know give us qnet take us away in that they let you have those m2 nvme slots as well and they let you use it for caching and raw storage you can stick a storage ball on those nvmes and take advantage of fast speeds and you know deal with data directly on that fast layer allowing the main eight bays to have either full hard drives for archival storage or half populate with hard drives half with some starter ssds and create a lovely little tier storage system with cubes here but it's worth remembering that due to the cpu lanes on that main ryzen processor and how they're spread across the system the pcies inside are pcie gen 3 times one so a thousand megs each so even though you might be putting in a pcie gen 3 ssd and a lot of the more modern ones like your seagate uh iron wolf 520s and your wd black 750s that sort of thing you're not gonna get the promoted three to four thousand mix you're going to get 1 000 megs per slot so a potential in a raid of no more than 2 000 megs at the very very top end it's still good but it's worth highlighting you're not going to see that speed to my mind there isn't any nvme gen three times one ssds out there so you're gonna be putting in gen three times two or gen three times four ssds and then immediately have them bottleneck so although you can use them for far fast acting performance storage do bear that in mind and if you stick a pcie gen two times four nvme inside there you're still limited by the gen rather than the time so bear that in mind so great do you have them but not quite the full complement of speed so that's going to make a difference for a number of you the other thing worth highlighting of course is they've both got pcie upgrade slots the synology arrives with a single pcie gen three times eight slot with a potential eight thousand megabytes per second connectivity between the card and the system so if you're going to be utilizing their new fiber channel card uh 25g card there then that card with two ports is going to be giving you um 50 gbe or 5 000 megabytes per second there so again still not fully utilizing that and if you have this eight bay with the two five bank expansions either side you're going to get a lot of saturation i'm not 100 you're going to saturate that full connection but it's still nice that you've got that option in the case of the qnap you have two pcie gen three times four slots so four thousand megs per slot for cards installed and there's a wider array of cards available on the qnet platform synology does support intel and melonex cards but they do have a tendency to highlight their own cards more than any other although there are melonex 40 gbe cards out there that potentially allow you to fully saturate that uh gen three times a uh pcie slot and i will say that i cannot see a scenario over sata based connections with an eight and two five by expansion on jbod even if you raise zero the whole thing i don't think you'd hit that 8 000 if you want to prove me wrong please do so but on the qnap there is support of wi-fi six cards they support gpu cards there's support of uh n2 nvme upgrade cards to add more super fast storage uh to each of those slots and although each slot will cap 4 000 each it's nice to be able to install two cards rather than one and then have some wasted bandwidth it's better to have two slots that you can max out with two different services now bear in mind that the the qnap system is still going to have that ryzen as the main hat there the thing that decides what can possibly be done all the memory in the world is not going to make a difference if the cpu is just melted so bear in mind that although the qnap seems to have more customization and flexibility in how you can upgrade that ryzen still may present itself as a bottleneck to take advantage of it and in that scenario the gen 3x8 may seem like the more mature long-term choice for you now next we can talk about external connectivity with both of these devices arriving with similar but yet weirdly different external connections the synology arrives with four 1gbe lan ports there at around 100 megs each all with the support of link aggregation up to 4 gbe or over 400 megs 400 megs together there's also failover and load balancing supported on there for different kinds of architecture the system also arrives with usb 3.2 gen 1 port at 5 gigabit uh 5 gig bits per second each that support external storage and some supported peripherals like ups's or printers and the like there's also those e sata ports there to attach those expansion devices allowing you to bolt on another 10 bays of jbod storage with the main raid being controlled by the system if you set up the right shr you can expand that storage just make sure you get the provisioning just right but ultimately that is the connections on the system i think synology again have played a little bit safe there there is a 10gb version of this device um but in six bays known as the ds162 and xs plus with similar architecture but it has 10g and a z on inside um but it does give you a lot for your money and there is that upgradability there of the pcie now on the qnap there is usb once again there's a usb 3.2 gen1 port that 5g connection but only a single port because the other remaining three usbs are usb 3.2 gen 2 10 gigabit each which means the likes of much much faster external drives there is also expandable options that use those usb ports as well as pcie upgrade slots as well um those usbs can even be used for a lot more network support peripherals with um usb to 2.5 g and 5 g upgrade adapters that use bus power something that officially isn't supported by the synology but unofficially there are third-party apps drivers that you can install to use those adapters although where that sits on the support of your warranty mmm trixie now the qnap also has a lan port and only has two lan ports compared with a four on the synology but these two are 2.5 gbe each so again 2.5 gbe or around 250 megabytes and we have link aggregation you can get up to 500 megabytes per second there are there about or 5 gbe again much like the usb ports there as good as that all sounds it has to be remembered that you're not going to be able to take advantage of the network ports or the usb port and their uh improved bandwidth unless the peripherals and devices in your hardware environment are set up for that as well if you don't have a laptop uh switch a system with at least 2.5 gbe you're going to be bottlenecked to one anyway same goes to the usb devices if they're not usb 3.2 gen2 uh compatible and architecture to start with they're going to bottleneck anyway so a lot of these options for a number of you are going to be about future proofing and having that hardware later on as the rest of your architecture evolves if you're not going to evolve that way anyway it might be wasted money on you and remember the pcie upgrade ability may well be future-proof enough on either one of these two solutions and that's really it they're quite similar in most regard and most other regards with all of their range of software and applications both have three years of warranty that can be extended both of which are desktoping for both of which internal 250 watt psus both using metal chassis and their ambient noise at this threshold isn't really comparable they'll be the odd scenario where one is more noisy than the other or vice versa but there isn't enough to make a compelling case to say one is noisier than the other same goes with power consumption because it's only when these devices are being maxed out that you will see any difference there and once you reach that stage of maxing them out power consumption and ambient noise level become largely immaterial and unavoidable but me personally in terms of future proofing hardware the qnap wins by a country mild the synology still has that great intuitive software that replaces a lot of the third-party apps from skype to office 365 stuff like that in your environment with their own first party alternatives hence why the brand has that shifting focus of 60 40 for the price tag in software and hardware the qnap has great software but it's just a little bit more of a learning curve and they have a tendency to release a lot of applications and improve them in development in their lifetime whereas synology have a tendency to release their software in a much more finished form early doors and i think a number of us that again i make comparisons are very very often against these brands with uh nintendo vs sega or console gamer versus pc gamer but i do think how that money goes into software and hardware when you buy these devices will largely define which one of them is best suited for your storage needs for home or business just remember 5050 hardware software 60 40 software hardware over here other than that let me know which one is the one that you think you're going to go for if you've got any questions just leave them in the comments but more precisely i'd head over to nas compares and use our free advice section where i can help you decide the right solution for you it's just myself that man's that advice section there so i can't promise the answers will be quick but i can say they will be unbiased and hopefully i can help you take your considerations um to heart but click like if you've enjoyed this video click subscribe to learn more and i will see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 7,292

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Id: JKAsz1P2jE0

Length: 25min 22sec (1522 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021