Synology DSM vs UnRAID - Which NAS Software is Best for You?

[Music] hello and welcome back and that is Right today we are going to be tackling the subject of Nas software and we're going to be looking at arguably two of the most popular platforms right now whether you're a home or business user when it comes to storing your Nas in an intelligent accessible and tailored way we are looking at sonology DSM here on the left hand side and unraid both of these very different applications and deployments in mind and arguably different skill sets as well and both of them do bring a different level of uh I would argue sophistication design and skill level uh to the user and ultimately in the course of this video I'm going to be comparing both of these Platforms in terms of cost in terms of services and tools in terms of their GUI and control and kind of management there on the web browser as well as their storage capabilities uh resources power consumption and overall all just a verdict to help you understand which one best suits your needs but a few disclaimers straight off the bat first and foremost what you're seeing here on screen is the very best I could do to squeeze both of these guis onto the screen I experimented with going full screen side by side but unfortunately because a lot of users are going to be viewing this on mobiles tablets or even big screen TVs bit ambitious I know um but because of that it's very hard to find a line between how to show both of these side by side without unfortunately squish ing them in and I've had to go with as you can see 75° of zoom on the sonology and you can see 90° on Android I could make it smaller but the text gets even harder to read but just bear in mind that normally you would be accessing these full screen rather than this snap half half methodology you're seeing here another disclaimer the hardware value depending on which one you're going to be utilizing uh will differ if you're using uh DSM for example DSM is available on a myriad of different solutions from the brand that go all the way from high-end kind of ooto core zeeon silver systems and AMD all the way down to very affordable systems that run on you know compact real Tech CPUs and arm-based architecture and similarly unraid runs on pretty much anything x86 based and because of that the experience you have will different depending on the hardware configuration you use for the sake of this review I am running uh the son here on a DS 920 plus uh a ds920 plus that is running on um I believe a quadcore Celeron based processor there and 4 gig of memory that's been upgraded um Sorry 4 gig with a 2 gig module additional inside there and in the case of unraid I'm running it on the brand new uh link station N1 that I had set up for a review that reviews already gone out this is a system uh for 279 nicka runs on a sellon quad core and 16 gig of memory and it also arrives with an unraid license as well that is the system we are using because I wanted to compare TurnKey versus TurnKey and UNR there aren't a lot of um official TurnKey Solutions out there and this is one of the few I could go with but you can find both a review of unraid and the pros and con short form version of unraid as well as um you can find my uh DSM 7.2 review and should you buy which is about an hour long so again I've gone through these systems in a painful amount of detail on other videos and some of that I'm of course going to be alluding to in today's video but we're going to have to keep things in a slight more bullet point form when comparing these two hence the sections we're going to go through but let's crack on with Section number one cost and value now I could spend a lot of time immediately frontloading this video with the design of these and I will get on to that later in the video but I think it's important to understand just how much an end user is going to have to lay down out of the wallet in order to get access to the software for these relevant platforms now the more expensive of the two unsurprisingly is going to be the sonology platform why is that because you can't get sonology DSM as a standalone software you have to get it in an inclusive hardware and software combination buying one of their disc station or rack station systems now the entry level price for that the cheapest I could find was £89 or $8 9 in us and again I know what you're thinking currency conversions trust me you can look it up without the tax is $89 or $79 uh in some locations on promo now that gives you access to a hardware system a one Bay Nas that's got DSM included now that does mean you're running on a real Tech arm processor and you do run um a foul of some applications you can't for example take advantage of virtual machines you can't take advantage of active backups so in order to have access to the full complement of sonology applications in DSM uh you have to spend um upwards of $299 this is for the ds24 this runs on a quad core Celeron with 2 gig of memory and this gives you access to every single sonology application and service that includes write once read many volume encryption that includes the surveillance virtual machines containers that includes everything so that is going to be our base point for how much it's going to cost for you to get into DSM and of course and we'll touch on this a little bit more later on you can go ahead and try out a demo of that application completely for free on Sony's own website again this should be linked in the description and you can test it out with a pre-made configuration to get a handle on it before you go ahead and pay fully fledged for a system now in the case of unraid the cost of unraid you're only paying for the software unlike that system I talked about earlier on where it is uh the license that's the standard class uh unraid license if you're going to go ahead and get a hold of your own Nas server and you only want to find out how much the server software is going to cost well it's going to cost you $59 for the basic that gives you access to six storage devices $89 to get up to 12 devices or Limitless um it's going to cost you $19 now bear in mind that $19 is already significantly lower than that 299 but the 299 there