Error on my part. The smaller NAS in the video is the DS923+ The number after "DS" in the Synology naming convention means how many drives it supports when you include the expansion units they sell. These add 5 drive bays. The larger 8bay one supports 2 expansion units for a total of 18 (DS1821+). In my mind, I kept thinking the smaller one had support for 2 expansions but it only has 1, hence me saying "14" instead of "9". Not sure how the 14 stuck through my script review. But everyone can enjoy my blunder now 🙃
You didn't mention about the nvme cache, that would help to speed up a lot of things. plus if u are using mac you should utilise the thunderbolt port. just get ur self a thunderbolt nvme external enclosure and connect to ur main mac or mac mini it will speed things up alot its actually faster then mac drive it self. then u can do a backup to your synology drive. 1. get your self a mac mini 2. daisy chain ur external thunderbolt nvme enclouser 3.share that drive too 4. do your back up to synology. 5.clean up your external thunderbolt nvme files when u no longer use it. just treat it as a scratch disk.
A bit confusing… so in a few sentences what would be your recommendation looking back? Less bays and higher capacity drives plus a cloud copy and an off-site copy? Also go with a NAS that uses M.2 SSDs to speed up workflow?
You Really should check out the HighPoint SSD7540 PCIe 4.0 x16 8-Port M.2 NVMe RAID Controller ... 64TB storage 55 GB / sec reads 52 GB sec writes. If that's a bit pricy for you, they also have the HighPoint SSD7105 PCI-Express 3.0 x16 4-Port M.2 NVMe RAID Controller for one third the price.
I have a suggestion: 1. Build a NAS type device at a relative's house with WoL. 2. Backup the data. 3. When you need to update the data, send WoL signal to turn the machine on. 4. Connect to the device 5. Update the data slowly via internet (cus it's long distance). 6. Turn off the device remotely. 7. Realize you forgot something and start again from step 3.
WOL usually requires a device on the remote subnet to send the magic packet. A cheaper solution is to schedule the turning on and powering down of the remote NAS. The remote NAS should also be configured with a full on firewall, and preferably some sort of VPN connection. But overall, the NAS is designed to run 24x7 anyways, so leaving it running is often a smarter, cheaper, and easier choice. You'll also want to make sure that it's locked down so it can't be removed, sold, or traded because it's a convenient source of cash.. If your relative is using the NAS, you should also reciprocate their data to your location as an offsite backup for them.
If you use SHR-2 system (and you really should on larger Synology NAS as it gives you 2 HDDs worth of redundancy), you can upgrade your drives and this way increase available capacity as you need it, without investing a ton of money upfront. I also recommend having an extra HDD configured as a hot spare so that NAS would automatically begin restoration of redundancy in case of HDD failure, removing an urgency of buying a new HDD after a failure. For your video editing, add SSD cache and upgrade RAM on your NAS to 32 GB, and your experience with change dramatically without the need for extra NAS as it uses free RAM as a disk cache too. I also have DS1821+, loaded with 6 HDDs of various capacities (some were leftovers from my prevous NAS DS1512+. which served me well for over 10 years!) for a data storage, and one more as a hot spare. When I get close to running out of space, I buy two new larger HDDs and replace two lowest capacity ones I had, this way I get more capacity, save some money (as HDDs get cheaper over time) and reduce a chance of failures because my HDDs are newer on average than they might've been if I would've followed your advice and invested into a few huge drives upfront. Over my ~13 years of owning Synology NAS (DS1512+, then DS1821+) I had 5 HDD failures, and none of them caused any data loss.
So your saying this better to get your minimum storage you need vs just getting a high ceiling and see if you reach it? And just swap as you go? And what can cause hard drive to fail? I only ask because I have PCs with 2 drives and haven't gone wrong for 4+ years. Would like more info
12TB drives are the best bang for the buck size right now for a 4-5 bay NAS. In case anyone was wondering. I got 8TB drives due to not wanting to go too big, but now wish I got the 12 TBs as the total size of 4x8TB in RAID 5 is filling up shockingly fast and not much room for expansion (I have 5 bays). 3x12TB would have cost me the same with lots more room to expand in the future. Seagate Exos are currently the best in price/performance, if you don't mind the noise. You should have the NAS in a separate room anyway so it shouldn't be a big deal.
@@micker9830 I'm worried about going that big. In case of failure it takes a very long time to rebuild. You'd want to have 2 drive fault tolerance RAID array if you're going that big on drive capacity. I know RAID is not a backup, but for many people it kindda is as they're not that good doing actual regular backups.
