Synology DS920+ NAS Hardware Review

hello and welcome back and it's time for another Nazz review but let's be honest this is probably one of the biggest Nazareth news I'm gonna do this year in terms of popularity the Synology for Bay Plus series has always kind of been up there for the majority of users and although it's always lacked a lot of the top top top power with some of the rap station series the previous generations ds9 1/8 plus is probably one of the most popular Nazis they have ever produced and that was back in 2017 when that was about so when we first heard about this the ds9 20 plus we were getting excited about it we wanted to know what it could do what it can't do and ultimately does it serve as a valuable successor to that as a ds9 1/8 this is Robbie and as compares and we want to find out if this now is is worth your data [Music] right so let's get it out the way early doors how is this unit here normally I want to get things here on the channel I normally you know ask for samples from Browns or sometimes they might say you know do a little review for us and something but this is one I've actually had to procure personally this is the ds9 20 plus and currently it is not available to buy pretty much anywhere in the world apart from Japan and areas of career I think it's a few other tiny regions that I've got it as well as a tiny they're massive but we've had to arrange to get this shipped over to us from Japan just for this review we've already done it with the DS 2 2 0 plus and thanks for some help with some reddit users I've already posted a hardware review about this device because they were able to lend me some of their kit and on some of my questions but now it's time for this video review of the ds9 20 what is good it's pretty much super sizing everything we saw in the nine one item buy everything it's probably a bit of a bold statement let's reel that in a little bit it has improved other than diamonite in a number of ways but there are ways that it is not improved that is definitely angered a few of you when we first looked at those PDFs but let's talk about the device for a little bit first what we're seeing is the Japanese retail box much like the t20 plus is largely identical to that of the units we get here in the west beats the retail box we've got the ds9 20 plus sticker there if we bring that closer to camera mean you'll have to forgive me that light is really fantastically aggressive there and the light will give you a bit of information about the hardware inside CPU the memory any kind of expandability that sort of thing and mention of the m2 nvme bays that we'll talk about later in the video but a mistake I made in my video with the 220 is worth revisiting narrowly simply that I used to think that these brown box they come in with just the same damn box and then they just stuck a bunch of labels on it doesn't note in the device but it's actually distinctive you look at the bottom there it does mention the ds9 20 plus there and there's information on all sides that detail this distinct device so it is a bit unfair of me to decide it's the same brown box different label they and again their device retails there's no real confirmed Western price at the moment but based on an arm on a and the pricing trends that we've seen on the 420 and 720 I think we're looking at around 550 maybe 600 at the very top and that's inclusive of attacks again that it's a vague price that still needs a complete term clarification at launch on top of that the device doesn't arrive pre-populated for those that are new to snow letting out is worth Harlow and you will need to buy hard drive and assisting media if depending on which one you only use inside this device you don't have to buy that separately and that is not inclusive of your price now much like the reviews are done for the recent 20 plus here so Synology this video is gonna run a little long I know that now or any three minutes into it so far but I can tell right now if you look at the bar at the bottom this must be a long video and that's because the number of you this is going to be your first now maybe you've been holding off you were gonna buy the nominate and he's all no it's a little older for me let's see what else they can bring out in the meantime and even holding out for a device like this so with that spirit in mind much like the 227 20 in the 420 I'm gonna make these reviews cover everything in terms of software and hardware capabilities of these devices so a lot of this you may already know I apologize it is repetitions and more regular subscribers but let's have a look what we get for our money we have a look inside we've got the brown with box as well and again lovely little design touches that I talked about before I know you guys think I'm really laboring about the retail packaging but I think it tells you a lot about a brand and where the priorities and where the sensibilities lie sometimes I'm in again the label they even everything from the handle basically screams slick Synology they've always kind of designed themselves around the Apple model and it's very very clear looking at this so that has continued one thing I will say that about me out a little bit already you see at the top there we've got some nice partition boxes that should have you know just basically inside all the accessories and the cable all within hours of the bottom one hour box the Japanese ds2 20 it came with this this Synology guide for the setting of device up the first time and it's pretty detailed about the device up for the first time in terms of DSM software capabilities and network capabilities and more so I kind of hoped they'd be one in there but again that's something that's incredibly regionally specific and they're probably not going to get that in your own place of purchase so ever look inside we have got inside our first box our main cable regional main scope and again it will differ and on where in the world you are over there next we've got the main box of accessories that will he be there inside we've got our two one GPU cables right there and these are cat 5e for the one GPU connections on the rear hold your horses yes 1gb we'll get to that later on but there's two of them for two independent ports inside we've also got screws for two and a half inch media because three and a half inch media does not require a screw driver for this