Which Synology NAS Should you Buy? (Synology NAS Buying Guide)

hey everyone today we're going to take a look at what synology nas you should buy in 2021 so we're going to be taking a look at the consumer model synology nas devices and i'm going to stay away from the rack mounted devices mostly because i think that if you have a rack in your house there's a pretty good chance that you know which device that you want to purchase so before we get started i just want to say that i have a link in the description with pretty much all the specs for these devices and i will also leave a link in the description for all of the devices that we're going to be going over today so there are a few questions you first have to ask yourself to determine what nas model is best for you so the first is do you want to use btrfs and i'm going to answer that question for you and the answer is yes and basically the reason is because btrfs is self-healing so basically in the background your data can get silently corrupted so what that means is that it's sitting on your hard drive your data is sitting on your hard drive and a portion of it can get corrupted over time uh and basically when you go and try and open that file either you'll have trouble opening it or if it's a media file you might have certain artifacts that aren't supposed to be there and basically the btrfs file system will heal this so with redundancy and a scheduled data scrubbing schedule your nas will be able to detect some of the corrupted files and it will automatically fix them without you doing anything you can also use snapshots with the btrfs file system so basically you can freeze your files at a point in time and you can recover that if you ever need to so if for whatever reason all of your data in a specific folder gets deleted or corrupted or something like that you can go back to a prior snapshot that has its own retention schedule and you can restore that data so it's not necessarily a backup meaning that you should always have a backup it should be off-site etc but it gives you a lot of flexibility and a lot of protection so for this reason we are only going to be looking at nas models that support the btrfs file system if for whatever reason you feel like you need a nas to just store some data you don't care about the protection you don't care about redundancy you can buy one of synology's cheaper nas devices you're going to have most of the functionality of a more expensive higher quality nas but you're certainly going to be missing some features so for that reason we're going to be focusing on the the nas models the consumer nas models that support the btrfs file system so the second question that you have to ask yourself is how much storage do you need so generally what you want to do is you want to take a look at all your devices because chances are you're going to want to back up your devices to your nas then you want to take a look at all of your media files and basically think of everything that you might have to store on that nas and come up with a total in terabytes now take that total and double it i know that sounds extreme but it's the truth so the storage that you think you need and what you'll actually need in the future are two different things especially if you're going to be scheduling snapshots you basically have no idea how much data you actually need because you aren't sure how much data your snapshots will take up and how much you're going to be growing your data in the future so what i found for myself is that i thought that i needed somewhere around 12 terabytes of storage what i actually needed was 20 to 30 terabytes of storage which is where i'm currently at today so fortunately i assumed that i would need more i just didn't assume that i'd need this much more so for you you want to basically keep that in mind and you want to make sure that you buy a device that can store the data that you might think you'll need in the future so you also want to keep in mind that these nas models generally last for many years there are people that are using five to eight-year-old nasa devices right now and while they might be outside of warranty they work they you know generally don't have any problems so for that reason this isn't something that you're going to be replacing every few years i mean you can if you want but as the years go on you generally use more storage because your devices require more storage so for example a photograph that you take today and a photograph that you take five years from today are going to be drastically different in size so you want to try and project as best as you can how much data you're actually going to need and overall that's why i suggest that you overestimate once you figure that out you have to determine what rate array you'd like to use so there is raid 5 raid 6 shr 1 and shr2 shr is basically synology's hybrid raid it just allows you to use hard drives that are different sizes but generally if you use hard drives that are the exact same size shr-1 is equal to raid 5 and shr2 is equal to raid 6. so what raid 5 and rate 6 are is that raid 5 allows you to have redundancy with one drive that can fail any one drive can fail without you losing any of your storage so basically if one of your hard drives dies what you do is you take it out you pop a new hard drive in of the exact same size that is currently in it and the ray will rebuild raid 6 is the exact same thing as raid 5 but instead of having one drive that can fail you can have two drives that will fail so like i said earlier shr-1 and shr2 are basically synology's hybrid raid that just allows you to create a raid array you know using a six terabyte hard drive a second six terabyte hard drive and then two two terabyte hard drives that's a really basic example but um think of raid as using the exact same size hard drives and think of synology's hybrid raid as using hard drives of deferring sizes so the best thing that you can do for this is use synology's raid