includes that Hardware that's why we're including that LinkStation N1 bear in mind this is an Indiegogo project at the moment and that is the introductory price that 279 that may be more expensive in the future but still nonetheless that still means that you can get that um unraid license for a system for 279 but again that is the standard class license we're talking about there the basic license but nonetheless all three of these licenses are lifetime licenses there there's no subscription model it's not monthly payments and there is a 30-day trial if you want to take advantage of it you do have to get yourself a USB in order to take advantage of it on any system but after that you are going to need a system to put it inside and again we'll refer to these later on you can either buy the uh system pre-made you can go on something like eBay and get a readymade server very very cheaply to run unraid from and you can you know pick these up remarkably cheap so arguably when it comes to the software price entry point between DSM and unraid it's largely inarguable that unraid is going to be the lower price software entry point overall even when you combine hardware and software together chances are you're still going to be saving money going for unraid but just bear in mind that with unraid you are losing out on a number of different uh features that are included in that Value Point that we'll touch on later on so don't just immediately leave this video knowing that unraid is cheaper and therefore is the best option there is significantly more to this comparison than that moving away from price and now onto the subject of value that's really where things do change hands because when it comes to Services tools applications and abilities that are included within the software by default DSM really does flip the tables here now we'll get on to precise um details on DSM but I think we should start with unraid first because it may seem like I'm being slightly disingenuous about unraid here I'm really not unraid is a fantastic platform and when we talk more about the GUI and the graph uh you know just the UI in general not just graphical but all of the controls at your disposal it is a very well-tailored tool that does strike quite an interesting balance between keeping it user friendly and also keeping it functional on top of that as you can see here we are getting real time information and we got little widgets here that are giving us information about our Network array our storage array Hardware health and we can dig pretty deep into all of those on top of that there's lots of features and services that we can enable and take advantage of with regards to synchronization with regards to multitier backup for enabling certain uh Protocols of management and access and creating our storage array with file and folder level access says if we choose all of that built in however this is not first party these have been installed utilizing certain uh containers and Docker applications utilized here in the app center now unraid is absolutely fantastic for you know creating uh allowing you to create uh crafted um inhouse tools applications uh utilities and more and con converting them for running on a Nas server here for example there are so so many tools here that you know VI the likes of GitHub have allowed users to convert existing Linux tools existing uh PC and even in some cases Mac Tools to be running within a Naas environment direct storage application use however these are all thirdparty not first party there and unraid provides you with a graphical user interface it provides you with the base the tools and utilities to run them but these are still effectively third-party tools so whether you go into the community App Center where there are quite literally hundreds of you know 1,793 applications already listed there constantly growing all the time and you head over to un raid's own documentation you can see they make it abundantly clear that you are utilizing in most cases third party tools that are not created by or directly in most cases is in conjunction with Line Tech or un raid so do bear that in mind they're still Fantastic Tools and if you want to use certain thirdparty tools already that you're using in your own existing server interface and therefore you want to run uh tools you already know on your unraid server you know nexcloud and the like it's not going to be a problem for you but if you're buying a NZ um server software or you want to use a Nas server software where it's all inhouse including and tested together that's where DSM is going to come in what do I mean by that well start light you've got the app center to start with which has absolutely loads of first party applications on top of that there is support of thirdparty applications much like unraid but there is far far fewer and they have to be added to either a contributor or a verified third party open source list there's around about I think 90 to 100 applications total again with popular third parties your Plex Media Server there your tocal your team viewer all the way running through but techology always prioritizes its own first party applications and to their credit they're trying to add as much as they can to the software experience for the user so some things are native to sonology application so things like the sand manager for mounting ice scuzzy target uh targeted storage the storage manager itself a lot of the backup applications a lot of the management applications and CMS stuff is either included by default or you're invited to install them by default during the setup of your device and all of them are included within the app center and are tested developed and maintained by sonology themselves and if you move outside of the system and you want to look at say client tools sonology has a wide range of first-party client tools for PC Mac and Linux systems that allow you to have tailored access to your sonology NZ in that first party ecosystem this extends to whether you want to use iPads iPhones whether you want to use Android devices there even as far as Amazon F TV and you know your multimedia devices having first-party apps that allow you to integrate and access