device we'll go through that later on on top of that we have got our external PSU and yes an external PSU is a branded one as well and see there and that branded PSU I'll talk about in just a second we've got keys for secure lock in the hard drive bays there on the front a hard drive SSD as well so these are keys that are same set of keys all four locks but it does allow you to secure the trays inside the device to prevent accidental removal but I'm not gonna say there's a heavy-duty like Yale or Chubb yacht locks or something these will you can break it if you want but this isn't a stop general theft is Ben can just take the whole box it's mainly to stop people accidentally removing them and finally we've got our quick start and installation instructions right there that details how to set the device up for the first time as well as information and Synology zone website where this updated guides all the time probably better than a paper menu but I'm still in love with that one I'll just put on the floor there and apart from that the device also comes with three years of manufacturer's warranty no matter where you are in the world so that is all covered now I said I was gonna touch on the PSU recent touch on that in the same way I've talked about it in other videos is because I know there's an area of disagreement with regards to PSU like this it's not the fact that is embossed which I quite like it's quite nice to know that the psu that you're buying with your device is produced and at least overseen by the company themselves but the fact that is an external P issue and a number of you aren't fans of external PS use you think it's easier to accidentally disconnect them they're dangly they're awkward for transit if you're moving hardware from location to location and very easy to end up accidentally leaving one of these at once place or another but an external PSU gives two main advantages which for me win the day by country mile first and foremost it's the idea that this external PSU if it breaks because level on the hard drives it's the most fragile pie inside it means that this is easy to replace it's so much easier to replace an external PSU than having to tear down an external chassis to get to the PSU inside and also a number of you won't want to do that in the case of an RMA and chances are if you are dealing with the warranty and you need to send something back because you know PS use they feel like anything else if that happens you don't send me about your whole unit can be troublesome and you take the drive do you send the drives as well there's so much to do an external power brick it's just easy this is covered by your warranty you fire it off they send you a new one you can even buy new ones or spares if you want secondly an external PSU reduces heat dramatically inside think about that an internal PSU and a system that's done on for days weeks months or even years at a time that can generate some heat so an external power supply removes the heat internally from the equation doesn't generate loads of P but it definitely produces heat when mains power is going through one of these so personally for me external PS use all the way now if we remove the top layer of the box there we can take a look inside because there is our unit it's nothing more in the box quite well partition cut well protected and again that has made it over here from Japan it's looking pretty bulletproof to me let's have a little look inside removing tight and see what we get for our money there and there you go that is the ds9 20 plus and again if you own the nine one eight what I've just said to you there they're a bit redundant really for a number of you because let's face it apart from this little label down there the majority of nine one eight owners are gonna be thinking well who cares because it's the same chassis and that's absolutely true this chassis is pretty much the same chassis that we saw unveiled in originally in the nine one eight series when it first came came out all those years ago this is the forebay standard chassis that's knowledge you have been using this slight tweaks I think to the framework of it it's not quite as deep on the front there and again it's gonna be very hard to go through this without the comparison and we do have the hardware comparison coming similar you do have two physical nominate and the physical nine twenty years on the side-by-side but what it will say is this is probably one of the best value versus return chassis I've seen in a long time I talked about it a number of years ago but it's worth reiterating once again and for a four bike so this is for hard drives worth of storage here ventilation is going to be key because you need air passing all the way through the device you need to make sure you've got active and passive cooling systems working together at the same time you don't want to have to have lots of wires knocking around you want to make sure everything's in preset locations and from every time I bet but I'm you know remove the framework around one of these now sees the Synology for by frame like this is probably one of the best we've seen because it does an excellent job of spicing everything out but not to an inappropriate level to a point where this will become unsightly large it's a very compact chassis indeed in fact if we get a hard drive a hard drive here just give you some idea about the size that's how big one hard drive is there in front of it's not that big at all if you've got a hard drive knocking around you can do most of that scaling for yourself now the device itself as mentioned is a four by nows but it can be expanded up to nine Bay's with the connection of the idea five one seven expansion chassis it supports a number of different right configurations and for those aren't aware a right configurations when you have multiple hard drives all in one storage area like this one two three four and you want to make sure that you can leverage the advantages of having more than one drive together and one of the chief ways to do that is right redundant array of independent disks what that means in real terms is you can either have a system where multiple drives are being read and written to all the time consequently improves performance speed overall or you can create a system where data is written to one giant storage area inside the nas but if one of your