 Tom here from Orange Systems and we're going to be taking a look at the Synology SA 3400D. This is a high performance, high availability NAS designed for Michigan critical environments, but it's still budget friendly with only a 9k MSRP here in September of 2023. That's of course without the drives. The SA 3400D not only has redundant power supplies, but also a dual controller architecture. This allows for continuous service, even the event of a hardware failure such as the controller itself. Let's dive in and take a closer look. Now, before we get too far in this video, I do want to make sure I disclose that one, this is not sponsored, but two, yes, of course I'm biased to like Synology. I have a lot of Synology videos. We do a lot of Synology consulting. The reason we do the consulting is because it's a good solution and it works. We've had great success with them. This is why I've created so many tutorials to share that information with others. So this review is me testing the system not only for our own internal testing and looking at solutions we plan to deploy at some of the clients, but also so you can learn about them as well. So not that the closure is out of the way. If you're looking to buy one of these right now here in September of 2023, the only place that seems to have them in stock at this moment, probably by the time we're watching this video be in stock more because this is a fairly new system is B&H photo when I was checking in. As I said, the MSRP price of $8,999 or $9,000 US is I think reasonable price. Now before we get too far down the path on an SA3400 because it does say active passive and you're probably wondering does Synology also have an active active system. They do have the UC3400 which is an active active dedicated SAN device. Now this is a little bit different than the SA3400D and I want to talk about first where these fit in two different product categories. If you have a virtualization server, whether it be VMware, XC PNG, but something that needs I SCSI as a target, this is an ideal situation. If that is the only use case you wanted to have was the UC3400 as your SAN storage, not as your SMB file storage, not as your system that we running surveillance station. This is a different use case because this active active controller in this model is going to give you absolutely like the instant failover active active system, but it doesn't have the full Synology feature set. The SA3400D runs this Synology suite of software with high availability. Now it's active passive so there is a momentary failover and what that means on the SA3400D as they have any little diagram down here that when the unit has one of the controllers, which one's in passive mode, one's in active mode fail, it switches over this switch does take and it says up to a minute. I've seen it take a little bit less. It really depends on how many services you're waiting to have start on there because you can run everything from the docker container images to virtual machines that is going to take a varied amount of time for all those to get restarted on the other side. Same with your storage, your storage is going to be available sooner. Some of the virtual machines are going to be available a little bit later and of course that is some of the nuance that I want to make sure is very clear. It is nice though because you're not having to take something out of service. This is a very automated process. I did our testing with this using it just as a storage device targeting with the virtual machines. The failover went quite well. I didn't have any real problems with it. It works pretty good. Now essentially because each one of these controllers is a complete Synology independent system, its own motherboard, its own local version of the OS running, but the same connection to all the drives. This is what makes it relatively seamless for the failover. Yes, there's a pause because it's restarting the services. So it goes from passively waiting kind of in an online but standby mode to starting up all those services once it's detected that it cannot talk to the other controller. This is actually a really nice setup and it works much the same way when you set up, and I have other videos on this, two Synologies to work independently as HA. The way that works as you create a synchronization between the two Synologies and if one fails the other one can start up in the same way. This is just doing the same thing, but with one set of drives because in the other scenario you have a completely separate set of drives on there. All right. So now let's talk about the specs on here. And the first thing I want to address is the Intel Xeon D 1541. Now remember there's two controllers. So everything here is multiplied times two for each controller being identical. So there's technically two Xeon D 1541s. And I did inquire right away because I said that's a little bit older of a model processor, not really ancient, but definitely older model that I believe you'll also find in models like the SA 3400 without the D for the dual controller. And the reason they use this one is because one they've already have it in production units. So there's no retooling other than designing it in a dual controller mode. So this was a cost savings measure. Now while this is not going to be your fastest latest gen processor, it still works quite well and does will get into performance quite well with the performance. This does mean though if you're running virtual machines on there, well, that's where you may take a performance hit. But as far as running the other Synology services for file services or for iSCSI, anything you may be using it for on their surveillance station, et cetera, I found it to work actually quite fast and it's still a reasonably good processor. Scrolling down here, we have the how many cores that processor has eight cores with a 2.7 gighertz turbo. And then we have the system memory at eight gigs. I remember you got to put this if you want to expand it symmetrically in each system. So if you want to add eight more gigs, you actually have to add 16 