the data on your Nas in a first party streamlined fashion now that may sound a bit wanky but what I mean by that is those applications are then all managed by one party they're all having their security and feature updates by one party but it's also worth highlighting that that software does have something of a lifespan what do I mean by that well if you make your way over to sonology list of applications and services you will find that of course their software can only be maintained for a given period of time what do I mean by that well if you go to the support status of a lot of their software and go by the software not just the hardware you will find that some of their software reaches a certain point of no return now unraid when you do run unraid it's effectively lifetime supported again they're only maintaining the software which again you will always have access to the software updates but of course as you move your system forward the hardware you're going to upgrade over time of course but the software is going to largely remain the same on that USB and in recent updates they've added everything from ZFS support um in your pools there they've upgraded improv some of the SSD caching therefore right caching to improve performance and other Innovations too sonology by the other hand when you look at it there has integrated um other improvements in its DSM and gone to whole new versions but that is at the expense occasionally of some applications becoming end of life or versions of those applications becoming end of life due to licensing difficulties or DSM for example in DSM 6.2 phasing out support of the previous DSM which means you have to move on to the newer version of DSM however some devices do not have dsm7 support if you've got a device for example that's older than about 7 or eight years some of those systems the lower powered ones don't support dsm7 consequently your system will no longer have the latest updates so that's good as all those features and services are withy DSM and we are talking about quite an extended period of time it's worth keeping in mind that DSM does have a finite support and if you're running for example uh sonology from 20134 15 some of them will not support the sm7 and therefore you may get left behind in updates in a way where unraid will effectively be lifetime again we are talking about extended decade periods of time for a piece of software so there is a reasonable expectation and an unreasonable expectation that we're going to have to balance between but still if your server you plan on running it for 5 10 20 years this may well be a concern in terms of those Services tools and support next up let's discuss navigation now I mentioned earlier on there are of course third party and first party applications that you can use to access the nas remotely or on the local area network if you want you can use a lot of third party applications for unraid you know uh Nas management tools there or use third party apps again like um nexcloud and stuff like that to manage the nas utilizing that software or simple something as simple as VLC to access your media or Plex Media Server to use those but for this we're going to be talking about accessing the na here on the web browser again I could cover 10 or 15 different other ways but I just want to focus on the GUI and the web browser to see how they differ now immediately whether when we're looking at these systems let's go back back to the control panel and we want to see the server Hardware we can see that there is certain elements of crossover when it comes to text being displayed there on screen if we look at the resource monitors for both of them you can dig a Little Deeper to get system information and get uh processes there running in the background But ultimately with unraid you will have to make your way in to use some of those third- party plugins in order to access and monitor your system long term and get some of that real time information in a more graphic fashion now this is something we're going to come up against time and time again because if you're happy to use those third party tools that's absolutely fantastic because then you have so so many more ways to interact with the unraid server using those third party developed tools but very few of them are ever as userfriendly as they are on the sonology now to put that into perspective here is the storage manager on both systems now on the left we can see here in D M it's pretty clear there's the base of our physical system there's the m2s at the bottom there there's the health of our volumes and the leftand side we can dig into the pools we get real time information about the storage pools inside that we can dig into and if we want to add new drives again it's pretty straightforward we can go into the overview there we can go into the hard drives that are listed and if we want we can manage the available drives and decide what we want to do it's very cheerble it's very user friendly you can even do all of this via the mobile application there we can find out more information about the drives overview the overarching um settings of the DSM system we can go in if we wish to individual drives and find out more information about them one by one so again we can go into the health info of these drives find out more about them dig in quite deep and all of it is presented in a very user friendly fashion now in unraid it's not that straightforward as you can see right now my storage um I not mounted on the UNR array right now none of the drives are on that's great for power saving and again if we wish we could always have it so that the pull always activates when we turn the system on let's turn it on here and the system will now Mount those drives again it's only because I've set this up to unmount them when not needed but we already see the array devices there if we want to create a ZFS pool we can there which is still good that there is support of zest that has uh kind of um counted a lot of the questionable performance numbers compared to um sonology and cup and other you know exd btrfs and ZFS platforms but still nonetheless I wouldn't call this userfriendly by comp in comparison to the sonology