drives dies then it doesn't matter because the system will still have a system of blueprint known as parity data inside across the raid and therefore allowing you to retrieve your data in the in case of a dead drive now parity and write something I could go into a lot more detail about but I strongly recommend you check out my video on it I've done like two or three of them if you just google Nasrid or something I'm sure you'll find it but the device itself is a four by now not only did support those standard rate configurations but it also supports their own Rea configuration known as SH arse and ology hybrid right now on the face of it it seemed clear enough identical to standard raid levels it allows you one disc of drive failure AB or in the case of SH r2 two disks you know what's a difference between that and write one and write Y and write x and technically on the face of it it is identically the same for the most part but with some core differences the first main difference is with SHR you can mix and match your drives now on the face of it there's a number of you that I've got a bit of experience in storage I've just heard that and gone what the what that's a terrible idea and you're right it's not great but if done right it can be hugely beneficial case in point you can fully populate this four by on day one if you choose you can fully populate it with 4 TB hard drive keeping it economical 4 TB drives put forum in there and you put them in a raid 5 or on SHR then you would end up with the 12 TB of storage because one drive has to be dropped for the rate protection you'll lose one drive worth of capacity now your systems running fine three four five years down the line but you start to think now I need to get some bigger drives I'm running out of space or one of my drives has died now when you want to buy new drives buying 40 P again will seem like a bit of a waste now s HR allows you to now install bigger drive so at that point although she is like a 10 TB may be incredibly affordable and you want to start including 10 terabyte disks so when you do that s HR will allow you to install drives that are larger than the rest of the drives in the raid configuration and adapt itself internally as you add more drives to give you more storage traditional rate doesn't do that doesn't allow you to mix Drive so I mean obviously brands primarily but mainly capacities this s HR will allow you to do that the second advantage of s HR is it significantly easier to like increase the size of your raided storage pool you can have an S HR with two disks and as you add more disks it is significantly easier to move it up within an SH artisan s HR with two disks and an S HR with five disks is only two clicks of difference when writing up whereas converting from a raid 1 to a raid 5 can be a little bit more time-consuming and more important broker more importantly can be very very difficult whereas moving in s HR cost 2 and then more disks really is incredibly straightforward and for those that are a little bit nervous about that sort of thing it can be incredibly beneficial so talking a little bit more about the device again we can have a look at the front of it now we have got at the top there little LED markers there that denote drive access system Health Network activity and more with an LED for each of the hard drive bays built into the front we've got a USB 3 that's USB 3.1 gin 1 or you must be 3.2 gen 1 or USB 3.0 but right USB make your minds up the USB port here is a five gigabits per second USB ie now that is utilized by backups on once again I said before I'm trying to cover all the bases in this video so a number of you know I'm gonna say but if you don't thanks for listening USB backups on an hours are so easy rudimentary yes but incredibly easy with a device like this you can have an obscene amount of storage we'll talk about storage capabilities later but with this device here and this us people it opens the door to a localized backup because an ass isn't a backup per se unless you're using it as such for example if you have a bunch of files bunch of tablets bunch of pcs whatever or sending files and backing up their respective storage areas to this device over the network or the Internet lovely but the minute you start deleting files off your phone off your tablet off your laptop off your computer this stops being a backup it it's the only place those files exist now it's just a repository of data which if it's broken if it's stolen if there's a flood or a fire or whatever you've lost that data forever so this is not a backup if you use it in that second way one way around that and a more cost-effective way to do that is to utilize USB backups now if we have a look that we have any USB drives available no we don't matter pain using a simple USB backup drives that are incredibly inexpensive these days in several terabytes you can create a system where this device backs up itself to a USB or selected folders files or more onto a USB as soon as the USB is connected to that port and vice versa if you utilize a USB regularly in your job or your academic life regularly you can get home dump your bag get the drive out pop it on the table connected by the USB and then you can set an automated routine so you don't even need to go into the OS that we'll talk about later on it will just back itself up streamlined and real easy so when that happened you can then go off make your dinner watch Netflix do it you want and the backup will take place either the USB turn as on a mouse to the usb in fact there are multiple ways in which group backup first and foremost standard backup it just sends the contents of one to the other just all the files with a bang after that you can do differential backups which is when only the files that change between backups are backed up so say you backed up this drive you went away you wrote another you know you mind if I have a copy of your dissertation or you took a bunch of photos for work come back reconnect it a differential backup will only backup the new files that have been added to the NAS and remember that works both ways - you can create a synchronized backup where a folder on this device or a fodder on both devices even are identical every time they're connected - if anything changes they can be reset and the third backup you can do is time manage backups where you connect the drive