more gigs to get eight more gigs because you have to put it in each one. And you do have a total of four memory slots per controller. Alright, so let's go ahead and take a look at some of the software specs. We have all the general storage management that's normal for Synology, all the different RAID types that are listed. Let's keep going down. And this is where with some extra memory, you can have a concurrent number of users of up to 6000 users. So this is back to that processor may not be the fastest latest in graces, but 6000 users is still a pretty good number that it can achieve on this. We'll scroll down through some of these other notes there. It does have a maximum of 16,000 local user counts. If you're not tying this active directory, but you want to set up local users and number of sync tasks, a lot of these are just some basic limitations for how many tasks you want to have set up in here. But you get the full Synology system, such as their log center virtualization, as I was saying earlier, being able to run the Docker images. But one of the other nice things is, and we'll get down here to surveillance station. And this is one of those use cases that this can be well suited for, is if someone says, I want a nice rack mounted high availability surveillance system that can't go down. And this is not something all surveillance software supports, you start narrowing a list when that becomes a requirement. The nice thing is, I'm a really big fan of surveillance station, this is a product I like to sell, it's easy to support, it's easy to set up and supports a wide array of cameras. But when someone tasks you with going, I also can't have this thing going down, you're like, well, now I got to build high availability surveillance station. And this model is kind of an easy drop in fit, you drop this in and now it will automatically start surveillance station on the second controller and the event of a catastrophic failure. So this is definitely a big selling point of this, if not the other reasons of having a high availability storage server just for your SMB and shares, or your virtualization target, but then also to be able to run your surveillance on here. And some companies really have a critical need to keep those cameras up and running, this really makes that easier. Now here's something I've dove into as a topic before, and that is the Synology Drive compatibility list. I'm actually glad to see Synology's gotten better about this. So if we go here and select our product as the SA3400D and we look at what drives are supported. So no, don't just assume whatever drives you have, you can drop in, you really need to have the drives that they recommend. And I'll leave a link to that video where I go into the nuances and details of that. Back to the compatibility list here. We can support third parties and this third party list, mostly Samsung and a few Seagates is a pretty good list of different drives that are supported. Also here in September of 2023, the Synology Drives have come down, become a little more reasonable price. So they have the official Synology Drives. Well, I call them official Synology Drives because they're branded Synology, they come with a five-year warranty. But of course, Synology didn't jump into the hard drive manufacturing business, they're putting their sticker on drives that they certify. Now an advantage of this is if you're using the Synology Drives, if there's a firmware update, you don't have to remove these drives from the Synology to put that firmware update on the drives, it can come right through the Synology System. So that is at least a good feature when you have these. And obviously, if you're doing something high availability, you don't really want to spend time popping a bunch of drives out of a HA system to update a firmware because some critical problem that was found that would cause a premature drive problem. So this is something, think about something worth considering of getting the Synology Drives, but they do have these third-party ones in the list as well. Now, unfortunately, Synology still has not adopted a tool list sled, so you have to put a few screws in, but the drives slide in nice and the Synology System locks really easy. Now the modules themselves slide out really easy, so if you ever have to service them or take one of the fans out, it's really simple to get these apart and pop them right open. It's a nice clean design inside, there's no real fiddling you have to do getting it in and out. The power supplies also slide in and out really well. Each one of the power supplies are an 80 plus bronze and they have a very simple edge connector allowing them to slide in and out really smooth. Taking a closer look at the modules themselves, it's a very clean design. You can see how the airflow and the fins all face the same way. We have the four memory slots, the riser card. Now it may look like two fans, but there's actually four fans. Each one of these modules that snaps in and out has two industrial fans that move quite a bit of air. While there is a 10 gig on each one of these modules RJ45 connector, we did install a 25 gig card. These are relatively easy to install and just simply snap in like a normal PCIe card and have a really nice tool-less design that just slides in locks and spins with a screw that's spring loaded on there. Now before I dive into some of the benchmarking and performance testing we did, I want to talk about my friends over here at NAS Compares. They have a nice write up on the SA3400D and they talk about some of the fitting of where it fits in the market because they have the SA3400, they have the UC3400, but then they have this nice comparison chart with the SA6400, 3610, 3410, 3400D and 3200D. Obviously if your budget allows buy the fastest one, but that is not usually how budgets work. So they have a nice chart here to kind of figure out which one might be the best price performance fit for your needs and they have all the random IOPS put down for each one of these models. Now when I've tested these I found that you are able to