Synology RT2600ac Router Review vs. RT1900ac - Clientless VPN and more!

[Music] hey everybody is Lawnside but never take a look today at a new router from Synology this is their AC 2600 this is a new and improved version over their other router called the AC 1900 that's still available but this one has better specifications to support all the features that they keep stacking into their operating system here so if you're doing a lot with your router and I'll show you some of the things you can do with this in a few minutes you might want to go with this one because it does have more RAM and a faster processor versus the other router that they offer this has 512 Meg's of RAM versus 256 on the other one a faster dual-core processor running at 1.7 gigahertz and a 4 by 4 AC radio versus 3 by 3 on the other Synology router now I do want to mention in the interest of full disclosure this came in free of charge from Synology however all the opinions you're about to hear are my own although Synology has been a sponsor here on the channel in the past they are not sponsoring this video so they're not paying for this and no one is reviewing this content before it is posted all right so let's take a closer look at the hardware now this is going to retail for about 230 dollars which I think it's pretty competitive compared to other routers with similar specifications especially because Synology seems to be updating these things quite frequently for security and bug fixes and whatnot I've been seeing usually an update about every month or so on the one I've got in the closet over there and they're very pleased with how well it has been supported over the time that I have owned the other one now you've got a lot of ports on this to talk about so this is a USB 3.0 port over here and what this lets you do is plug in external storage so if you've got an external hard drive that's formatted for the Macs for Windows or for Linux you can pop it in here and make files available to your local network or you can have them available over the internet as well using the same applications you would use with a regular Synology nas device you're not going to get all the Nats functionality you'll get out of one of their discs stations but you'll get enough to share files and do some basic stuff and they've got a button here that if you want to reject that drive you can push it here without having to login to its control panel first to do that so that is pretty handy you've got an additional storage option on the front because you can put in an SD card you've got to put it in upside down like so but when you get it in there you can then store files on here and access them in the same way and you can have both of these things going at the same time you can Giles to your smart television via DLNA you can also use this as a destination for the Mac Time Machine backup utility - so they've got a lot of basic nasa functionality on here that it's pretty usable on the back here you've got four ethernet jacks for your local network i would have liked to have seen eight given that i see this class of router having more reports these days but you can always get a switch to add on later of interest here I'm going to put the wrong camera button here of interest here is this little port here you'll see that it says ran to or land one and you can configure this to either act as a additional LAN port if you have two internet connections you can plug one connection into this port the second connection into this one and the router will load-balanced things between your two internet connections and have it use one internet connection or the other in the case one of them goes down so it could be a failover as well as a load balancer so you've got a lot of people on your network that are uploading a huge file or something it will then very smartly decide to direct some of the other traffic to the other service provider so your users never get an interruption pretty handy stuff really good for a small office environment over here you've got a USB 2.0 port and that you can use for either connecting yet another drive if you wish but you can also have it be a print server or you can get one of those 3G 4G modems from your cell phone provider and have that be your failover so you can have that connected in there and if something happens to your cable modem for example it'll switch to the over-the-air internet connection so you may want to get your your unlimited data on that one going power goes in here you've got a physical power button here as well so if you want to turn the router off it will stay off you can't hack that button that is a real button right there on the other side here you've got a Wi-Fi button if you want to shut off the Wi-Fi in the case of an emergency you can just knock it out with one push and you have a WPS button for connecting printers and other devices that supports that so pretty decent set of ports on this thing and now we're going to do is boot it up and see how it performs alright so we got the router all booted up and I want to show you the configuration options here now this interface is without question the nicest router interface you will ever see it really feels like a desktop computer here versus a little appliance that we're configuring and what they've done is they've put all the major settings into different applets on here so your network center is all your routing controls you have everything on here that you'll have on other routers but it's presented in a way that's a lot more organized is really good support available here just by clicking on the question mark and you get access to all of the advanced features you see in other routers but in a way that I think makes a lot more sense especially if you're still kind of learning the ropes I'll cover some of these