and then every single time it runs the backup routine it creates a brand-new copy each time in a different folder over time which is incredibly useful for those out there that do testing and need something more like a snapshot of different days of synchronized backups so there are lots of ways in which you can store on an arse but the USB port on the front people seem to lie to the Overlook at something other than a fluff gathering device but it's incredibly useful and a very inexpensive way to create another tear to your backup strategy so if we have a look at the front of the vise we've got our trays now these are click and load three and a half inch trays there's also screw holes for two and a half inch drive media there and this is a starter device installing a drive inside this is incredibly easy so put off one side click off the other side there we go there helps if you have fingernails you then get your hard drive pop your hard drive inside its implants pop the clips back on another clip and there you go simple answer and then you can install that in there make sure it's Sartor bought pour out slide it in and that's it you've installed your hard drive you can lock it of course there's the locks there on the bottom so we talked about earlier on but it really is that straightforward to install drives and remember you don't need to fully populate this device in order to utilize it for the first time you've only need one hard drive to run it you could run this device now on that single hard drive you wouldn't have any real redundancy in case of that drive failing and you want to utilize some of the backup means be utilizing USB or using cloud manage backups with hyper backup or active backups weightless another thing that we'll talk about later on but the the hard drive support on this device is pretty extensive modern hard drives now such as the Seagate iron Wolfman Series arriving at 16 terabytes it's not cheap drive at 450 to 500 nikkor but it's still one of the best drives out there in terms of overall capacity for NAS we're starting to see 18 terabyte drives slowly put their head up and then climb back under but these are incredibly data center class drives which may not be ideal for a device like this now we remove that drives we can take a look at the rest of them inside there will remove all four drains again as I mentioned you don't need to fully populate this you can populate it with a single hard drive and then you can add drives gradually if you want to scale your COSO maybe start with two in a red one or an SHR and then add drives gradually as you go now if we look on the inside of this device we can take a good look at how ventilation is sat on this so at the rear you've got that blue PCB and on there you've got a SATA bay through to them no loose cables for power these are jaw data and power ports there we look at the other side on the inside there which is going to be a lot harder to show you with this light you can see that ventilation there now on here we've got the Synology logo on either side and that's ontology logo there assists the active fans at the rear that we'll talk about in a bit with some nice passive air flow there's lots of means in which air works around the drives but and on the base of it of course but it's on the reciter device that really nice logo for passive cooling they've always been impressed by but one thing I'm less impressed by that we will definitely talk about later in the video is that memory by now as you see there there is a so dim memory bay there now we're going to talk more about that later on but the nine one eight had to sodium memory base here inside the device there's two of them in an L formation both of which support would fall gig each this is a single sodium slot that is designed for a four gig Synology memory module there you go so standard Synology module and that's a four key stick and again it retails around seventy to ninety pounds so it's quite steep but it is their own memory it's two thousand six hundred and sixty-six megahertz installing the memory is incredibly straightforward all you do is make sure it's face-up I'll bring that close to the camera in there pop the memory module inside and then angle it down and it'll click and there you go that's that memory module now this has gone from a four gig device to an 8 gig device that is this how easy is to upgrade memory on these devices there's runners there for each of the individual hard drive by you so in terms of overall construction it gives you a very simplistic looking design but it's really the software in the hardware inside that carry this device forward it doesn't need to be overly complex the technology has moved forward so much over the years that this is what it's become now a much more streamlined compact and efficient device because you don't want lots of bits knocking around because that generates heat it can generate noise and ultimately make it very unpleasant to be around and detrimental to the efficiency and ability of the internal components now if we look at the rear of the device re the base of the device we can see some ventilation here for the side control of all that's got that memory module as well as the CPU as well but another cool thing we need to discuss is this these are the two nvme SSD caching values now this is something there originally premiered on the ds9 one eight it was the ability to not only have four hard drive bays in their own right giving you performance improvements in some brake configurations but also allowed you to install nvme SSDs these would be utilized to kind of act as caching and buffering to the storage array so to put it another way if you were to populate this we've just SSDs your performance would be insane even standard star RSS RSS days gives about five hundred megabytes each and if you push them in I know a raid 5 array they would give an improvement per SSD of around 150 to 250 megabytes per second incrementally with each added SSD based on their CPU inside is a few other factors remember that's internal speed only with hard drives the average hard drive will give you somewhere between 150 and 250 260 more enterprise level drives you know in you know enterprise construction above 10 TV and 7200 rpm and larger cache they'll give you that 200 to 250 60 and as you add more drives in the raid it'll increase your rate configure your