 Tom here from Orange Systems and we're going to talk about Synology. Two specific Synologies. These are both new releases. They recently sent one to me, but I only have one of them. So this is the DS1520 Plus that I have in front of me right now, but we're also going to talk about the DS1621XS Plus as well so we can compare some specs and talk about some of these new products from Synology. Before we dive into the specs, the details in a hardware and a DSM software, if you can click that like button. And first, if you'd like to learn more about me and my company, head over to LawrenceSystems.com. If you'd like to hire a short project, there's a hires button right at the top. If you'd like to help keep this channel sponsor-free and thank you to everyone who already has, there is a join button here for YouTube and a Patreon page. Your support is greatly appreciated. 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Now, we didn't get any hard drives from Synology so we just threw some old hard drives that we had actually out of a retired server just for the testing. So we're not going to cover in depth the performance on this because I didn't put any really high performance drives in here. But let's talk about the form factor that Synology chose to use with both of these devices. You may have seen this, this is actually like the same casing they've used for a couple of years with some of their older devices. So they keep updating hardware but keeping this form factor. This form factor is wonderful for small businesses and home users that go hey, I don't have a dedicated area to put servers in so they may share space with the other PCs or even sit on the desk and ask you this small form factor is well convenient for that also not noisy. That's an important factor and we have on both of the units two large fans at the back. This is nice because we have good airflow without a lot of racket and that is that is something that can be really annoying where you have people going well can we just stick that somewhere else like just the closet if you think about like a lot of these really small businesses like a little four person office they don't have a nice ventilated closet so shoving servers in the closet means heat problems unless they take the time to mitigate that. Putting these out in the open but not being annoying that's great. Next thing we'll talk about and this is common with all Synology of this form factor is they're easy hot swap drives with a lock option. The lock option is particularly good for well people who want to poke at things because it looks like something you can just poke at. Now the nice thing is they don't come out this way they come out this way so when you you have to lift up on get them out or you can just take the key pop a twist and click and away they go now they don't come out anymore you can pull up on them and they're going to keep the kids if you are using this at home from being curious and wandering off of the hard drive. Now even though it's hot swap and we'll rebuild and it's very automated with the DSM it's better if they don't wander off with a hard drive and cause problems. Now this particular model has an external power supply the other one has an internal power supply and I am aware that every time we do a Synology video someone has to bring up that a few years ago another YouTube channel commented that they had some Synology said died with power supply problems that has been re-engineered not to have that problem reoccurring and we have been deploying a lot of these in businesses and just have well I can't even think of one that's failed for power supply they've actually been extremely reliable for that. Now on the bottom here we have two NVMe spots now the purpose of these is if you want to pop an NVMe in there and set up as a caching drive so maybe you have some large storage drives five of them that you filled up in these bays here and then you want to have something that's a little bit faster when you're pulling files well they've got a pretty automated system to set up a cache drive and make your NVMe be the cache really straightforward and simple I like that feature quite a bit because as much as SSDs are becoming affordable and we love how fast they are the demand for larger and larger storage is increasing and the drive prices are still you know SSDs can't quite compete with some of these very large drives that have come out in the spinning rust series so spinning drives are still here in 2020 they're not irrelevant but there's ways to speed up if you have frequently accessed files now before we go any further let's dive into the specs I will also link to my video some of my favorite applications that we use in Synology when we use these for business I will leave a link to that video so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on a DSM software because I've already got a dedicated video because that's a nice thing at Synology they're consistent they're all their models run this DSM software these two when we're talking about specifically you can't see all their models there's a couple of exemptions but any of the DS line are going to run the DSM software now when we look at the specs you'll see that we have the cp model on the DS1520 plus as a Intel Celeron J4125 versus the Intel Deon 1527 so we have a lot more power and an extra bay that you're going to get with this one here then we both have stock 8 gigs but we have more memory slots on the 1621 we'll go down here the big difference here now like I said we have the three and a half inch two and a half inch ssd or hd support but you obviously get more storage because you get one more bay with a six versus five both hot swappable but this is the feature I really wish they could have done on this now this does have four one gig ports on the back that's awesome and you can you know lag them together to get better performance but if they could have found the you know resources to squeeze in here I would have been a little bit happier if you look at this is the back of the 1621 and look at number 12 right here that is a 10 gig port so you got two one gig links plus this 10 gig link that would have been a great addition to have on there and you know it would have been nice I'll just leave it with that but it does not have any 10 gig options and it doesn't have any expansion options to add 10 gig the 1621 does have one expansion port that can be added on there now internal file system I've talked about this before but I'll mention it again people go well how reliable is butterfs they will tell you that they've heard problems now butterfs is implemented slightly different they use and this analogy dsm software has its own type of raid controller and then runs butterfs on top along with ext4 so it's not like butterfs is handling every individual drive it's just part of the file system and allows for snapshots and features to work on there so it's still reliable because if someone were to point out that there's some problems with butterfs in a way it handles drives you would be correct but btrfs is available on here no it does not support zfs sometimes that question comes up as well and as I stated the system fans are the same in both units their fan speeds are about the same here and relatively quiet we're going to fire this one up here