 So we're here to talk about the Synology disk station. This is a really interesting because of the software and solid NAS product here. And we've had a few data-deployed clients. We've had some use for them, and I've really liked them. And Synology reached out to me and said, hey, would you like to review one for your YouTube channel? And I said, well, sure, absolutely. So they sent me this and then Seagate provided us a couple of drives to do some testing with it. Got a couple of these Seagate four terabyte iron wolf hard drives. These are really solid NAS drives. If you're not familiar with the iron wolf series, it's their higher performance higher end series or hard drive. But I didn't want to just show you the unboxing. I did the unboxing part. And I mean, it comes very well packaged and as expected. So that's not that interesting. What is interesting is we're going to talk about the hardware inside. And this is going to be the first in a series of videos that the nation Synology has of their hardware and software makes this a really good product choice. I know there's a lot of different NASs out there. This is just one more in your toolkit. So if you're trying to decide, I want to make sure you have all the options. It's not like I promote just one product. Or there's one solution for every single need that people have. So the first thing I'm actually going to do is remove the Seagate iron drives in there because I want to talk about what's inside this device. And that's where it gets a little bit more interesting. I've already removed the screws. There's only two little tiny screws that you have to remove on the back here and here. Once you remove those, it comes out. By the way, I learned already before the video that if you start taking this apart without taking the drives out, it'll get stuck on the drives. So make sure you take those out first because that's an important part. And it kind of slides and snaps. Does that pull it kind of hard here? All right. It slides forward just a little bit and slides out. There's a little plastic connectors in there that it can get caught on. So now we're going to talk about the hardware first because that's like I said, the first thing I wanted to cover on this. So an unboxing to me means uncovering. Now I'm not going to take this whole side apart on this. I don't want to get that much taken apart on here but I will admit it's pretty easy to disassemble it down to this. It's easy if you wanted to clean it. But now we're going to talk about some of the hardware and the features on it. The DS918 Plus comes with four hard drive slots and they give you these plastic rails. So it makes it really easy to install the hard drives. No challenge. They already slide and clip in. When they clip in, they have this little lock so someone doesn't just press a button and eject it on there. But obviously it's not rocket science to pick this lock. It's just a little plastic key that turns in there and just puts it in a lock position. So that's nice. We will get to testing what happens when you remove a hard drive while it's running. I'm going to cover all those in some later videos. This is like I said, the first in the series of them but I wanted to cover the physical layer first. So as you see a SATA backplane in there, you could put two and a half inch hard drives with adapters in there. I don't, if you had a bunch of them laying around or four of them laying around but I'm going to use three and a half inch drives for this. The only thing really on the front is the USB3, a power button and the four lights for the disc and a status light to blink out what's going on. If you look down inside here, put it a little bit of an angle, you can see it comes with four gigs of RAM and has an expansion for four more. So this will support a total of eight gigs. On the bottom of it, we have two M2 SATA slots and these are accessible even when you have just the plastic. So these just pop out so you don't have to take this cover off to get to the M2 slots. Matter of fact, if you just pull the drives out, you can get to the memory. So it wasn't necessary for me to take this apart other than for explaining how this is set up. Now, something I really like, if we look at the back of it, we have another SATA 3.0 port. We have two one gigabit network interface Nix. We have an E-SATA adapter. We have the power adapter. Now I think some and I'm not remembering all the models some of the Synology's had built-in power supplies but this particular model uses an external brick which I actually really like. That way if this ever goes bad you can just order another one of these. The device itself is really quiet. It's cooled by two fans right here. You see at the back, which are standard fans. And I say standard and I mean right down to how they connect. So when you look at the connector for the fan they are standard fan connectors, not anything weird. So if you have to swap these out because they go bad, not a big deal. That's actually pretty easy to do and they're fairly accessible without a whole lot more than I just took apart right now. Now as far as the hardware inside of here, this is run by an Intel Celeron J3455 quad core processor at 1.5 gigahertz that bursts up to 2.3. The file system it's gonna use is ButterFS and it has a ton of features more than I can just cover right here right now. Because that's why I said