That's a LOT of hard drives! | Synology DS1821+ NAS review

I Got a notification that I was running out of storage space on my Nas but instead of just throwing bigger hard drives into it let's check out an option that's an upgrade in more ways than [Music] [Music] one sonology sent a new Nas my way to explore as with all of my reviews theany has had no input into the video the opinions expressed here are entirely my own and no money has changed hands I'm in a position that I know a number of other network attached storage owners have faced where they're running out of space but it's not coste effective to swap out their existing hard drives for larger ones instead of scaling up with bigger drives it can be advantageous to scale out with more of them and this model the D s 1821 plus will let us see exactly what that's like the front panel is simple but functional other than the drive base there's indicator LEDs for power and network activity and a USB 3 port in the lower right corner there's a lot of connectivity on the rear of the unit though with three more USB 3.2 gen 1 ports 4 GB Network ports and networking is something we'll discuss a bit later on and the sock for the internal AC power supply with eight SATA hard drive Bays there's plenty of room for storage and growth sonology sent along a few of its plus series drives these are 8 TBT and run at 5400 RPM they are of course guaranteed to be compatible with the nas but you're free to install other makes and models of drives if you prefer the company maintains a helpful list of models that it's tested and know to work these Drive caddies can be used two different ways with 3 and 1/2 in drives they're toolfree just pop off these side rails drop in the drive then snap them back on also included with the 1821 plus is a bag of screws and these are for if you plan to install SATA ssds instead and keeping the drives cool is a pair of big 120 mm fans with temperature control that also managed to remain surprisingly quiet initial setup couldn't be simpler just plug the nas into your network power it on then browse to find. sony.com and it'll locate the device and walk you through the process once you get the operating system called diskstation manager or DSM installed then it helps you set up the storage pool there's options for the typical raid setups like 15 and 10 but it defaults to shr or Synology hybrid raid the dialogue describes shr as being for beginners but that's a bit misleading it's much more powerful and flexible than a fixed raid type sonology has a neat calculator on its site that better explains how it works unlike with regular raid shr lets you mix different Drive sizes to get the maximum usable space while retaining redundancy it also lets you add drives later or swap drives out to expand the capacity this means you you don't have to fill all the drive Bays right away you can add storage later on as your needs grow or replace drives with bigger ones on the Fly while this unit is called a Nas sonology has really positioned the disk station series as being multifunction servers and the list of optional packages you can install really underscores this some are related to file storage such as backup tools and file utilities but there's also options like email web and VPN servers and even a virtual machine hypervisor open- source and thirdparty packages are available too not just for nerdy stuff like Apache and python but also popular media center platforms like Plex so what about performance the DS1 1821 plus has an AMD ryzen V1 1500b which is a quad core chip clocked at 2.2 GHz it ships with 4 GB of ddr4 ECC memory and a popular upgrade with this model is to add more it's very straightforward to do there's a door on the bottom held on with a couple screws and taking it off gets you access to the pair of ram slots sonology sent me a second module and the official maximum the unit can support is a very healthy 32 gigs though some owners have had luck installing 64 another and even easier upgrade is to add an SSD hidden in inside the first Drive Bay are a pair of m.2 slots sonology also sent me one of its own branded ssds of 400 GB unit and it's a toolfree install it just snaps into place adding an SSD lets you do a couple of things the most common use case is to set it up as a read cache there's a built-in utility that can monitor how you use the Nas and make recommendations then it's just a few clicks to add it and the net result is that commonly accessed data on the nas can be served up much more quickly the other neat thing is that ssds can be set up as their own volumes if there's data you need to read and write as quickly as possible this is a good option without using up one of the 3 and 1/2 in Drive Bays it also can be a clever way to save power and wear on the mechanical drives you can set them to go to sleep after a period of inactivity but using the SSD won't wake them up unlike like with the mechanical Drive sonology doesn't list any known compatible m.2 ssds on its site other than its own branded models but that doesn't mean others won't work to test this I added a second SSD a 1 tbte drive from Intel and the nas had no problems detecting and using it there is one limitation though only sonology branded m.2 ssds can be used as their own volumes third party drives are limited to just being being set up as read caches it's said to be for performance reasons but it's disappointing to see given how traditionally DIY friendly that Synology has been around the time of this review there's been a change in how DSM reports on Drive Health previously you could see the smart data about all the drives in the system in addition to the built-in Health monitoring that DSM offers but the smart reports were removed as of DSM version 7.2.1 a ostensibly because that data alone isn't a foolproof indicator of whether a drive is failing that may be true but it's still useful information to have especially as drives age for a company that caters to power users removing smart statistics even though they may not be perfect is a strange choice and one that hopefully Synology will reconsider so with healthy drives what's performance like as one would expect it's easy to saturate a single gigabit Network link with file copies at 120 mbes per second that's why there's four ports built into the 1821 plus you can set them up for redundancy or link aggregation to get better performance diskstation manager supports smb3 multichannel which is an inexpensive way to get faster speeds without special Network equipment but not all client Operating Systems Support it well or at all and that leads us to the last optional upgrade I wanted to take care of around the back of the unit is a blank plate that looks suspiciously like an expansion slot cover to access