raid speed by about 50 to a hundred or so megabytes per added drive so you back that all up and get your overall speed now the SSDs are obviously faster great but with inherent downsides one while they expensive around five to seven times more expensive depending on the drive you go for and with a cap currently the largest commercial you know consumer SSD for SATA is four terabyte with eight terabytes thanks to quad layer and a quad layer cell NAND becoming available so even at 40 B it's expensive still and 40 B inside this a 4 TB hard drive is way way way less to buy so the middle ground is hybrid level storage that's when you have all your hard drives in there and you have to nvme SSDs in there at around 10% of the overall harddrive capacity so 10 terabytes have one terabyte of SSD and these will assist the hard drive array in terms of I was reading write still keep things moving though act as a kind of buffer zone for files will be handed to him from more frequently accessed files can be moved over to them but again the the cache can often be flushed but not in the same way memories and installing an SSD is incredibly straightforward this is the new iron wall 510s these are the nvme SSDs for nas and installing an nvme is incredibly straightforward you don't even need a screwdriver again remove a panel remove a panel get your nvme SSD make sure it's labeled face-up make sure you double check the key at the top because you will need an nvme m2 SSD the nvme bit is very important put it into the slot there's a little clip there push the clip and that's it the nvme is now installed inside that device and again very easy to do pop another one in inside move the clip bank to in VMI's installed actually quicker than it took me to upgrade the memory now it's worth highlighting that you don't need to install too you can install a single SSD if you choose the reason you might install two is to take advantage of a different kind of caching you have read-only caching you technically have right only caching these days I think DSM 7 it's gonna be smoothing that out and you have readwrite caching the most popular that actually works in both ways with regards to buffering the hard drive area you can compare those to a raid 0 of melding the drives together for read or write only caching and read write caching is a raid 1 environment with two SSDs so in the improvement of SSDs the nvme SSD caching in this has been noted before we'll of course we doing the performance benchmark on this we've already done one for the DES 720 that should be going live in a few days but ultimately with this device when it comes to the hard drive and SSD array is more beneficial in a 4 basin area than it was in a - just because you've got a lot more speed potential with those hard drives in conjunction with those SSDs when having a larger hard drive or a two hard drives and two SSD as we found in the 720 has its limitations by comparison now it would be remiss of me before we even go any further after all of this talk about nvme SSD caching without discussing the moderate elephant in the room those one GbE ports there at the bottom now this device when it was first announced a number of you felt not dissimilar to myself when we learned it was going to be one gigabit Easterns it which was a bit of a kick to the stomach because we kind of assumed phonology and this gene would go 2.5 GPA at the very least nvme SSD performance benefits increased memory that great CPU that we not even talked about yet inside enterprise of all hard drives enterprise level SSDs all of that adds to a huge amount of performance possible but all of that performance is internal so if you're running vm's if you're running a surveillance setup if you're running a plex media server if you're running things that are inside the mask when they're operating and rendering and what you are seeing is a browser-based interface of that you will see the benefit but because of the rear port it is a bit of a bottleneck there are 2 1 Gigabit Ethernet ports there now don't get me wrong you can link a kogai or port trunk or load balance to a lesser degree this allows you to combine those one GbE ports of 100 or so makes each and combine them into two Gigabit Ethernet so in other words around 200 or so megabytes per second but even then that's still a bit of a limiter you heard what I said about one of these drives surpassing 200 megabytes on its own so the 1gb ports on this are still incredibly beneficial and the majority the hardware in your environment now or in the years to come are not going to be 2.5 GB 5 GB or 10 GB enabled you may not even take advantage of this but it's worth highlighting that if you connect this device to a switch or your internet service provider root RSP if you connect that with one or two Gigabit Ethernet ports if you have to understand that every device does communicate with denars is sharing that connection so if you connect this with 1gb a and you connect this and five people connect with it at the same time they will only get a maximum throughput unless you tinker with the priority settings 20 megabytes per second each because they'll be sharing you know that's only if they're simultaneously accessing and if all of them are utilizing the full bandwidth they can potentially do I mean you can assign priority to devices in the home or office environment you can do lots of things within the software but there's still no avoiding that's a huge amount of throughput internal potential that is getting bottleneck in a scenario where you may have multiple devices now there may be people watching this going okay is everything I owned one GBE anyway and that's a very good point but more internet service providers are considering 2.5 GB now particularly in the rise of Wi-Fi 6 - a number of commercial devices and devices reusing a home for something as simple as multimedia are getting to a point with 4k and 1080p and incredibly dense codecs out there that the media we're watching is taking a lot of bandwidth and although most of it won't fill an entire 1gb connection some of them are becoming very down close and when you look at some of the high things like ok 8k and stuff like that which isn't really geared towards his 4k enabled box one GBE there still no avoiding it is a little bit of a disappointment this price point is still pretty good particularly in comparison to