platform there it's not out of this world difficult and I would argue this is significantly easier to understand than something like true naaz that we'll talk about in another video but still nonetheless I wouldn't call this tremendously user friendly there are ways and means around that for example if you touched a question question mark up here unraid has enabled and added lots of explanations here but as useful as this might be it's still a large wall of text being thrown at us here on something that was already a large wall of text now in UNR defense when it comes to installing a lot of those third party applications and some of those Services it is just as easy as it is to install an application on DSM as it is on unraid and vice Versa for example if we want to go into some of those tools and utilities and some of the things that we can install here for example say we wanted to go ahead and install Advanced copy we can go in and we literally just have to click install we click install it runs the plugin there in the background and unlike a lot of slightly more complicated applications and services when you might want to install um some sort of service onto your system you know unraid has managed to bridge the gap quite significantly between turnkey um OS Le Nas Solutions and some of the third party ones where something like open source like true Nas requires jail configurations which although tremendously secure can be quite a headache for the less experienced user and as soon as you created those uh these plugins go into the plug-in section find your plug-in and each one of these can be managed quite easily and again there are multiple apps and services that you can use for example for folder views there's slightly more graphically flourished versions of things like this on top that you've got ones for photos you've got ones for videos you've got ones for third party like Plex you've got all of the backup and resync ones they're all built in there and then you've got ones like the ones I mentioned earlier on like nerd tools that allow you to bulk install huge ranges of tools and services and applications but again this is not really being presented in a userfriendly fashion for Less experienced users now on the flip side of that there may be experienced users that want to be able to TR what they're doing quite significantly and for those you can of course go into the terminal of your uh unraid n and run on the command line lovely and easily and again there's a lot of Helping Hands and guides available on unraid for you to manage all of these things they're quite handholding in the community and as something we covered earlier on in a video we did with um uh Ed over at space invader 1 when we were talking about the pros and cons of unraid and why someone should switch for it one of the things he highlighted that was tremendously true is the unraid community is arguably one of the friendliest out there unfortunately when you look at some uh Comm um open source software where it is very heavily based on Community Support be it first party forums or utilizing things like Reddit you tend to find uh the kind of elite level God server admins or users that are experienced kind of talking down arguably or kind of mansplaining to a point or gaslighting users and have not really experienced too much of that on the unraid uh community and particularly at the moment with their documentation being upgraded to the new um unraid uh version for the new service they've included in version 6 I believe 612 yeah 6124 a lot of that has led to just a very handh holdy Community but still nonetheless as good as that all is it is still nowhere near as user friendly to control manage and navigate as it is on the sonology because the Synology is based on being as userfriendly as possible a lot of money a lot of the money arguably that goes into these systems has gone into that design and if you are less experienced you're just going to have a better time overall navigating this from Individual applications so for example if I want to create a multi-tiered backup here for all of my data well I would make my way into Sol's hyper backup application or utilizing active backup and just navigate around and set my device ight if I want to use sonology drive I can use it like a Dropbox or a Google drive to access my data in a very easy Native fashion and all of these files being openable and accessible within the browser window in a userfriendly fashion yes I can install those thir parties but they're not going to be as smooth as that now when it comes to storage things do really change quite significantly though now storage management between these two platforms is actually pretty damn different and up until about a year and a half ago sonology would have held most of the cards in this comparison at least as far as performance LED but things have significantly changed in newer versions of unraid and if you're haven't you you haven't been on unraid for about the last 12 to 18 months I would definitely give it a revisit because they do have some new tricks up their sleeve now let's start on the sonology side of things um advantages they bring to the table well first and foremost you have support of something called sonology hybrid raid you have the ability to mix and match drives within a single raid pool and that raid pool and volumes you put on top are able to take advantage of the larger storage drives that you can mix and match iny hybrid raid also on top of that there is support of ext4 or btrfs something that both of these platform share now on top of that you have in more recent updates in DSM 7.2 things like write once read many support and volume encryption but this is limited to certain systems it has to be said not all systems can take advantage of those benefits and you do need to be running at least an x86 based processor and 2 to 4 gig of memory in order to take advantage of that uh on top of that when we showed it earlier on in the global settings there you have other options and accessible uh advantages too such as fast repair fast repair is when if you do have a dry foul and your rate goes into a graded State the fast repair system will make sure