 Let's talk about selecting a NAS. And listener Terry writes, wrote the perfect question without knowing that he was going to set us up. He says, what are your current recommendations for a two-bay NAS? And he says, I would just like to do something that gets me started in the Synology world. So I figured I would have each of us, and Pete, since we weren't expecting you for the show, I didn't ask you to prep this, and that's fine. So we will do it as the three of us. What the best two-bay drive is, see, you got me talking Ks now, what the best two-bay drive or Synology would be, two-bay unit, and then also what would the, we'll call it the either wishful thinking or the perfect world unit B for that each of us would recommend. Not necessarily, it may be the one that we're currently using, but it would be the one that we would recommend to you if you asked us this question today. So, Jeff, you wanna start with that one, then John will go to you. Sure. All right, so for the two-bay side, I'm picking exactly what I have because why would I not have bought the very thing that I think is right? And that's the 220J. And the reason I picked that is because if you're someone that is looking to get into Synology and you don't wanna spend a fortune and you want a device that has really good performance and is going to let you do all the things, this is a really great place to get in to the Synology world. And in my case, I bought it, popped in my drives, set it up so that I played with some stuff. Sure. And then just wiped everything and started over so that I could set it up as my backup. And it works great. It is a solid machine at a reasonable price that will let you do all the things. So if you're looking to just get in, here's a good way to do that. And yes, there are others that will give you overall better performance, but honestly, I think for most people they would never know the difference. Do you know if you can run Plex on the 220J? Oh, totally, yeah. Okay, because that's, Plex, there was a period of time at least where Plex was something that was not just universally runnable on your distations. So, okay, that's great, that's great. And I assume it runs really well. I'm not doing that. Sure. But yeah, I mean, if I wanted to, sure. I could spin up Plex and do it. Well, Dave, I'll say with regards to Plex in the stations, the only difficulty I've had is if I leave some of my files in their MKV format. If I convert them to MP4, I don't seem to have any problems streaming. Interesting. But MKV, I have problems going to the one television upstairs. The one in the living room seems to work fine. And so I don't know where the conversion issue is. I suspect it's in the television because it's works on the main floor but not the third floor and I don't know. It's a mix of both. With Plex, the, if it's possible, it will, the distation will just send its raw contents out without having to transcode anything to whatever device you're playing it on, your TV, your phone, your iPad, whatever. If the device doesn't support the format that it is in natively on your disk station or on your Plex server of any kind, then the Plex server has to do its level best to transcode on the fly to get all of that there. And that can be, that's where the, I'm sure that's where your issue is. I think it's that TV then upstairs because sometimes even setting the playback settings down to 320K, it still doesn't want to play. And I'm like, all right, I'll just change it over to MP4 and it's more. Well, it's probably that your Plex doesn't have the horsepower to transcode the MKV videos on the fly at whatever size you have them. But the other thing is you could go in to Plex and tell it to pre-transcode your videos. If you know a destination that you have, you can say, yeah, I will want you to pre-create a version that will work over there and then you get the best of both worlds. So, yeah. Interesting, okay. Cause what I've just been using handbrake and converting it to MP4 and not worrying about it. But that works too. Jeff, we tangentialized off of you. What would your larger than 2B, if money were not... So that 220J is 187 bucks. So just to set the playing field. And that's bare. That's bare, without drives. Yeah, we're gonna talk about prices without drives. Thank you. So what would your next level up be if you were to take that step or if someone were to ask about that step? That would be the 15, 20 plus. And the reason I would go with this one, there's multiple reasons of course, but this one, I mean, you're starting off with five bays and it has plenty of horsepower. So this would be the machine that becomes my version of Dave's Synology. This is the one where I would do everything else and then leave the 220J just as a dedicated backup device. Yep. So, you've got all of your bays, but that plus that's the kicker for me because that means I can plug in extra bay boxes. It doesn't. It doesn't. No, it no, you can, that is a truth about this unit, but the plus, as far as Synology has explained to me, the plus just means it has a little extra. Oh, okay. So I misunderstood why they were including the plus, but this one does what I would want, which is give me the ability to add more bays. So if I hit the point where I've decided I've outgrown what I can do with the storage that I have, I'm not having to start over. I just add another box and keep going. Nice, nice. And that Amazon has it for $766, $766 bear discless at the moment. QWE 1231 in the chat says that it is $67 cheaper. So $699, I would assume, at B&H photo. So shop around, of course. Yeah, that's great. Always shop around. Always. John, what would- Here's the secret. Go ahead, John. Yeah. Here's the secret as to what the numbers mean. Jeff, the number, the first number after the DS is the maximum number of bays. Not the number. So that means basically that you can do expansion, which is one of the things some units allow and some don't. That's not entirely true. Oh, can this do 15 bays? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, it can be extended. You can put two more boxes onto this. Okay. Oh, interesting. Yeah, got it. So here's the one that I picked for like a high end one because- John, you forgot to tell him what the second part means. Oh, the year it was. Let me play the straight guy. John, that was amazing information. Thank you so much. But what does the second set of numbers mean? I'm really curious. As far as I know, it's the year that that unit was created. Yeah, yes. Yeah. All right, so what's your pick for a 2-bay, John? It's close to what I have now. I have the 2018 version, but the DS420+. Okay. That's not a 2-bay unit. What's your pick for a 2-bay unit? It's a DS420+. Say it again. You're going to have to try one more time for a 2-bay unit. Oh, for a 2-bay. What's your pick for a 2-bay unit? I know what it is. It was the DS218 play because you put it on our agenda for us here. Yes. Okay. And why did you pick the DS218 play as the 2-bay unit? It's a $230 unit. So a little bit more expensive than Jeff's 220. 220J. 220J, thank you. I would say that it looks like the processor is sufficient to do media. And they actually say, oh, make this a home multimedia center. So let's talk about this 2-18 play because I chose it as well as my 2-bay pick. Synology has a fantastic comparison chart, which I will put on the, I'll put a link to the four units that we're going to discuss. So spoilers, the two I'm going to mention have already been mentioned, including your 420+, that I know you're going to talk about in a minute. But the 2-18 play and the 220J have the same processor, the Realtek RTD1296. The one difference between them is that the 2-18 play has one gigabyte of memory, whereas the 220J has 512 megs. And that can make a difference, both in terms of the number of apps that you can run, but also in terms of file sharing speeds I've found. More RAM, just based on the way Synology is architected, makes a huge difference in terms of file sharing speeds. So that was sort of the reason that I went up to it for my pick, and it wasn't that much more. And it lets you do Synology hybrid rate and all of those things. If the 220J wasn't the device that I wanted just for the basic backups, and if I wanted to run a very robust file server, I'd go with something higher up the food chain. But even still, especially if you're on Wi-Fi for your computer, I don't think a lot of people would notice that performance difference. That's fair. That's fair. That was more about future-proofing for me, then. But yeah, either one of these, you're not going to. In my opinion, you're not going to go wrong with either Yeah, for sure. All right, John, so tell us about the 420 Plus, the DS420 Plus, which was your pick for a step up. Yes. The reason I picked it is it's close to an older one that I have. But they upgraded some things on it. But the things I like about it, so 4Base are enough for me. Right now, I think I have four 8TB drives in it. Let's see, Cache, NVMe Cache. So you can do SSD Cache, which helps speed up reads and or writes. And they actually have a little utility that shows you the number of cache hits, which can help you determine whether you should do that or not. And it has two gig ethernet ports. So you can bond them if you want to get maximum speed. Cool. Cool. Good stuff. You know, bonding the ports. That's actually something I think people should be paying more attention to now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and the thing is some of their higher end machines, I think the fastest they have is 10 gigabit. Or no, I think they make something even faster than that. But a lot of their units have 10 gigabit ports. Oh, yeah, you can get them with them. I don't know if I guess some of them would just come out of the gate like that. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Do we need to talk about what port bonding is? No, I think we should save that for another time. It just it makes it lets you use two ethernet ports and go twice as fast if your network can support it. How's that, Jeff? Is that good? That's absolutely perfect. We're out of the weeds. My picks will be quick because I also, like I said, went with the DS218 Play. And then the 1520 Plus is the one, like you, Jeff, that I would pick as sort of the step up for most folks. And it is it also you said it was your pick to match a you know what I do with my distation. It turns out that is exactly the distation that I use is the DS1520 Plus these days. It's got a four core Celeron J125 processor in there. It comes with eight gigs of RAM, which I really like the the one you picked on the 420 Plus comes with two gigs. You can upgrade it to six and and I would highly recommend doing that if you're going to start doing the things that we're talking about doing with these poor RAM on these things, put it get them up. Ram is is relatively cheap these days, even with supply chain stuff. It's just not terribly, terribly expensive. And so I just highly recommend putting maxing them out with RAM and then and then you don't have to think about it after day one. But that's that's that's the that's like I said, that's the unit I use and it's fantastic. Just it does all the things I mentioned and there are some things I didn't mention. So we'll get to eventually. So yeah.