the Nominating the improvements the fact that they're hopefully keeping those prices as close together as possible but 1gb is still something I know a number of you were not hoping for and unfortunately have seen so what else have we got going on on the rear of this device well we have got another USB port there and it's worth highlighting those USB ports don't just support external storage they can be utilized for other things and wireless dongles they can be utilized for printers UPS's there are actually quite a lot of USB devices sported by Synology but none of them in the traditional KVM of a keyboard video mouse setup or to be utilized in anything more than a add-on to this device to use very this device will always remain the the host with everything else a low scale client so bear that in mind there's the East Santa portal we talked about earlier on that allows you to add another five bytes of story to this device and again why would you do that well four bags of storage is great particularly in light of the larger generation of drives that are out there these days but four bags can fill up real quick and again if you look at 1080p 4k I came in here and more we're starting to see some files are just Herculean in their size if you're backing up games from your PC rig then chances are that you're going to be utilizing a lot of bandwidth I mean if you look to games like GTA 5 recently that game is super old and with all those DLCs it is massive what I'm saying is if you're running a device like this for backing up a standard system rig with all of your files chances are you're gonna run out of space eventually and the idea of expandability to add another five days of storage this device can be opportunistic you know you are talking about by the time you need it even bigger drives out there to have yes the expansion is jbods to the radius handle by the device and yes the expansion itself does require a commitment of around 400 quid to buy that but the expandability later date allows you to you know leverage your budget accordingly now toward a four by that gives you the ability to add drives later on and our number of you will just go straight for a night bag with a raid 6 bang straight off the dot and I get that but not everyone is like that it's nice to have that choice early doors and that's about it really we've got those rear mounted fans there and they can be set automatically or manually for their rpm to adjust accordingly increasing and decreasing as needed and again if noise is a factor which it really isn't on a device like this is pretty quiet you can lo those are PA the RPN of those fans manually I'm talking of kind of environmental stuff in your home or office environment I didn't really mention the LEDs can also be dimmed as well so all the LEDs on the drives and the system can be lowered to absolute zero or might as bright as possible yeah I mention nice let's talk about noise for a second this isn't a very noisy device I think it's like 19 DB I on short it's on the screen at the beginning and again I've been running not this device but I've got a few of the newest analogies running simultaneously and you can't really hear them right now and they're only about two meters that way so they're quite quiet but you need to bear in mind is more enterprise level hard drives produce more noise for those of you coming up in the next week or so you're going to be watching a lot of software videos about the brand-new series of analogies a lot of the time I purposefully kept the mics very close to the Nazis when I've done boot up cycles when we've been testing different things and there isn't I've done that is so you can sound you can hear the difference between bog-standard I think bog-standard they're soaked hypocritical I mean standard series drives you know up to about six maybe eight TB these drive these days that don't make much noise and then you go higher than their these drives are bigger they're particularly the helium sealed drives there's a lot more going on inside and you hear it a lot more audibly you know even a meter away from the device so a lot of the time the NAS can't really do anything about that noise because it's the drives so make sure if you're sensitive about noise to look into the noise of drives before you buy them now carrying on the subject of hardware we can talk about the internal hardware at this device we've already talked about the memory that we're going to touch on and again a bit soon and we talked about the nvme SSD caching all of that means nothing if you don't have a good CPU inside to take care of things and I'm pleased to say the CPU inside this I'm already pretty pleased with early doors in it at times I've experimented with it that is the Intel Celeron the j4 one to five it's a four core 2.0 gigahertz processor that can be burst up to 2.7 gigahertz per koi also opens the door to ddr4 so with the ddr4 memory that this arrives with full gig after can be upgraded that it's serologies are in two thousand six hundred and sixty-six megahertz so dim non-ecc memory so let's go through it the CPU is definitely a jump from its predecessor that was a J 3 4 5 5 and that CPU was 1.5 to 2.3 gigahertz when burst and that was a 4 core CPU - also right with full gig of memory that was ddr3l at 1866 mega so he's a jump up and in almost every single regard this new CPU outperforms its predecessor apart from I and 10 bit h.264 decoding but were in code decode we'll talk about that in our Plex video soon now on this device that CPU opens the door to a number of things thanks to you HD graphics 600 it means that you can take advantage of 4k as well as 1080p transcoding it can playback the majority of 1080p in 4k files but transcoding you will see different performance overall you'll certainly see the difference in native performance versus Plex performance and transcoding particularly even if you allow clicks media server to take advantage of to Hardware transcoding engine you know you've got a Plex pass and you've let though your server have access to that facility it still won't be as good now there is a little bit of confliction at the moment we're sort of working in the background on some stuff that come out last year and again and to kayo who helped us with the 920 review a few weeks ago going through some stuff there about how to improve performance in terms of transcoding in