that it only builds the areas of the drives when it rebuilds The Raid and you insert new Drive it'll only rebuild the area of the drive where data originally lived and then just you know zero out the rest of the drive and that does mean that you're only just sort of top layering the data um with your zeroing it out so data recovery is still possible on that drive but nonetheless the fast repair is going to be good for those that are worried about um degraded performance or potential issues of a second Drive fails in a raid rebuild State fast repair does you know decrease raid rebuild times quite significantly also as mentioned earlier on the sonology has its own file manager there natively built in for you to access files and folders directly from within the web browser and you can even access and play uh you know videos photos and more within the web browser and with more tailored access for things like the photos application the videos application the audio application and more then of course you've got support of um sand manager there for you to be creating those storage LS where you can create a large area of uh Block Level storage you can access remotely and in many cases trick your local system in order to if for example if you're a video editor and you want to edit video directly on the nas perhaps over 10 GBE then you can create an area of storage in a lan and then your OS using things like iceing manager will allow you to bolt on that storage directly and trick things like Final Cut Pro and elements to uh uh connect with the nas not just utilizing something like mapped Drive which can be problematic so overall there are a lot of storage advantages and of course in sonology DSM platform because they're using traditional raids uh the performance benefits of traditional raids where you've got multiple drives being read and written to at any given time depending on the raid config you go for generally result in higher benefits of performance compared with unraid and its standard array now what do I mean by standard array well first and foremost on unraid if you use the standard array system of unraid generally although there are uh performance benefits to be had when it let's open that up there there are performance benefits to be had when it comes to uh power consumption and only having discs that are being needed being span up at any given time and therefore lowering resource utilization it has to be said because at any given time you're only really accessing two drives the main drive and the par drive you don't get those multi-drive performance benefits of traditional raid in the standard array of un raid now there are benefits of course to that one you can mix and match drives quite healthily it runs on btrfs or xfs as well on top of that when you're utilizing that system there mixing and matching drives is made a great deal easier and the parity calculations on unraid are I would argue more nuanced and arguably better in some respects when it comes to Resource use now again I've referenced him already but if you head over to Edge Channel I'll try and link to this video below if I haven't someone remind me um this link this video here goes through a lot of those parity calculations and ultimately it is a mathematical calculations of zeros and ones using binary for whether data lives on a certain bit of a drive on the par disc and it means that regardless of whether you're using one two or 200 drives you only need one drive for that parity bit to be calculated because of the odds and evens methodology now up until I say recently again 12 to 18 months there was a point where my arguments against unraid would have pretty much ended there I would have talked about how you don't get the performance benefits um and of course that when you use those plugins and applications although you do have access to a lot of the utilities for um snapshots for for uh raid recovery for off sync for the folder view all that sort of stuff although you have all of those things and they're all third party the main problem a lot of users had was to do with the performance loss on unraid and the way utilized that lack of multidisk access now that has been addressed in a couple of very key ways number one with caching discs uh now you can utilize an area of right cache using an SSD where when you send data to the UNR system it writes onto the SSD which then in the background is then uh during moments of idle and access it moves the data over to the uh unraid array thereby giving you the benefits of the right caching but also allowing you to use your existing raid but the real big big big one is now support of ZFS now it should be added that ZFS currently on UNR 6124 doesn't give you the full gamut of benefits so ZFS is generally associated to have the following benefits number one you have triple parity options like raid Z3 you also have inline benefits what do I mean by inline it means benefits uh that happen as and when data is being transmitted so inline compression so data is being compressed as is written to the system in line data to duplication to duplication being when the same data resides in multiple locations such as backing up uh virtual machines and there from there you can then have data that's duplicated only stored once but referenced internally for all of those backups then you got inline compaction as well so all of those benefits of unraid not all of those not unraid all those benefits of ZFS not all of them are currently available in the ZFS pools of unraid they're slowly getting mitigated over but you do have the benefits of is um the benefits of performance of multi-is performance there and utilizing some of the benefits of unrate expandability towards that in terms of your storage now since the addition of ZFS on unraid I think that has now significantly closed the gap between unraid and the likes of true n because unraid has given people a lot more userfriendly access to their storage software but now G gaining gaining those benefits one by one of ZFS does that close the gap with um sonology platform there I'd say yes if you're someone that feels that butter FS isn't as evolved as ZFS or because it should be added if you don't want