I went the DIY route and for the networking went SFP+ + DAC cables. The NAS (running truenas) cost me about 300 before drives and mellanox cards + DAC cables about $90. Throw in a switch for another $200 and I was set. Currently rebuilding my little home lab and picked up an Epyc CPU/mobo and some ram to replace my NAS and VM box with one machine. I totally get the convenience of using Synology and understand not everyone wants to DIY for something like this though. In the end so long as you get to where you want to get it's all good.
@@trrjecto4459 It's honestly been years since I've measured power consumption so I honestly don't remember but TDP for the CPU is 65w and it's 8 spinning drives + 2 ssd's. Power consumption is not high on my list of priorities though, if it was I could switch to a Xeon L and get TDP down to I think 35w and set the drives to spin down to save a bit more. I'm still testing the EPYC system but TDP on that is around 125w iirc.
There’s one thing I’ll say. It’s nice to have the large storage capacity but if your HDD fails and you have it in raid for redundancy. It would take almost 3days to rebuild that 20TB and if any of the other HDD fail while it’s rebuilding for 3days you loose all your data. VS if you had 8TB it could be rebuilt in Hours. I’m pretty sure i heard this from somewhere before but all those cloud storage companies use 8TB instead like a 16TB or 20TB bc of how expensive they are and how long they take to rebuild your data. Thanks for an amazing and informative video Jimmy!😊
I have an unraid machine set up. I always worry about this when the idea of having to rebuild from parity comes into my head. I know unraid and your scenario are not a 1:1 analog, but still… the fear is real haha.
RAID is not a backup. Keep your data in an offsite backup to protect from fire, flood, or theft. It will be inconvenient to load on a new NAS, but not lost.
How fast your array is rebuilt depends on the hardware running it all and what raid configuration you go with. You can also set up more than just redundancy for a single drive. You can set it up for failure of any number of drives depending on how much capacity vs redundancy you want, and depending on the number of drives. Typically though, multiple drives don't ordinarily fail within days of each other unless there's something else going on. And rebuilding your array doesn't prevent you from using it in the meantime.
What I did for backups: my synology is attached to a cheap small micropc with a celeron and 32gb of ram. I installed Ubuntu and then mapped the storage to it, with a good password. Then I have crashplan for small business running and backing it up. Wayy cheaper then backblaze. Now I am also planning to get a second nas to keep at my mom's house as a second nas. My synology also has nvme cache, with 2 256gb ssds wich made it snappier for my lightroom collection.
I was thinking of a similar solution. But I don’t follow completely. When you say “attached” what do you mean? Over the network or via USB? Can you talk in more detail how this is done? Thanks.
I have a 4 bay QNAB NAS, and I definitely agree with you about HD size. I made two mistakes. 1st I bought 4 8TB drives. NEVER thought I’d run out of space within 4yrs. And, unlike Synology, QNAB doesn’t allow you to mix drives. So, I have to replace all of my drives before I can use all of the drive capacity. The 2nd mistake was going with QNAB over synology. It works, but for my use case the user friendly OS from synology would’ve been the better choice.
Unless you use disk striping (RAID0), it doesn't matter what hardware you use, you cannot use all of the drive capacity when you mix drive capacity. Whether you have a Synology or QNAP, you will have to upgrade all your drives to the same capacity.
@@pavelbuchnevich1229 With Synology you have SHR though. With this you can mix hard drives with different capacities. On the website there is a raid calculator where you can simulate the whole thing. There will still be unusable storage, but it is significantly better than with a normal raid.
I found SFP+ cards and switches years ago when I built my NAS. I think I spent around $300 on the networking side and got a 4 x SFP+/gigabit eth switch, along with 4 SFP+ PCIe cards, and all the cabling. Later on I’ve picked up other switches with a mix of SFP+ for cheap 10gig and SFP+ to 24+ port gigabit networking. Been keeping things cheap while hardlining everything that stays in one spot. My next network upgrade will be when 100gb gets cheaper. My NAS is an old full tower currently running TrueNAS. with 10 x 3.5” hard drives, 8 x 2.5” SSDs, boots from mirrored intel optane drives, and has a couple PCIe Cache SSDs(Sun/Oracle F80s), handling metadata, read cache, write cache, etc. and 64GB of DDR4.