Plex Media Server we're finding out something about drivers that we can disable I'll save that for another video but the vanilla device here with knowing no change in via SSH or anything like that this device does perform very well in Plex we're really looking forward to seeing how it compares with both our videos with the ds2 to zero plus that went live last week I believe and how it compares with the nine one eight plus and ten nineteen plus the reason being that this is supposed to be the follow-up to the nine one eight and a number of you bought that box because of its affordability as I plex media server I will say that I think it's going to perform admirably admirably well in Plex Media Server for what you know the money you're paying but remember this isn't an Intel Core this isn't like a Pentium so we saw in an arm antics this is still going to be a Silurian processor on an hour number of you we're kind of hoping they'd go down the slur on road I didn't think they'd ever do that because of the family and the series and the way they run these devices within their product families but still now the four gig of memory that would this arrives with is a lovely little starting point for gig is to me should be the standard these days we're seeing more and more NASA coming out with two gig and I don't quite understand why four gig may seem a bit extravagant from a manufacturers start but from a user stance given that you normally lose up to a gig of your memory for the system running and it's very best without all the individual apps earmark in their own memory I'd say that this device arriving with four gig is a lovely amount to start with that fall called CPU allows you to take advantage of things like docker and Sun ologies virtual machine manager a great deal better than some of the dual-core variants of this because you need to allocate storage and memory in advance of those vm's and container environment another thing is so knowledge ease DSM platform and the way manatees caching in the background it does an incredible job of kind of harnessing the total amount of memory available using a little bit extra if anything when it's not being used and when an app comes along that needs the memory the speed at which it flushes the utilization of the memory at the center and those resources over to the apps is really impressive it's a very interesting viewpoint if you look at the resource monitor do check that out in terms of the applications that this thing can run anything from Synology this largely runs it notwithstanding the fact that it is file system is btrfs you can run it only xt4 if you like but thanks to the support of the btrfs file system you've got things like background snapshots to be created with a far lesser impact on your hardware resources so those that like to keep records of storage images so they can revert if need be that's very beneficial on top of that faster recreation of shared folders so if you have a shared folder and you want to duplicate it a bunch of times your connected users or if you've got staff and user groups and stuff like that so much easier on top of that you've got file self-healing where check sums are created before and at the end of transmissions so if there is an irregularity and avoidance of things like bit rock it can do the farce help healing there's a lot of stuff that beat our Springs that btrfs brings to the table and a number of the apps that this device supports in largely the entire catalogue of this enormous new DSM library art a lot to take advantage of btrfs and others insist that you have it running so what have you got well for those of you that have never used the sonority now it's worth highlight in the number of the apps from Synology are designed to replace apps that you're already paying for the reason being that if you are using a salty out with a Synology system with your data then it utilizes less resources their applications have been tweaked and you know evolved and updated regularly to be the best they can be within this storage environment case in point and the examples are generally always give are comparing some of the cloud managed apps that we use these days and the Synology alternatives so if you use Skype or whatsapp your family and colleagues and friends communicate using you Synology chat which will actually create multiple users all with account or within the system that can communicate all the data still it stays within the system not the internet or the cloud within the system is mobile apps desktop apps you can communicate messages send file send links do to-do lists it's just like those other chat platforms if you want to utilize for example a storage area that is a shared storage area that's one portal access point like the likes of Google Drive or Dropbox you've got that in this device utilizing Google Earth roam Synology drive so Knology Drive allows you to have a one portal access point as alternative to Google Drive and Dropbox and and and more allowing you to see all your folder structure open files be they document be they videos be they photos directly from that web browser without having to go through different apps or any other kind of file means Salalah T Drive also supports local file pinning and file streaming and again I know you're hearing file stream when off stream movies all the time it's more than that it allows you to create a folder on your desktop where you can have faster live on the nares and you can see shadows of those files and then either pin them do you want them permanently delivery system or only accessed when you want to access them and therefore they don't take up any room on your system but you can still see all the files are all the structure and you can pin them or stream them locally or just go like 30 days I want that and a little more and the intelligent background caching will know the files that you use the most it's very very cool and there's also applications such as surveillance station that allows you to attach a multiple IP cameras in your home or office environment and have a enterprise level surveillance platform with pan tilt zoom with simultaneous record and playback intelligent timeline scanning alerts to your phone alerts to your email so many features and functionality of modern IP cameras such a smart iOS support and motion detection and light support and heat detection all