calculator so on their website they basically have a utility that allows you to add multiple hard drives you can use either the same size or you can use different sizes and it allows you to compare and contrast at the bottom different raid types which will tell you how much storage you'll be able to use based on the hard drives you have in the device so at this point you should have a rough estimate on how much size you think you'll need in the future you should have picked the raid type that you'd like to use and now we're going to take a look at the nas devices so moving forward i'm only going to discuss the differences between devices i'm not going to highlight the same things because generally these devices are very similar so we're just going to focus on the differences so the first thing we're going to take a look at is the two beta nas devices so that is the ds220 plus and the ds720 plus um so both of these are very similar the main difference is that they use different processors so the ds220 plus uses a celeron j4025 and the 720 plus uses a celeron j4125 the ds720 plus also has two m2 drive slots for ssd cache whereas the ds220 plus doesn't you also want to keep in mind that the ds-220 plus is not expandable so you have two drive bays and that's it the 720 plus if you ever want to expand it in the future you can buy an expansion bay which would allow you to use uh seven total drives as opposed to just the two that are currently in the ds720 plus so for that the expansion unit that we're talking about is the dx517 so my personal thoughts on this are that you probably want to try and stay away from two bay devices if you can the main reason for that is because if you want redundancy you really only have one option and that's to throw two hard drives that are the exact same size into your device and have them mirrored so even if you buy the ds-720 plus and you buy an expansion bay as well first off you're probably going to end up spending more money than if you were to just buy a 4 or 5 bay nas device now but you also have a fail point so the cable between the ds-720 plus and the expansion bay is a single point of failure so you would have to create two different volumes so you'd have your first volume which is the two drives on your uh your current nas device the 720 plus and then you'd have a second volume which is your expansion unit so keep in mind that if you want redundancy you would have two different drives that are being used for redundancy on two different devices so not only will it be more expensive financially in the long run but you're also going to kind of have to use it a little differently you're going to have two volumes not that there's anything wrong with that but you're going to have two volumes that you'll have to manage as opposed to one so those are basically the two beta nas devices so what you're going to find is that there is for the most part a better option with each of these models that we're going to go through so for every device that has multiple options you're basically going to have the more expensive option being significantly better in certain areas so in this case it is uh generally just the processor and it is the expansion of it uh so keep that in mind moving forward that doesn't mean you have to buy the more expensive unit it's just that there's a reason why it is more expensive so moving on to the four bay nas devices we have the ds420 plus and we have the ds920 plus so the 420 plus comes with two gigabytes of ddr4 memory and it has a celeron j4025 processor whereas the ds-920 plus comes with a intel celeron j4125 processor and four gigabytes of ddr4 memory so you also have to keep in mind that if you buy the ds420 plus you can only upgrade the memory to six gigabytes total whereas the ds920 plus you can upgrade to eight gigabytes total so in short if you can afford the price difference which right now is fifty dollars more for the ds920 plus rather than the ds420 plus you should definitely buy the ds 920 plus we're not talking significantly different devices because you know in general they're the same um but you know you are coming out with a slightly better processor and you have two gigabytes of memory more that you can upgrade it to um other than that they're actually very similar um so you know i'd personally feel that that price difference is warranted meaning that you should you know throw the extra 50 bucks at it if you can um but you know the ds420 plus is a fine device as well so moving on we're going to take a look at the five bay nas device which is the ds 1520 plus so this has a celeron j4125 processor it has eight gigabytes of ddr4 memory installed but you cannot add more to it so this device you can expand so this is basically a clone of the ds920 plus except it comes standard with eight gigabytes of memory as opposed to four and you have a fifth drive bay if you'd like so unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you look at it there is no competition for the ds1520 plus if you want a nas device with five bays this is the one that you should get so we're now going to take a look at the ds-1621 plus this is a six-bay device a little later in the video we're going to take a look at the ds-1621xs plus but for now we're just going to look at the ds-1620 plus so this is the first model so far that is actually different and by different i mean it has a more powerful processor it can be upgraded slightly more and it's generally a more premium device so when i say a more premium device i mean something as simple as the power supply is built inside of the unit so what you'll find with all of the devices that we've already talked about is that they come with a power brick and basically that power brick is the power supply generally those power supplies have a higher failure rate so the ds 1621 plus having the power supply built in is actually a you know quote-unquote more premium feature that all the devices that we've discussed so far does not have