in a second you'll see how quiet is there easy replacement fan it appears that the fans a little bit easier replaced that's one of the reasons I want to look at the physical aspect of it a little bit trickier to take this apart to get to the fans in there so I wouldn't call it easy replacement now power supply unit only 120 watt and versus 250 watt also noise level 20 dba versus 25 so yes you're going to get a little bit more noise out of the 1621 but not substantial other than that pretty much as you go down the list here they're pretty straightforward in terms of all the other specs in power consumption of course is a little bit lower this is going to idle with hard drive carbonation at 15 watts versus a power consumption 36 watts you're going to jump up to 62 watts but that xeon processor well it's going to pull a lot more you get that you know the beefier power that you might be looking for but that does come of course if using more power pretty simple as that and it's going to vary with you know the level of usage you're not doing on there and what types of loads you've put it under now they'll run down all the dsn specifications and they're kind of as expected when you say you know maximum amount of users maximum amount of files you want to store on here yeah of course you're going to also get a lot of bumps included that including if you want to run this as a not just a file server but if you wanted to use these devices for managing the surveillance station cameras obviously there are some limitations in their surveillance station system is great once you start setting this up but yeah you're going to need the faster one if you need more cameras and they have their selection tool when you determine how many cameras you want now and maybe how many you want in the future if you're going to use this for surveillance station and which model to get both will do it but it does bump up the maximum number of cameras when you go with the higher n1 and of course once you have a really high volume of cameras and lots of data that 10 gig comes into play again when you're going hey i would like to have that volume of data well then you're going to need to look at the 10 gig now with all this said let's fire it up real quick and just take a quick look at the dsm software and of course let's hear what it sounds like sitting next to me and i'll measure to see if they're accurate on their decibels here now the drives going through their cycle because these are some older enterprise drives i think are making the most noise of anything in here are those hard drives so i'm going to say they're accurate i think the ambient noise from the switches i have back here i can hear over this the fan noise on this absolutely minimal and i've seen recording my microphone is right on the edge of this off screen here and it i'm at the same distance essentially as this so in terms of noise they like i said that's a nice feature and it's something very relevant because i know that question comes up a lot whenever i'm doing these reviews now while we're waiting for this to uh boot up and do its thing we will go over here and talk about the price differences as of right now september 2020 if you're looking at this video in the future those prices well they may be different now there is before you jump and say i just want that 1621 with the 10 gig because that's one that works for me well it's 1800 dollars currently on new eggs so uh it's very new product i'll imagine the price will come down over time but yeah it's going to be a little bit pricey yep there's the analogy telling me it's way to boot so 1800 bucks yeah it's not average home user target that is probably a little bit more than they want to spend this right here though 699 and both of these prices are without any drives in there pretty reasonable for all the features you get with the dsm software which is pretty impressive it's a i really can't say enough good things about dsm my overall you know i will as i said i'll leave a link to that video it's been a great setup to use the updates have gone smooth and by the way whenever i power this thing off i just yank the power out because i always like to do this testing because well i want to make sure that it recovers each time and our experience of deploying these with clients has been the same the recovery's been really really solid on it so there is a pretty significant price difference between the two of them but overall i do wish they could have figured out how and i think in the future we're going to see this getting a 10 gig port on one of these smaller devices all right it sounds like it's all booted up i see all the status lights on here so let's log into it all right so we're logged into the dsm and these are the things i was testing with it first i set up an ice guzzy target so i wanted to use this for virtual machine storage via my zen server so i set this up as a target use zen server to store files on here worked no problem didn't have any issues with it like i said we've been running it for about a week and just letting a bunch of random things just constantly hammer and run on it unplugged it many times just to see if it would fail but as expected and as the other synologies no problems recovered each time and everything worked we set up some file shares on here i had dumped a bunch of videos in here which we can pull these up and there's some of the videos that i had copied when i was doing demo now you're looking what it looks like before i edit when i'm setting everything up so it's fast it's no problem the cache work kind of as expected and this one of the reasons i was testing it with video and things like that to see how the cache hits work we also set up a few NFS shares on this and tested those as well once again no issues worked quite well so overall um i'm like i said i'm not gonna spend too much time on the dsm software everything sustained was well the dsm software and all of them the nice consistency of the way synology works has been wonderful and that includes even if you want to set this up with certain high availability features and failover and replication those are all different features that synology does have support for so you can pair different synologies together so overall i think this is a great box other than i'm not only complained is that i wish it did have 10 gig because well once you have a pair of NVMEs and you want to put some reasonably fast hard drives on there saturating four ports well that's easy so if they can make another model in between it doesn't cost that as much as the 16 and as much as this would be wonderful but if you're looking for a good turnkey NAS system we've always been happy with the synologies uh they're definitely one of the products we sell quite a few of and like i said i'll leave a link to my video where i can talk about some of the favorite applications we use for business on there but i know a lot of home users will use it for plex and things like that and yeah that's other features you can definitely do with this all right i'll leave links to the pages on this and i'll leave the amazon link that's available for this one the other one's not available on amazon yet only found it on new eggs so keep an eye out if you're in our sydney's 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