of these things can be facilitated into thus analogy now is to create a surveillance platform if multimedia is what you want to go for this analogy 920 a lot of writers support of photo station and Synology moments photo station for photographers a great app for those of you that have photo collections and portfolios and want to learn intrinsic details about your photos or you've got em slanting moment that allows you to use a I powered search tools and I ice powered recognition to go through decades of photos and then identify people places things subjects and then you can search your albums using intelligent search terms don't search for image 3 6 9 2009 oh three search for beech tree drink food dog cat whatever that you can search them and it will find them and produce those photos for you - same with the facial recognition - and it would continue cataloging as you add more photos allowing you to take advantage of smart tagging features that Google photos and Facebook have on your own local network storage not the Internet local storage cut the ties that's what we're saying here if it's music you've got audios own station and along with that you've got other iTunes server and other applications built in with DSM's App Center you to create a very unique and customizable audio areas which you can then pick up that audio over the Internet or the network on smart Sano's devices or Amazon Alexa and Amazon fire stick with dedicated Synology apps available from the Amazon fire stick platform and from Amazon Alexa the only NAS brand that has them as well allowing you to access your files with voice recognition often hours locally so there's so much open to you we haven't even talked about video we talked about Plex Media Server which runs on this you know pretty damn good on top of that you've got their own app video station which for all intents and purposes is better than Plex and that is a point I'm prepared to stand behind in a video coming very very soon where we compare them because it takes advantage of the system resources and gives you everything click stars without the bloatware without the extra stuff that you don't want or need and most importantly without a subscription clicks requires that subscription for a Plex pass yeah sure you've got the free one but you can't take advantage of hardware transcoding without it this video station the transcoding all of that the metadata scrape them from IMDB Rotten Tomatoes trailers cast list and thumbnails all included one thing is this is a contained package in terms of software if you're a business user virtual machine manager container station along with Synology office Synology calendar some knowledge email mail station all of these applications to replace the tools that you already use in your office environment that rely on cloud connections cloud subscriptions and ultimately monthly payments go away because this has it all included in that one payment you pay at the beginning a five to six hundred nicker it's that straightforward is perfect is it hell there is of course nothing perfect the surveillance platform after two cameras you've got to buy more camera licenses the reason being their platform it's subsidized by surveillance use so you only get two cameras included to be supported but it supports up to 40 and you will need to buy licenses for those extra cameras which isn't perfect the CPU isn't perfect to plex media server which I know I rubbed some of your noses out of joint and ultimately its ability is only limited by the fact of that CPU being a Silurian it's still a great CPU and the 1gb on the back is a bit of a pain but overall it is a good nazan 920 if you have been waiting on buying a powerhouse analogy for BAE and you weren't quite convinced about an arm I know you were thinking well hold out a bit this is a great alternative because it brings a lot to the table it brings all of the software resources from Sumati it brings a lot of hardware that has been heavily researched over time and it brings it all together in a single purchase option but it doesn't try to throttle you with additional payments afterwards like some cloud providers the only thing at the moment for us to figure out now is does this device live in your home for three to five years it does it have the longevity but it's a nine one eight if your own if you own the nine one eight right now should you be considering this now's probably not if you're an existing nominate user this to me is not a big enough upgrade to you know result in selling up and going for this bad boy they're very similar but if you're already under nominate for a year or two stick with it there may be something better along the way but if you were looking at the best for Bay that's a notice you put out for a while you're looking at it it is a good news it is a combined complete solution and I do recommend it I look forward to telling you more about this and all of our software overviews very very soon and if there's anything I've missed in this video do stay tuned for all of the follow ups we can be looking at VMs we're going to be looking at cache performance we are certainly going to be looking at plex media server and video station and if you've got any other recommendations moving forward put it in the comment but thank you so much watching there is a full review in the description soon as compares calm a lot more detail in there than I've gone through today and this has really gone on hasn't it if you do want to learn more always click Subscribe I do these videos regularly and I will keep you informed click like if you've enjoyed this video and of course there are more links in the description but the best places to get hold off your 9 what are your 9 20 plus I'll see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 94,913

Keywords: NAS Drive, Best Synology, Best Synology NAS for Plex, DS 920+REVIEW, DS918+ vs DS920+, DS920+, DS920+ NAS, DS920+ NAS Drive, DS920+ Plex NAS, DS920+ Review, DS920+ vs DS918+, DS920+ vs DS918+ NAS, nas drive reviews, Synology, Synology 2020, Synology Diskstation Review, Synology Drive, Synology DS920+, Synology DS920+ NAS, Synology DS920+ NAS Drive, Synology DS920+ Review, synology nas, synology nas drive, Synology Plex, Synology Plex Media Server, Synology review

Id: UsXPDv-wS8I

Length: 52min 20sec (3140 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 15 2020