So I got the 8 bay Synology NAS and put eight 4TB WD Blue SSD's in it, there was a killer deal for Christmas about a year ago on those drives. I get some amazing speeds doing that, however at the cost of adding a larger storage pool. SO, enter the 5-BAY expansion unit for the Synology, I plan on a later date, getting that unit and populating it with 20TB drives and using that as my backup and catchall since my 8bay SSD solution is only 20TB total usable pool storage. I do love how the only sound from that setup are the fans. So quiet and I get 821 MB/s write and 1126 MB/s read! Holy smokes! So I am ready for that 8k edit!
4:00 Also another thing to point out is that having a 10GB connection to your router or main switch is useful if you have for example 10 devices using 1GB/s. So having a faster connecting from the server to the router could be advantageous even if you don't have 10GB on your devices but instead have multiple users connecting to the server and pulling or uploading data.
Great video! I started out similarly. Got a DS1621+ as my main NAS, but almost immediately got the 1821+ when released a month later. It became my primary and the 1621+ became my backup. I had (7) 14TB drives and a 2TB SSD for VMs, but recently replaced it with another 14TB drive with the intention of using one of my NVMe drives as a storage pool when I upgrade to DSM 7.2. I use SHR2 on the 1821+. On the 1621+ I have (6) 14TB drives using SHR and it’s now my backup NAS for my 1821+ which includes PC backups along with data. As for and offsite backup, I got a 920+ with (4) 16TB drives using SHR and keep it at my daughters house. I do as you mentioned. I have two storage pools, one I backup my 1821+ to and the other I give to her for storage. I also backup her data to my 1621+ to return the favor. I will also eventually hang a HD off my 1821+ for critical data and store it on my safe. So, I think I’ve more than covered the 3-2-1 strategy. 😊 One critical thing I would mention to your subs is absolutely, positively get one or two UPS’s. They can be a NAS lifesaver! 😉
I was going to suggest the same thing: use a lower powered Synology at a family member’s house as your offsite backup. I saw you mentioning Ubiquiti equipment. I use a site-to-site VPN and use Hyperbackup to do an rsync across (I just keep one remote copy). Locally, I have two Synology’s, one as a backup, both with external drives hanging off of them for more local backup. I’ve found that for my photo editing light video editing, I use local drives, use Synology Drive for some files, and rsync to the NAS for others. The lag you mention is real. I like the idea of a small pool of SSDs. I need to try that. :)
I purchased Synology 213J with 2 WD Reds, probably 7-8 years ago. Still rocking without any problems. Synology makes such a great devices :) Now it's time for upgrade... Thanks for sharing your experience with us.
@@leoguevara9303 I cannot achieve promised 100MB transfer speed. LAN or wireless, it is always 40-50MB/s. Not sure is NAS too slow or disks are dying :/
Just be sure it's backed up too. See my experience posted above...This was after about 6-7yrs. Drives died consecutively before they could be replaced. RAID corrupted and lost it all.
Good video, Jimmy. I use Synology exclusively at the office for editing I have about 18, 1821+ at this point. I just started adding 1221+ rack units. One thing that is really important with the Synology NAS is to increase memory. I typically add a 16 GB memory chip but in my last build I added 32. Every unit gets 10 GbE cards for network performance, and we are able to edit massive amounts of video through the Synology without lag.
Hi Brian, quick question for you. You're telling me you edit video, without lag using: Synology NAS, updated 16gb (or 32gb) RAM, and Synology E10G18-T1 10GbE PCIe expansion card? Are you running HDD with 7200RPM? Thanks - really need help on this!
@@MarkMcCabeMarkMcCabeVideoI would assume editing off an ass for anything higher than 1080p is going to be lackluster. I use an NVMe for the render and work drive and then offload it to sata after. I am getting a NAS soon but I'm still undecided on the drive sizes as it is very expensive
perfect view timing!! was going to purchase another WD external hard drive and stopped short of doing so...just came across your vid; new inspiration b/c wanted to do this RAID type storage years ago...nice
Your explanation on speeds is so true, remember when Fiberoptics first came out people were paying through the nose for it not realizing that some where wasting ther money because although those speeds came to their Home ( the pole on the street in front of their home) it is the internal part of their home that also had to be able to fully support the fibre optics which at that time pretty much no homes were
Was using a Synology DS218+ for general storage and Plex for a few years, then moved to a DS418 for just file storage and the DS218+ for a dedicated Plex machine. Both are being backed up to Backblaze B2. Also have a DS220 for video projects for the day job. I'm definitely a Synology fan. haha
Big beefy external HD in a small safe deposit box is what I'm doing for off site back up. My total data archive footprint fits into a 14 TB or bigger single drive, so a single drive works for me. I update it every 6 months.