to use butter fs and you want to use ext4 in your storage and the I should say the volumes bear in mind that there are some sonology applications that require you to use btrfs uh within your volumes and that may be problematic for some users who don't want to use butter FS would rather use exd4 ZFS um that is not a pre stipulation of unraid you can choose to use your storage PS in your storage access whatever way you want and as long as you're okay with using a lot of those third party services to really make the most of your um storage there in the background uh for protection from ransomware for protection uh for you know restoration there in the background there's a lot to be going on with there but just bear in mind they are third party based let's make our way over to probably one of the bigger benefits of unraid over sonology there resource use now unsurprisingly unraid is definitely between these two the one that's going to consume the least power there's so many reasons for this not withstanding the fact that when the system is Idle here you can see that the occasional Spike here when we're running operations might Peak up but overall in terms of how much CPU utilization happens in idle you're going to find that unraid uses slightly less and there's a few reasons for that not withstanding that sonology has quite arguably uh a dynamic approach to memory utilization the system actually has a tendency to hold on to more memory than it needs for most operations which it will intelligently flush between operations when needed but it then it basically holds more memory than it needs to just to ensure that there's a little elasticity when it comes to operations that are being used and you have to rely on DSM to free up that memory and flush it when needed as your utilization use grows but in the case of unraid unraid runs within the memory now what do I mean by that well the system boots from a USB that's got your unraid installation which it then installs there for operation in the memory during its runtime that's why when we were looking at some of these eBay options here you can run an unraid server on some frankly comically low priced Hardware when we're talking about this Nas here the link station for 279 even that Hardware that CPU is way more than you're going to need now if we make our way onto UNR here and look at the minimum specifications there you're able to see that the minimum spec is surprisingly low you can run this on a single core if you wish uh but it does recommend you need it you have at least 2 to 4 gig of memory to run unrate obviously when you go to the more aggressive uh ZFS based stuff that is when your um Hardware utilization needs to be a little higher but even then you can still get away with running your ZFS pool on and raid server which much lower Hardware spec than you would find on a true Nas server trying to run ZFS pools obviously that because is because ZFS runs a lot more of that inline stuff that we mentioned and the jails but still nonetheless the utilization is much much lower and the fact that you can use old Hardware you've got knocking around and we've done a video on using mini PCS and converting them into nasis with un raid but on top of that you can get away with just that USB stick plugged in so you can get pre-made Old Dell and IBM service knocking a ram over IBM and some of these are pretty highend although some of the CPUs arguably have you know seen better days they are well outside of warranty and the manufacturers have long since turned their back on it but in terms of Hardware efficiency the unrate server does arguably a better job in terms of lower power consumption and that is not withstanding the fact that the array you know can be stopped or if you use a standard UNR array only individual discs are running thereby lowering power consumption even further now in the case of the uh sonology the sonology does generally like for like use more system resources when in operation but there are allowances and you know things we have to highlight so for example there was the intelligent flushing of the cach that we mentioned earlier on that the system will perform in the background when needed also there are you know certain allowes that can be made within the control panel with regards to power consumption where you can have the system go on scheduled power on off some of the memory compression we mentioned earlier on there and hard drives be powered down into idle States or low power States when needed another thing that isn't really spoken about enough in my opinion is the fact that unraid doesn't really run well you know has been tried but not really effectively run on Arm based CPUs unraid is largely destined for x86 processors that's your intels your amds dual core quad core and that the architecture of x86 allows much more complex command uh and instruction to be handled to and from the CPU internally now DSM although of course it runs on x86 Bas processors as we mentioned at the beginning it also runs on arm processor s processors even the more sophisticated modern Arm based processors that run on 64 bit things like the real Tech rtd1 1619 uh the um uh 1252 I believe I might got that the two and the five the wrong way around but ultimately it means that the DSM platform can run on much much much lower Hardware spec but it is of course A reduced version of DSM something we talked about in our video where we looked at how DSM runs on more established systems versus those Arm based ones you do lose out onto Maps But ultimately it means that some of these nazzies arrive with 36 wat psus they can run you know for motor homes and on boats and stuff for extended periods of time and although you can buy secondhand Hardware less these racked Mount stuff but small little compact 2 and four Bas systems to run un raid from bear in mind that unraid needs to effect to effectively run it needs to run on an XC x86 based processor overall but let's go to our last section to do with control and management of the unraid and DSM platform now once again ease of use versus overall control will differ between these two platforms arguably if you're looking for a much more userfriendly and less system