features and more details we get a little bit further into things but everything is again organized into little applets here so I can go into the control panel here for some of the network attached storage configuration and then you can add additional features by going to their package Center which is basically a free app store so you can put in things like a VPN server and they've got a really pretty in-depth features on this one which we'll cover a little later in the review you have intrusion prevention you also have something called cloud station server which allows this to become like a Dropbox server so you can have your own Dropbox where you store your files on the drive attach to this and then all your computers and other devices sync up to it just like they've lived with Dropbox but you own and control the storage device that those files are stored in and I covered this in a video about a year ago where I was explaining how is syncing up savegame files from my android game through cloud station on its analogy Nats it actually operates the same on the router again you get some really neat features here media server for example is what you can use to interface with your smart television a download station here is like a BitTorrent client so they do include some things that you might see on their Nass devices not all of them but nothing you can really make this a pretty usable all-in-one appliance for your internet and file sharing so really cool stuff on that front now I want to do a rapid-fire of some of the features that stand out to me on this analogy routers and I should note that everything you're about to see you can do on the less expensive Synology router but when you start stacking all these features on top of each other you might want the extra memory and horsepower that this one provides here is the smart wind feature to start off with and you remember when I was going over the hardware overview I mentioned you can connect to different internet connections to your router and have it work as a failover so for example if I had that first land port occupied by my second internet connection that the blue one here went down it would switch over to the of one but you can also have it work in a load balancing mode where I could say give 80% of the traffic to the blue connection but I have 20% go to the yellow one and that way I've got a lot of people in my office and I really want to keep everything in a decent level of performance for everyone I can set this up to automatically decide which traffic gets routed through which internet provider and you can adjust the percentage here like so you can also decide whether that land port is your secondary connection or perhaps that 3G 4G modem we mentioned earlier or you can even have a VPN connection act as a secondary outlet on there it's a lot of options for getting your failover and load balancing going and there's also some pretty robust traffic monitoring and reporting on this as well and I wanted to switch over actually to my production router here the one that they actually use here at the house this is the less expensive AC 1900 router but the feature is exactly the same as it is on the more expensive one here and what you do is go over to Network Center and over to traffic control you get a list of all the devices on your network and you can do different things to them so I can have the wireless beamforming work with six devices and that basically appoints the wireless signal in the direction of the device so you get a slightly better connection against on other devices but I think it's implemented here in a little better fashion I can just click to get that all going if my daughter is acting up and I want to take her off the internet for a while I can click ban here and knock her off so the power of dad can be felt through a mouse click there you can also set custom speeds for individual devices so if I want to limit her iPad to five megabits per second downstream and maybe one up I can click on that and that will get police through that feature and you can also set devices to be a high priority so that's good for gaming PCs and Xboxes and whatnot that need a factor connection you can put them as a higher priority over other devices on the network so it has some quality of service stuff built into that that little thing there as well now over on the monitoring feature actually I found some really neat stuff in here so over here I can get a real-time view of my network again this is something you can see on other routers but you also have the ability to look at the past 24 hours and then the past week I just started using this feature today as a matter of fact it's been on my router forever I never really played with it before but you have the ability to do all that kind of stuff they've got this really cool report that generates itself automatically so every Sunday I have the router now going out and analyzing the traffic logs and giving me a report as to what happened and I check out this report it looks really nice let's click on the report here and it looks like a really well formatted thing where you can really get a good feel as to what's happening on your network you can even have this spit itself out every day if you wish to get a little bit more of a up-to-date thing if you're in an enterprise environment but you got just a nice way to format everything everything is you know organized very nicely here you can get a good sense as to what's going on it'll tell you all the new devices that join your network since the last report so if you are in an enterprise environment and people are bringing things in you can go through here and make sure that everyone on the list is authorized to be in there and you can also get a feel for whether or not that new employee is maybe consuming too much