outside of that it has an amd ryzen v 1500b processor that is more powerful than the j4025 or j4125 that all the devices we've discussed already has and it also comes with four gigabytes of ddr4 ecc memory so everything we've discussed comes with non-ecc memory the 1621 plus comes with ecc memory you can also expand that memory up to 32 gigabytes so everything we've discussed up to this point only can be expanded up to eight gigabytes or it comes standard with eight gigabytes like the ds1520 plus but this can be upgraded to 32 gigabytes of ecc memory with two 16 gigabyte sticks so overall this is you know quote unquote the more premium device that you can purchase so if you need six drive bays or if you want something that's slightly more powerful than the ds1520 plus and you don't mind spending the extra money this is a great device to me the fact that it has ecc memory is arguably more important than the more powerful processor but since you're getting both you know it's a great option so we're now going to take a look at the ds1821 plus and this is going to be quick because it's basically the exact same thing as the ds1621 plus that we just discussed except for it has eight drive bays so if you're interested in something with eight drive bays this is the one that you should look at so we are finally going to take a look at the ds 1621 xs plus and i left this for last because for 99 of people you probably don't want to buy this i just gonna be totally honest with you so this comes with a zeon d 1527 processor it comes with eight gigabytes of ddr4 ecc memory you can also upgrade that to 32 gigabytes by using two 16 gigabyte sticks if you'd like and the biggest selling point to me for this device is that it comes with a 10 gigabit ethernet port it also has a five-year warranty where everything we looked at today has a three-year warranty outside of the ds-220 plus which has a two-year warranty so the thing that's tough with this model is that it's very expensive uh so right now on amazon it is 1600 us dollars where it's you know hundreds of dollars at that point more than every other device that we talked about today now it does come with the quote-on-quote best processor that we've talked to up to this point uh but you know you you have to keep in mind that synology devices generally their hardware is extremely underpowered so in most of these cases we're talking about processors that are five plus years old and they're selling them in their brand new devices and the reason for that is because you're really buying the software when you buy a synology nas you're not buying the hardware if you want powerful hardware you should probably look into building your own device and you can use unraid or you can use freeness but you're going to be able to pick up used equipment that's way more powerful than the synology nest can ever provide for the most part and you're going to get it at a significantly cheaper price so when you buy a synology you are buying the operating system you're buying the ease of use you're buying the reliability you're buying the future updates and for that reason these devices they all run dsm so you know the funny thing is the ds220 plus and the ds 1621 xs plus are both running dsm now yes you'll be able to do things on the ds 1621 xs plus that you cannot do on the ds 220 plus but you know the operating system is the same so if you're just looking for a storage device something to just store your data you really should only be looking at the the total storage bays then probably the memory the maximum memory capacity and then probably the processor because you don't need anything extremely powerful to just store your data these devices are perfect for what they do and that's generally to just be nas devices it's when you start building on top of it that you might find that you need more powerful hardware so my guidance on this is if you need the best of the best or you want the best of the best and you can justify spending the money on this device then go for it it's you know the quote on quote best synology nas consumer device uh in a desktop format that synology produces but you know if you're just strictly looking for a 6-bay nas you should probably just buy the ds-1621 plus save the money and by the time you fill it with all your drives you'll probably be similarly priced to what the ds-1621 xs plus is so this is not to you know say anything bad about the ds1621 xs plus i just want to be honest with you guys it's just an expensive device for something that's probably not going to allow you to do much more than a 1621 plus with a 10 gigabit ethernet card added to it um so that was a ton of information generally what you're going to find is the more expensive the device the better it is especially when you're comparing models that have the same drive base so there are more synology models there are more budget-friendly options that don't support btrfs so we didn't look at those and synology also offers a ton of rack mounted options but we didn't take a look at any of those today so also keep in mind that there's a pretty big used market for these so if you're interested in picking up an older model um you know a 1618 plus a ds-1019 um you know they're out there you could take a look at them like i said these devices last a long time there's nothing wrong with buying use especially if you get a good price for it so hopefully this helped clarify a few things i know this was a long video but if you made it this far thank you very much for watching if you have any questions please leave them in the comments i'll do my best to get back to you and if you like this video give it a thumbs up and subscribe thanks guys

Channel: WunderTech

Views: 4,838

Keywords: what synology nas buy, synology nas buying guide, which synology nas to buy, what synology nas should i buy, synology nas 2021, synology nas buy 2021

Id: 8cBpAbh5EGw

Length: 18min 5sec (1085 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021