admin Reliant control and management of your Nas dsm's going to be the more appealing of the two now what do I mean by that well if you look at unraid if you want to manage your Nas even if you use a graphical user interface it won't be long if you're going for example the controls there you want to find find out more information about the processes it will load into quite a complex list there of active processes there in the background that's not you know unfamiliar if you go for even a Windows system go to the task manager go into your active processes chances are you will find quite an extensive list there but it feels just a little bit more user friendly and accessible than here where you will inevitably have to give way to using the terminal in order to really dig deeper now on top of that if you want to go for example some of the DI di agnostic tools that you can download those reports for if you want to make your way into the hardware profile there you can download it as an existing layout and ultimately yes you've got access to a lot of that information but it's once again being presented in quite a technical fashion there of course you can if you choose make your way into some of those plugins go into some of the pre-built ones that arrived with or go for some of the nerd tools ones there that allow you to add additional means and ways to manage your nzs manage some of those system resources the backups the duplication um the snapshot some of that stuff there all of that can be managed with those extras that are plugged in Via those extra tools that are third party but even then it's not that long before you have to dig into the command line on those and although on a surface level they seem user friendly and accessible to install and at least get to their standard user interfaces it's not long before you need to go down the command line route and then the case of the sonology you got a few options you've got the standard control panel there that anyone that's ever used Windows own uh control panel will be very familiar with there on top of that if you want to manage things on a slightly more complex level yes you can go ahead and enable um SSH or terminal level access to use things like putty or Windows Powershell if you choose on top of that you can go in and control the nas in all those preset areas in quite a straightforward userfriendly way that you would expect again very you know chewable easy to get your head round if you choose on top of that if you want to move away from that and go into the slightly more uh Technical and advanced you can make your way into things like uh report monitoring you can go ahead and use some of the third party some of which are paid for tools like active Insight multiple Nas operation and controls using the CMS system there are readily inaccessible from the user interface pretty much Straight Out The Gate and there are more tools that can be downloaded for system monitoring access and reports all to be generated by the system and indeed if you make your way in to some of the early management tools you can get the sonology nas to spit out daily weekly or monthly reports of storage utilization access rules all of which can be controlled quite easily for example say you want to add a new user in sonology system go to the control panel go to users and groups and you can go ahead and create individual users and those individual users can have their name and credentials and levels of access so if we call this person test we're not going to bother with a password or I think have to we can say which group they belong to from there we can say which applications and services they can have access to which stories areas their quotas all that kind of stuff all of it can be accessed and created very very easily here along with a lot of kind of quoters and stuff as well as if you need to in a pinch you can go ahead and choose a standard class user and then delegate them admin Powers when needed as well as access their permissions and roles easily now to do something like that on unraid we go to um users we then have got that we can create ourselves a new user we give them a name again give them a password if we choose go ahead and we add that user and it's quick but what about all of that configuration what about all of those controls and stuff that we created earlier on if we go into this user we can find out a little bit of information about them but not really it and once we go into the shares you have to reverse engineer a lot of that access rights there when you create a new share who can access it and although that is possible here on the sonology side by going into the shared folder control it just feels a lot more user friendly here if we want to you know create the user and give them access at the beginning not just doing it in the one fixed Direction and again you will see this time and time again when comparing these where if you know your way around the command line know your way around even a light level bit of coding you are definitely going to enjoy unraid for the kind of unlock experience that it grants you but you will find that intimidating if you don't have that level of experience and that is just where sonology DSM platform really shines and once you really dig deep into individual applications and the fact that their controls are also presented individually in that way you are just going to find overall DSM to be a much more usable experience for Less experienced and non-system admin users and so let's conclude if it hasn't already become abundantly clear DSM is the easier option of the tool managing and navigating the windows just feels a lot more modern and user friendly compared with unraid and that's been intentionally done there on top of that um DSM also brings in all of those first-party applications and client tools that we talked about earlier on that ultimately mean that DSM ends up being the far more easier to control it experience for the novag user is also a lot more simple to take advantage of and also it is very very easy to get into whether it is accessing accessing via a web browser or those applications and tools there on top of that more money is being spent inside