stuff on the middle of the workday there by getting a feel for how much that device is consuming so a lot of cool little tidbits within there you can also see what your applications are using the most bandwidth on your network even which websites are consuming the most traffic as well at least which domains are and I'm surprised to see here that things like iCloud really do hit the network quite a bit in videos grid services well I've got three Nvidia shields in the house and those devices are apparently constantly dialing home for some reasons those might be some things to start troubleshooting from this report as well to really nicely formatted report that gives you a good idea of what's going on on your network you also have some decent parental controls on here too so you can control things on a per device basis they have some safe searching involved so they don't stumble upon things that you don't want them to stumble upon you can also set aloud times of access so I can go in here and get a pretty robust way to block out certain times a day that my daughter can't use her iPad on the internet for example they also have some web filters here so you can block things based on specific categories or by specific sites that you specify so lots of stuff in there for folks that want to protect their kids from finding things they shouldn't be there's a guest network feature of course as all of these things do and the intrusion detection app was also of interest to me because not only does it look for things that are attacking you from the outside it also looks at things that are on your network that might be suspicious so here are four examples of a computer on my network hitting up a dynamic DNS server and that was something that I knew about because I was actually doing it but good to see that it found some things that could be potentially suspicious and let me know about them so I can go in and investigate so that's the kind of thing that it does look for outside stuff but also things that might be communicating out from inside your network and what you can do with this is that you can switch it into a mode where not only does it detect those packets but drop them and if I had that mode activated I could have had all of these queries denied just to play it extra safe and then I could approve them on a case-by-case basis you have some options to really get pretty granular on what might be happening on your network that could be of concern and they update these definitions things that it looks for on a regular basis like you would see with a virus scanner they also have maps here that will tell you where your attacks are coming from and an ability also to notify you by email or even by text message for things that you need to pay attention to now the real standout feature for me is the VPN functionality on the Synology routers they have a new thing called VPN plus server and what a VPN does is basically let you get yourself more people that you authorize into your network from the outside to access all the things on your network so if you want to share files or you want to have things print out you can have people connect securely through a VPN protocol to do all of those things and they have a lot of different ways in which to do that so if you go over to the VPN plus app and go over to the standard VPN section here there's four different protocols that it supports and it can support all of them simultaneously if you have sstp you have Open VPN l2tp and PPTP and if none of those work for you Synology has their own VPN server and client now also called Synology VPN there's a server that runs inside of that app for connecting people in and as a client that is available through Synology for most of the major mobile and computing platforms in which you can use to connect back in it's probably the simplest way to do it with decent amounts of encryption but again if you'd rather trust an open standard you have those options available to you as well and the most interesting feature of that VPN app here is something called web VPN and I would just let you do is without a client let people into your intranet to access things that are available via web browsers if you have an internal web server there's a way to get people into that internal web server without having to have them get a VPN client set up so what I've done here is I've set up my iPad to connect to the network here over my verizon connections I'm coming outside my network in and what you do is you go to a dynamic DNS address that you set up it can be through Dyne DNS or any other provider or Synology zone provider it will give you a login screen after you log in it'll bring you up to a portal here which I have on my iPad right now and I have something set up so for example I can tap on a little web app that I run locally here on my Nass device called sync up and again I can't get to this from outside but now that I'm on this client list VPN I can and I'm doing it securely here so you can get access to that what I can also do is actually access other web servers on my local network if I know the address for them so I have my HD homerun for example set up at this internal local address I can click connect and what it will do is actually connect me to that so if I know the IP address of our printer or something that I'm trying to troubleshoot I can log in and do all of that stuff with a web browser without having to have a VPN client all I need is my username and password to connect in through this secure web VPN feature pretty neat thing I think it's not for everybody but I know at least I'd have some uses for this at my day job and I think a lot of other folks could find some uses for this as well and you also can bring in your own security certificates also so you can have a certificate authority issue