 We're a Drobo house but I just explained to Brad Kaminski from Canada from Synology that I hate the Drobo dashboard with a fiery passion and I've been always looking over the fence at the interface for the Synology disk stations and I wanted to talk to these guys about the different models they have and then we're going to break from hardware and we'll go over and take a look at the software. So Brad from Canada would like to tell us a little bit about what's going on here. What do you got? First off I do live in Seattle but I manage Canada resellers for Synology. Regarding our software operating system Disk Station Manager, our current version is 6. We're about to release 6.1. It's our award-winning platform. We have a large development team that just focuses on developing apps. It's completely compatible with Mac, Linux, Windows operating systems and it is built on a Linux file system. One of the nicest things about it in addition to all the apps that we create is that it's non-proprietary, so any disk stored in our devices can actually be accessed from any Linux machine. Okay, that's cool. So let's talk about these three different model levels what we have. We've got this first one. What is this? Yeah, this is the J series. We have a single and a two bay model. Personally I prefer the two bay because you're always going to have two drives that are redundant in case one were to fail. That's one of the benefits of network attached storage in general. But these are great for home users, people that are looking to store items at home like a media library or just their personal files. Really great entry level boxes just to get into network attached storage. Now when you say entry level and you're talking NAS, that's usually cost of fortune. What is the two bay disk station cost? I believe it's around $169. Alright, and that's Canadian or US dollars? It's US dollars, yes. Alright, now let's move up to the higher level here. This is the DS916 and you explained that the first digit is how many bays it can expand to and the second two digits are the year. So the 2016 model it's got a nine at the beginning. What does that mean? That means that while this device does have actually four bays internally it can be expanded up to nine with a five bay expansion module. So that's kind of nice. So you don't end up with multiple things laying around. You've just added a secondary piece. Exactly, you don't have to purchase multiple brains. You just add more drive storage and it can use this processor to run it. Now if you only need four bays you also have a four bay model as well that doesn't have the expansion. Is that correct? Yeah, the DS416 is a great option and there's a couple variations. The DS416 Play is one that you should be aware of that has extra hardware for video transcoding. So people are trying to do like a movie library that they want the transcoding horsepower. The 416 Play is a fantastic choice. Okay, and how much does that one run? Do you know? I think it's under $500. Okay, that's for NAS storage. That's pretty... Wait, that's redundant, is it? For NAS that's actually pretty reasonably priced. I like it. All right, so we're going to take a break from the hardware real quick. We're going to run over and take a look at the software. All right, we've trotted over here to a Windows PC but Brad does keep telling us this runs on the Mac, runs on Linux. Cross-platform, you got to love that, right? Absolutely. So DSM is a browser-based so it'll not only run on any of those machines but in any of the most common browsers like Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. Okay, great. So in this particular instance, it looks like we are in... I think it's Chrome, yes. It almost doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't even make a difference. This is our DSM operating system. If you've used any operating systems in the past 20 years it should be instantly accessible to you. There's a couple main functions. Control panel is going to be where you're going to change any of the basic settings on the NAS from network settings, creating user accounts, limiting user access to adjusting things like power, power notifications, automatic restart after a power failure you can enable through here as well as adjusting things like your theme and creating user groups and all sorts of things. So for those who are just listening to the podcast this is a very beautiful icon-based system. I should ask you, is this accessible with screen readers? That's a good question. We do support a ton of different languages. I think we have over 30 different languages we support. I can check on that later. But since it's a browser-based, as long as the word user really says user, we're probably going to be okay. But we'll go ahead and check that. You can definitely zoom in through your browser and everything will actually resize. So it is friendly to scale in. That's for low vision. That's pretty good. Okay, so that's the control panel. So control panel is one part. The next thing would be storage manager. And this is where you will modify or manage your volumes. So you can go through and create different RAID volumes, configure RAID types, set up hard drive groups, manage your hard drive health. Let me stop you for a second. Beforehand we were talking about the fact that you don't use a proprietary system. What exactly? So our devices all support RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, 6, and 10, assuming they have enough base to support all those types. Obviously 2-Bay can never do RAID 5. And we also have Synology Hybrid RAID, which is a RAID system that we've created that allows you to take advantage of disks of different sizes and actually use all the usable space. It's a standard RAID if you put in three terabyte, one 4 terabyte. You don't get all of that 4 terabytes, right? You'll be wasting some of that space. But you don't really have a proprietary system in what you created. Yes, so Synology Hybrid RAID actually is a logical RAID volume manager. So what it'll do is create a smaller array across the unused space, and stripe a second RAID volume across that unused data, which you can actually then mount in any Linux machine. Okay, very cool. So recovery, if you lost the whole unit, you're not dependent on the hardware from Synology. You'd be able to rebuild that on the Linux system? Absolutely, although I think in the time it would take you to go find a Linux system and rebuild it, you could be back at the store with the new Synology and have yourself up and running in half the time. Well, man, he is good. This guy's on it. Product warranty is two years, three years, or five years, depending on which model. Now, what really blew me away was that I asked you about phone support. Yeah, so currently our support is from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Pacific time. By the end of 2017, we'll have 24-7 support. And how much does that cost? That's absolutely free for the lifetime of the product. Wait, so as soon as it dies, I can't call you? No, absolutely can't. What I mean by lifetime is we're still supporting products from over 10 years ago. Oh, fantastic for no fee. That is really impressive. That says a lot about your faith in the products. Anything else we need to see here? Yeah, we should take a look at the apps through Package Center. This is our system where you can download different applications and see what version you have and what not. But this is going to give you access to everything from backup tools to productivity tools like calendar, chat. Looks like you can set up your own personal cloud here. Yes, you can absolutely configure NAS to do all sorts of things. It can be a mail server. You can use it as a media server. NoteStation has office tools like word processing and spreadsheets that you can share with your team. Oh, that's one. A VPN tool, I think, and a media server. I think it was under V. Yeah. And actually, this could get bigger here. So we're looking down at the bottom. This, again, is very icon-based and we're able to see the different applications. A patchy web server, there you go. There's over 100 apps and we do support third-party applications. So our platform is open to development for third parties. Oh, that's fantastic. I can't think of any other questions to ask. This looks like it's pretty cool and thank you for taking some time with us today. Thank you very much. Oh, yeah. What's your website? It's www.synology.com You want to spell that? S-Y-N-O-L-O-G-Y All right. He passed the final test.