One thing to think about is having at least 3 of the backup drives that you rotate. You don't want all the drives in the same place at the same time. And protect against what would happen if lighting struck while freshening up the external drive backup.
Incredible video. Loved how you introduced them sending in the product (they are seeing this video the same time you are). I have been using a single TB external SSD and was on the fence about purchasing a NAS system. This video was extremely helpful. Subbed
Great video! I also purchased the DS1821+ and super happy with it. I have x6 - 10TB HD (Raid 5) and x2 - 4TB SSD installed (Raid 0) (Yes i have nightly backups to external drives). I updated the RAM from the standard 4GB to 20GB and used a dual port 10GB NIC I already had to install in the expansion slot. Runs great but I am not stressing it very much, the larger array serves all my ripped blu-ray movies. The smaller array is for photos, music and data files. I used to run a custom built Ubuntu server, learned a LOT but in the end the maintenance of it was overwhelming at times (botched updates, incorrect command entries by me!) and the giant server box was just too much (x14 - 2TB drives!). Synology makes it all so easy, very happy with my purchase.
eeyy, saw that LTT screw driver ! Also dude you are so chill, its refreshing to watch your videos. Youre kind of a upper end regular tech nerd that people can still relate too.
Thanks for the update. Viewed your previous video on NASs a little while ago when doing research on what to get. So a few weeks ago I set up my DS1821+ with currently 5 14TB drives for all my storage and editing (with 1 drive redundancy), and 1 x 14TB without redundancy for the media server. That means I have 2 bays empty, ready to be filled for more storage in the future. Actually planning on using one bay for surveillance once I decide on the right cameras I need to keep an eye on my dog while working in the homeoffice lol. And what I also did was added 2 x 1TB NVME SSDs in a read/write cache which makes the whole experience lightning fast... the speeds over 10Gbit network are amazing, nothing lags and basically viewing/editing 4k footage is smooth as butter. There is that initial delay when all the footage is loaded, but 750GB of cache will keep things around when you are working on something longer than a minute. The 3-2-1 backup problem I havent also solved yet, but as a first action I'm thinking of running those hard drives I migrated all my stuff from to the NAS as backup drives. These are WD 2-drive RAIDs that in RAID0 will have 16+20TB (36TB - plenty for now!) of space for that first backup of most important stuff, just in case the NAS gets fried. But yeah they will still be in the same house and connected to the NAS via USB. Even if I could have a wall between the actual devices... still not ideal. Backblaze seems like an option but will get a bit expensive. Will have to see. If you find a good affordable solution in the mean time, let us know ;)
Just before I recently retired, I got a QNAP TS-1635AX, and a few 12TB and 14TB drives, planning a big re-design of my multi-computer network. My dream of lots of spare time in retirement is slow coming, so also is my incorporation of the NAS box. I appreciate videos like this one to help me understand the finer points of what I'm getting myself into.
External backup, store a NAS in a purpose built water & fire resistant box, outside the property, possibly even underground, keep it connected via cat 5. It’s more likely, if you survive a fire, the fire department will put the blaze out and you can rescue your data. Just make sure the cables are coming out of the box from the bottom side so water from the fire truck won’t penetrate the box. Obviously much more thought would be needed but the option is there
I have a DS1520+ which I’ve bought at least 2 years ago. My need for extra large storage space wasn’t as huge when I bought it, but it was still a need to back up a lot of media files I had. Instead of buying like large capacity single 20 TB HD drive which 2 years ago was extremely expensive. I just bought smaller drives, all 4 TB HD drives and populated all 5 drive bays for total 20 TB. I did the raid option that allowed in future replacing any drive with a larger capacity drive. That allowed as drives got cheaper over time I could buyer larger capacity drives at cheaper prices each going into the future and slowly increased the DS storage capacity as needed and as prices got much cheaper. With just 1 large drive, you have no backup. I don’t make vids or anything, but my DS1520+ sits on my computer desk. I hardly even notice it’s even there and running unless I don’t see the blue lights to even notice it’s not even on from a power failure.