you an SSL certificate and use that for the encryption so there's nothing at Synology can really touch here it's all running locally on your own router there's also a mobile app that gives you access to many of the features that you just saw on the web-based control panel including parental and traffic controls you also have the ability to do all of your port forwarding and firewall settings from here as well and even have a real time usage monitor here from keeping track of what's going on locally on your network you can access this locally of course you can also access it remotely if you wish although that can be risky if you don't have a good firewall setup one way to access it remotely might be to go through a VPN to do it but either way you've got a pretty nice little app here that gives you a good amount of control over the device all right let's take a look now at some performance on this one we're going to test the wireless performance as well as the performance of its USB port so I've got my macbook pro here connected wirelessly to this analogy device here and this macbook is connected via a Gigabit Ethernet connection and we're going to see how fast we can get data through that wireless connection back to the computer and back again now this is an ideal scenario here obviously because these things are right next to each other but this will give us a good idea as to the maximum speed we can anticipate so now I'm going to do now here is institute the first test which is going to send packets from the Mac to the other Mac's let's get that going here we'll see how fast those packets come in so we're looking at pretty quick speeds here actually about 800 megabits per second almost ethernet speeds over this wireless connection so we're seeing some good performance there the range isn't bad on it either you'll get better range as a 2.4 gigahertz radio than you will out of the 5 gigahertz radio I also found that it was very smart about finding the best channel to put its radios on which is not something I see all the time pretty cool stuff let's take a look now and see how fast its USB port is on it with a hard drive attached alright so we've got a USB 3.0 drive connected to the router this is a solid-state disk which is very very fast and we have the Mac here connected up via Gigabit Ethernet so let's take a look and see how fast we can get data transited back and forth and it's coming in around 50 megabytes per second or so which is about half of what we usually see off of a good performing network attached storage device that we have tested here on the channel so not the best speeds but I think adequate for doing light file transfers kind of casual stuff like you might with some files that you want to just make sure are accessible to you locally and perhaps via the Internet now there is a setting here I'm going to pop back over to my web browser to speed up this port which I have enabled right now so you can see here in the network center under wireless there's an option here to downgrade the USB 3 device to reduce interference and this is a common issue with USB 3 and 2.4 gigahertz connections when they're in the same device like this all routers that I've seen so far that have this file feature require you to either leave that downgrade on or have the option to shut it off at the risk of interfering with your 2.4 gigahertz connections and the speeds that you're seeing here on the Mac are with that feature turned off you'll need to make sure you do that otherwise your speeds will be a little slower than what you see here so again not an ass replacement but a good supplement perhaps if you're just looking for some basic file sharing that is the RT 2600 AC from Synology I think it's a very good value for what you're getting here very feature-rich if you saw with all the stuff that I just glanced over there's a lot more to look at on this actually I really like the interface everything is just feeling very polished now and it's got a great set of VPN functionality also that you don't see on other routers out there now you might be wondering why go with this more expensive one if the less expensive one does all the same stuff and the reason really is going to come down to what you plan to do with it so let me pull up my other routers control panel right now so this is the old version the AC 1900 which again is still available for one hundred and seventy bucks but you can see here that I have my memory on the device 70 percent utilize that's running the VPN server the intrusion detection as well as that traffic monitoring so if I really start hitting my network card and trying to do a lot of things with the VPN I might fill that memory up to the to the tops and slow down my overall performance both for me and everyone else on my network so there's a little more room on the new one to have all the features you want to have enabled and still get decent network performance out of it so I think if you do plan to utilize a bulk of the features that are available on this product line go for the more expensive one with the greater capacity but if you're only going to do one or two things the other one will be just fine this is LAN siphons thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by my patreon supporters if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to land TV slash patreon to learn more and don't forget to subscribe there's a laundry B slash F

Channel: Lon.TV

Views: 56,220

Rating: 4.9164734 out of 5

Keywords: Synology RT2600ac, Synology, RT2600ac, router, review, wifi, wireless, NAS, USB, benchmark, performance, speed test, VPN, clientless VPN, Synology VPN, OpenVPN, configuration, set up, Lon Seidman, Lon Reviews Tech, Lon.TV

Id: tfEZU115e98

Length: 20min 3sec (1203 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 18 2017