this I needed to remove the screws that hold the top housing on then lift it away and sure enough there's a four-lane pcie slot just waiting to be put to use sonology had sent me one of its 10 GB network cards and I just needed to drop the card in and secure it in place sonology offers a few different models of cards in both SFP plus and 10g based T versions and there's even a couple of thirdparty cards on the compatibility list I opted to go with the two Port SFP plus version so I connected up a DAC cable to my 10 gig switch and of course file copy performance got much better I was seeing speeds of up to 500 mbes per second copying 200 GB of video files in about 6 minutes and that didn't involve the SSD I'd installed earlier this was all going to the array of four mechanical drives so a larger array would of course yield better speeds a copy to the SSD as you might expect went even faster pushing 800 mbes per second 10 GB networking is clearly a great way to get the best performance from the snaz and it works equally well whether you're just trying to copy file from one 10 gig capable client computer or share the storage across s and that leads us to something else I wanted to test everything we've seen so far has been from using this 1821 plus fresh out of the box with blank hard drives which is certainly a common use case but Power users have been using NASA long enough that there are no doubt some people out there with existing older units looking to upgrade does the 1821 Plus offer anything to help as it turns out yes you you can of course connect the Old Nas directly to it through the network to transfer files and this is the best path if your Source device is of a different brand but if you're moving from a previous sonology device the process can be even easier and that's what I wanted to try out one option is to use the migration wizard package which will copy over all your data and settings in one shot I've been using my ds916 Plus for over 6 years and it's seen a couple of hard dri upgrades during that time nevertheless I'm running out of space and copying all the data would take quite a while and require at least as much free space on the new unit but sonology also says that you can just take the drives from your existing disc station and install them in the new one so I decided to put my data on the line to see how well it worked the first thing I did was upgrade my older unit to the latest version of disk station manager as this can apparently help make the migration process go more smoothly then as a precaution sonology recommends to export a backup of the NASA's configuration after that I could shut down the unit and remove the drives keeping in mind which Drive Came From Witch Bay I shut down the DS1 1821 plus next and exchanged the drives the drive caddies are similar between the two but not identical so this step took just a few minutes with all my old drives in the new disk station I could power it on and give it a moment to boot up back in a web browser the sonology find tool picked up the unit right away and just as it should it recognized that the drives had been moved from another dis station and offered to migrate them all I had to do was Supply it with the latest DSM installer file and let it do its thing sure enough after I logged in everything had been brought over from the pre previous Hardware with my data completely intact including the warning about running out of dis space time to take care of that next the array had been set up originally using shr and a nice feature is how it supports on the-fly expansion in my case by adding another physical drive DSM detected the new disc and it took just a few clicks to integrate it into the existing Drive pool after that I just needed to wait while it redistributed the data across the drives in the background a couple days later it had finished and now I had more free space there's another thing that shr allows you to do and that is to increase redundancy by adding another drive this is kind of the equivalent of going from raid five to raid six where the capacity of two drives is given up for parody data instead of just one but the upside is that you're better protected in the event that multiple drives fail around the same time which is not as uncommon as you may think given how most people install drives from the same manufacturing batch sonology calls this shr2 and I think it's a good idea to consider using especially as the number of physical drives in an array increases so who is this model 4 I think it cuts across a few segments of course there's small businesses where you have a need for network storage and some lightweight services but don't want to deal with the cost or complexity of a traditional server it's also great for power users and creative professionals who need a lot of capacity in a compact package and the option of adding 10 gig networking is a fantastic perk and of course it's a logical step up for an existing sonology owner who's grown beyond the capabilities of their current disk station and if the 1821 Plus plus ends up being not quite enough over time when it comes to storage there's another upgrade option beyond the ones we looked at here a pair of EA ports on the back allow for connecting two dx517 expansion units which hold five drives each these can be set up for additional network storage or used for local backup of the data on the nas itself of course the use of raid alone isn't a viable backup solution so DSM offers many options for this from sending data to a variety of popular Cloud platforms to just copying your most important files off to an external USB hard drive ultimately I think the ds821 plus has a lot going for it solid performance more software features than we have time for in this video the option for high-speed networking and plenty of Drive Bays to grow into for the about $1,000 us it sells for without drives I think it offers good value inevitably some will say that they could build their own Nas for less money and this is probably true but it wouldn't be as easy to set up or maintain nor would it come with the support and 3-year warrranty that this Nas offers sonology has been a popular choice when it comes to network storage for a number of years and solid models like this one certainly help explain why thank you again to sonology for sending out the ds1820 21 plus for me to review if you want to learn more I've included a link in the description if you like the video I'd appreciate a thumbs up and be sure to subscribe please consider supporting my work over on patreon and as always thanks for watching

Channel: This Does Not Compute

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Length: 15min 52sec (952 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 13 2023