this is going to be a series of videos because this is where Synology really shines. They have a ton of things you can add on to it through their DSM, so their disk station management tool. That even includes virtualization. So it not only supports running virtual machines on here based on limitations of the hardware, they're not gonna be super fast, but you can do it. You even can run Docker on here. So it does have the ability to run Docker containers. So it has a container management system. It has a lot of different backup options and we're gonna be covering some of these individually. And the software does include both a combination of things. So there's some that are more designed for business applications where they have backup. It has Active Directory and LDAP integration. But it's also good for home users because they have tools like Plex and this will support the 4K transcoding. So if you run and run your Plex, they have your media in here and have it 4K streaming to one of your devices. That's supported as well. From a media standpoint, the other interesting thing about this is it's super quiet. So if you wanna run it for your media and have it as part of your home entertainment system, the fans do not make a lot of noise. So you're not talking about a noisy NAS device. Actually, with it styling, this would fit really well next to any media center and not be a disturbance to have there, like a large server or things like that to have all your data on here. So, enough about all this. Like I said, this is the hardware that's pretty straightforward to cover here. So now I'm gonna kinda show you the getting started with it and how the setup works, which is actually pretty easy. Also, when you're sliding this back on, it doesn't go on like this. You gotta kinda find the spot to get it back on. But most people probably won't be taking this apart. And it's something I did for the video, but not something necessary to do any of these servicing. And like I said, you can still get to the memory here. You can still get to all the hard drives. The NVMe drives are still accessible from the bottom here, like I had shown before. Also, fit and finish-wise, once you line this up, even without the screws in it, you can see it's clipped on there really tight. So this thing is not like, it doesn't feel cheap. It is plastic, but it does have a metal frame, as you've seen inside, with black metal all on the back with a Kensington lock, too, in case you wanted to make sure that this doesn't get picked up and wandered off with. So I plugged it in, turned it on, and we're getting ready to get started. You get a blinking light to let you know that it's booting up here. I got the hard drives in it. It'll take a couple, hey, it's booted. It beeps, so let me know that it's ready. That's the most noise it makes, though. As you can see, it's really quiet. As I stated, it's not a really noisy device. The hard drives are gonna make a little bit of noise, depending on, and this is gonna vary. Some hard drive manufacturers are a little bit noisy. And others, these Seagate Iron Wolf drives are reasonably quiet, even when they're reading and writing. They chatted a little bit when they came on, but like I said, this is not really a noisy device. All right, the Synology's all booted up. And I didn't show you this in the other camera, but it's a quick installation guide, pretty straightforward. It says put the drives in and turn it on and then go to. And this is going to vary a little bit based on how your network is set up. But to discover it, you can obviously do easy things. Well, easy for me, I should say, going to the DHCP server. But the other option is going to find.synology.com or http colon slash disstation.com colon 5,000. Now these don't work for me and my network because I am on a different network with this computer I'm recording on versus where the Synology is. So it doesn't find it during those. So that's gonna, you're gonna have issues if that's still the case. If you're putting on a separate network, this is for demonstration. So it is, I just wanted to make sure that's clear. But the port number is 5,000. And this is what it looks like when you first set up a Synology. So LTS demo will be the name of this. Oh, if I spell demo right, LTS team, sure why not. Username, Thomas, yeah, I guess Thomas is a good username. And does it like my password? I think it's weak. Let's try a little bit less weak of a password. There we go. Whoops. The medium passwords. It's happy enough with that. And we go ahead and add that to the last pass for now. Install latest version of DSM. So the first thing it's want me to do is DSM update and maintenance, protect your distation and important data. Install the latest DSM version automatically instant installation schedule. Install important updates or notify winners updates. I'm gonna go ahead and have it and install it automatically to keep this up to date and secure. It does have the option to run smart tests, enable bad sectors, so drives, number of bad sectors, threshold to 50. We'll leave it all at defaults here. This is where I want you to create a quick connect ID with Synology. I'm gonna skip that for now, but that's so you could easily go in there and log in. It's either way, I think you can skip this. Can I skip it? Oh, skip this step. All right, it's down there. Yeah, I'm not worried about. This is