sonology because of the combined money that's spent on hardware and software Solutions that'll allow it to innovate a lot of those tools for the first party while still maintaining a reasonably healthy list of third party tools there however or the good is as good as it is it is not perfect one there is the idea that that software does have Ely slightly more of a rigid end of life uh end of lifespan than unraid because a lot of these are locked to certain Hardware after a given point on top of that you got to buy the hardware to get the software and many would state that the hardware included with a lot of sonology systems when you make your way through the product portfolio is not that impressive and you end up paying a lot more for the hardware than you would buying the hardware new or secondhand and sticking unraid on it by comparison sonies are built to be efficient sure but experienced Hardware users are not going to be overwhelmed by that Hardware also something I didn't really touch on earlier enough is Hardware um compatibility and on the techology platform we are starting to see um when it comes to certain products like the DS let's go for a product here we're starting to see compatibility start to be slightly refined by sonology and for some not in a good way that when we look at the compatibility of certain Hardware that's USB upgrades we look at hard drive upgrades we look at different you know components we're seeing sonology somewhat limit some of the compatibility of thirdparty hardware on their system when you go to the third party there and you know some people want to use for example larger hard drives than 16tb they want to use a larger range of hard drives than what is being shown here on screen for the DS 1522 for example whereas andr doesn't have a lot of those limitations presented at least in terms of supported compatibility and verified compatibility and for some users that is going to be a pain and that is freedom that is granted on and raid in Spades it is still the most user friendly um kind of Nas OS out there once you compare it against a like of open Med Vault and tras and raid brings a lot of featur Rich experiences to Nas and DIY services and private server ownership that up until unraid really got established was locked behind the command line on top of that the price point is ridiculously cheap when you look at those price points there yes this is real money and if you're someone that's you know gotten used to using something like true Nas that has no price on it this may seem a lot but this is Lifetime access they're going to be updating the firmware updating the security updating the features you know like adding ZFS like adding some of those SSD benefits there Lifetime and once you pay for that once that's it that's forever and it allows you over time to you know this year use 114 quid Dell power Edge um server there then down the line few years later upgrade your server upgrade your server upgrade your server and that whole time you're still using the same USB with the same unraid license there also we got to applaud the inclusion of ZFS as uh for your pools is massive for unraid in order to you know get around that performance loss that was always associated with unraid and their unraid there uh unraid array I should say there on top of that although you reliant on third party applications is something of a pain when some of us would quite like first party you know the range of third party tools is insane and always being added to all of the time and that infinite level of unraid os support combined with an Ever evolving and frankly quite nice third- party community on the likes of Reddit and unraid own own Community forums is to be applauded but we can't Overlook the fact that unraid because of using all of those third party apps it does mean you are opening up those attack vectors for if for example an application is installed that has a purpose or purposeful or accidental back door left open that although unraid being super secure that app that you're installing might not be in for those cases it can be often but of course it isn't foolproof often um beneficial to go for first-party tools that are developed in line and within the OS hyper structure that the NASA system is built on but ultimately between the two of them there is clearly great potential for novice and experienced users on both platforms and I really hope this video has helped you decide which one best suits your needs thank you so much for watching I hope you've enjoyed this let me know if you have in the comments if you want to learn more we've linked some of the videos we've talked about already in the description as well as YouTube almost certainly recommending a lot of these videos and guides along with um EDS ones over at space invader 1 on the right hand side of the page so check those out finally if you want to learn more um or you need help with your data storage solution head over to NAS Compares use the free advice button on the right hand side of the page to uh get some free support from us alternatively you can take advantage of some of Ed's tools such as the nas Builder which is currently in development and going to be released very very soon pop the uh password in there and then from there you're able to access the new Builder tool along with the raid calculator tools the pr the best price per terabyte tool lots and lots of stuff for you to be get on with and learn and get the right solution for your needs but thank you so much for watching I hope you enjoyed this and I'll see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 15,418

Keywords: Best NAS Container App, Best NAS Hypervisor, How to Install UnRAID on NAS, NAS 2023, NAS Hypervisor, UnRAID, UnRAID 2023, UnRAID Container, UnRAID Containers, UnRAID Guide, UnRAID NAS, UnRAID NAS Guide, UnRAID NAS Installation, UnRAID on NAS, UnRAID VE, UnRAID vm, UnRAID vs Virtualbox, UnRAID vs QTS, UnRAID vs TrueNAS, UnRAID vs VMware, Unraid vs Proxmox, Unraid vs Synology, Unraid Pros and Cons, Unraid Advantages, Unraid Disadvantages, Unraid vs QNAP, Unraid vs VMWARE

Id: PKZAsHa4hGA

Length: 51min 3sec (3063 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 28 2023