achieve under the more ideal condition the spec listed from Synology, but do take into consideration it really comes down to your use case. Now we did add 25 gig, but these come by default with 10 gig RJ45 on each of the 10 gig modules with the UC3400 and the SA3400. So both of these if you're looking at these because they're kind of a similar model and why they get grouped together because they're also close in price, kind of in the beginning like I mentioned is whether or not you need the full Synology set that you're going to get with the 3400, but having 10 gig built right in very handy. I just wanted to go ahead because I can and I had the 25 gig cards connected mine up at 25 gig, but you'll find a link to this article down below because I know many people like to watch a video and also read some articles on the topic as well. Now for my own testing I was using Pyronex because I wanted to dive in a little bit and see how iSCSI versus NFS was performing. So it's not about being able to get the absolute perfect amount of performance out of here. It was more about figuring out which one was faster, whether it was iSCSI or NFS, but I also added VM on Synology. Now that is going to be one of the fastest because it's not going through another hypervisor. It's not going through a network connection to get this. So I was actually impressed with just how fast the VMs on Synology work and the reason I was impressed as opposed to being well not impressed is because when I had tested this in the earlier six versions of Synology, I really reached out to their engineers and said what's wrong with this system because the IO performance is terrible when I run a virtual machine. That is something they said they were going to be fixing in seven, but I never really came back to test it. The virtual machines in Synology now have much better access to the drives on the system for much better performance than they had in this Synology version six. So now that everything's moved up to seven, I'm actually impressed with the performance you can get out of the Synology drive system. But I'll leave a link to this so you can look through each one of the tests. There are times when NFS is a little bit slower than iSCSI. That is something I have noticed on Synology. NFS setups don't seem to work quite as fast, but not substantially. There's not like a night and day difference. There's a couple exceptions. And I think this is just a caching problem where iSCSI was showing this incredible number over even the VM on Synology for certain in certain tests that it was run. This is specifically just a small block 4k test. But I once again, think this has a lot more to do with the caching that's going on. It probably catches that in memory. It caches it and serves up these on the iSCSI maybe faster than it doesn't NFS. But that's something worth considering because maybe you have this tiny small block right that is going to go back and forth that may lend itself to better performance because it can cache it in memory. Now this unit I did not test with any cache drives. This is all tested just with standard drives that were put in it. They were all SSDs, but nothing particularly special. That's the Synology branded models. Now I've had this Synology and been testing it for about three weeks now. And it's given me no problems at all. And I know this is one of the reasons I do the testing is so one I can make sure these failure modes that I created such as just randomly ejecting drives, popping them back in and making failures and unplugging systems and just yanking out the power supply randomly to see what would happen and see if it would automatically take over. And of course, unplugging network cards and forcing it to an HA failover back and forth, back and forth to see if there was some edge case I could create because not everyone wants to buy something for a $9,000 base price plus put drives and just start yanking things in and out of it. But hey, that's what I'm here for is to do that because well, that way you can buy something with some confidence and go and hey, it's tested, it will do the thing and I didn't have to just listen to Synology say it. And as I said before, at the beginning, I recommend Synology. We as a company recommend them because we find them to be a good reliable solution that we put in for clients. This unit comes with a five-year warranty. So we don't really have to worry about, you know, chasing down hardware or trying to find a part off eBay, only two years into something or three years into it. They default come with this five-year warranty. And Synology has always been good with their enterprise equipment. We've had very few problems when we have, they've always taken care of us in terms of RMAs. But nonetheless, it's ultimately up to you. I'm just here to add a data point, not be your decision point. Read that article from NAS compares, read a few more articles that you can Google and find on these devices. Leave your thoughts and comments down below. Do you love Synology? Hate Synology? Feel free to bring up that 2016, I think it was 2016 video that someone had talked about them having a bad run of internally built power supplies and some of their desktop models. I'm completely aware of it. It's something that every now and then is Tom, what about the power supplies and these things? And Synology has solved the problem from those models eight years ago. But yes, I'm completely aware of them. There's not a company that I say has never had a problem, but they're really their recent hardware and especially their rack station stuff. I have several of them, which I should probably do a follow-up video on some of the ones we've deployed over a couple of years ago now because they're still working. And that's important information, I think to say, has it been in production for the last few years and worked? Well, yes, I would definitely be talking about it if I had a high failure rate of ones out in the field. And that really hasn't been the case. But love hearing from you. Leave your thoughts and comments down below. And thanks.