one of the things this will do with the Synology and I'm gonna cover this on maybe a later video. If you skip this step, you'll need to set up port forwarding to remotely access your disk station. What this does is allow essentially a proxy connection so you can go to a Synology site and link it. So it talks to Synology and creates a bridge without having to do any port forwarding. I'll do that later. For now, we're just gonna skip that part. Next thing we're looking at is the install Synology's recommended packages. These packages will help you get started with the DSM. So we have video station, media server, audio station moments, hyper drive, drive and download station. We can install all these manually. These are just the general features for right now. We're gonna go ahead and leave it at default. Got some things to agree to some privacy statements and install, share my Synology device, the network location, allow me to locate it to find. And we'll go ahead and say yes. Now we'll go ahead and say yes, we'll allow them to do some device analytics. Demo machine, why not let them know? And now you're in the Synology DSM and this is pretty clever the way this works. To me it's, I like this because it's a whole like interface that you have that's very easy to navigate, has windows in it. So even though it's a web-based interface, there's no tools you load. And obviously I'm using Linux, which is nice because I don't have any weird special things I have to load to manage this. It has a help thing that you're presented with. You have a little widget over here on the side. Plus storage, connected users, file changelog, recent logs. You can stack up all kinds of things inside this little widget. And I think yeah, you can drag these. We'll leave the system health at the top. And we can see it's downloading using CPU usage. Then we have the control panel here. And this is where you're gonna set up users, groups, file services, network settings, external access, so on and so forth. Updates, restore, indexing services. And this is the package center. This says what's already installed and looks like there's a few updates that it needs. So I can just tell it to update these. Some of these already looks like they're already downloaded. Like the download station, I'll hit update all. All right, now that's still updating. And I'm gonna cover some of the packages that we have on here. And this is where you kind of kind of unleash the power of Synology and what makes them very interesting is they're very simple to install packages. From everything from high availability, hyper backup, mail server, yes they have a mail server and a mail station, a media server. A lot of different things in here. And of course you can sort by name, all packages. You could search for them and let's look for Plex for example. Right there's Plex and then we have hyper backup. Believe is what they call it. We'll just call it backup. There we go. And we're gonna actually go ahead and install these things because this is for a future video we're gonna call is how to do these Office 365 and G Suite backups with their Glacier backup. Probably copying to Amazon's Glacier if I had to guess. Say yes, drive will be stopped if you wanna continue. Sure, here we go. Replication services, snapshot, USB copy. There's just typing in backup. You can see there's a lot in here. And as I said, I'm gonna get into some of the more detailed videos later about all the applications and packages on there. I just wanna get that one kicked off. And the last piece we'll cover is the storage manager for this video. So this is where you're gonna set up the, if you have a hot spare where you set up the hard drives, SSDs, health info, actions for them if I wanna deactivate, switch, configure, how the storage pool is set up. And it seems to have defaulted. I did nothing as you watched when I logged in here. I didn't preset this up. It defaulted to being configured in a rate array with pairing these as a mirror. Which, if you only have two drives, it's probably the more ideal situation. And we'll do another video on how you add drives and things like that. It does default to the ButterFS file system. So we have it in there. It shows that 3.6 terabyte freeze or a pair of four terabytes in a mirror. But it's, like I said, pretty basic to get things set up and going. And for some future videos, we're gonna dive deeper into each of these applications and some of the more details and nuances of this from virtualization to perhaps some Docker containers on it and covering some of the advanced features that you can do with like the backups and things like that and how you can integrate this in your network. So let me know in the comments below or on the forums, what other features you wanna know about the Synology distation here. So I'm gonna plan out some future videos for it. But I wanted to at least get the review started and see what people think. We've got a few clients using these. We've seen them used for a handful of different functions, a lot of them just backup or just basic rate in office. And they are a great solution for that. They're solid, they're very reasonably priced. And like I said, with all the features they offer on here in terms of their application, their package center, there's a lot you can do with this. All right, thanks. 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