I have a 8-bay NAS with total usable storage of 24TB, which I only use for archiving. I had the idea of using it as my personal cloud storage, but the noise and heat makes it less practical for keeping it running all the time. Thanks for sharing the idea of using a smaller NAS with SSD for stuff that are fequently access. I'll have to look into whether it can be run quieter and cooler with SSD, maybe my a solution for me if it can.
As for cables, if your runs are less than 37m, then you can get away with CAT6 which is way cheaper than CAT6a (required if longer runs are needed up to 100m). My Synology 1010 is still chugging away nicely.
I don't technically have a NAS, but I do have a server running Proxmox and I can set up a NAS in a container or VM in a handful of clicks. I am considering a NAS though, any streaming whatnot can be done via the cloud, that's what it's there for.. so the NAS doesn't need many features, it only has to be reliable.
Thanks for the video. I have a DS416play, which has a miserable 1GB of RAM and for the last year or two hasn't even completed a backup. Saw a comment about adding more ram and it suddenly became obvious why it would only start backing up right after a boot. The speed of your UI is insane compared to my unit!
Yr video was awesome. Really appreciate yr sharing. I own a small PC repair company I just bought a small two bay synology I have been backing up by creating images of my clients PCs externally. So now I plan to use synology
If looking for a much cheaper NAS solution, look into old workstations! While not the easiest option, forcing you to learn another OS like TrueNAS or Unraid and losing the ease-of-access that comes with prebulit hardware and software, it is a much more budget friendly option. I bought a refurbished Dell optiplex 5040 with an i5 and 16gb of ram just as an intro into the idea of running a NAS, and the original system came out to like $180 USD for the system and a SATA expansion card to connect more drives. Might not fit everybody, but it's a way to get into using a NAS without spending 5-600 $ on something from Synology or another company. Also allows for you to drop in something like a graphics card to make a media server at home possible with hardware transcoding! Worth checking out if for nothing else other than experimentation.
Depends, while it's hard to get up to the price of a 8 bay Synology with a self-built NAS/Server it is certainly possible especially when you start talking about other things like self hosted cloud gaming. Mini PC (new or used) and a couple of used SATA drives can be done for around $250 if you shop around. The cheapest two bay NAS from the two leaders is easily $200 or more without drives. Plus you'll be getting a ARM based CPU which may or may not handle 4K streaming to more than two users.
I wish the 3rd option for the NAS would've been considering other companies. Something like Truenas mini lineup. It uses open-zfs filesystem which uses ram as read cache and you can even add nvme drives for a level 2 read cache. Which both would be faster than your DS923+. You can fill it with large capacity drives and it caches the most recent written files as well as the most common read files intelligently and automatically. Have you considered that way to get more speed?
Did you know Synology Drive for mac has on demand download? It will download the needed files onto your computer and syncs changes back to the NAS. Just like iCloud Drive.
Hey! Just found this video and I normally don't subscribe instantly, but I looked through the channel out of curiosity, because this video is extremely good and helpful. To make it short: new Sub, keep it going! :)
I have a video production company and we use the Synology 1821+ for our editing needs with 12TB Iron Wolf drives. We use 2.5Gb connections to four M1 mac minis and one M1 mac studio via a 2.5Gb switch with one 10Gb connection on that switch for the NAS. We do not experience any lag for the most part even when editing 4K projects on all the machines at once. But we did add 4TB internal PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 Internal SSD and maxed out the memory on the NAS. I missed if you mentioned upgrading these on your 8 bay. This will be key to help you improve editing performance over the network. Also, not sure what kind of cables you are using. I think you need a minimum 5e in order to have enough speed over the cable. We are using Cat8 though I know that is overkill. We have a really short run so I didn't mind the expense.
Great video, very insightful given my own similar experience. I have 3 2-bay NASs each with more capacity (HD size). I finally moved to the DS920+ which will last me for a while but lie you I am looking at purchasing a second (perhaps bigger to support 2 volumes equal to my 920+). I had free storage with Google Cloud through my University however they are ending that program next year so I will be scrambling to get my own secondary backup in place! One idea you didn't mention, place the backup drive/nas in a firebox/safe (to survive house fire) taking it out periodically to update it! Thanks again I now know I am not alone in the mistakes I have made (mostly financially motivated).
Started with a 2 bay Synology with 6TB (x2) netting 6TB (SNR raid). Then shelved the 6TB and put in 12TB (x2) netting 12 TB. Close to outgrowing that, got a DS918+ (4 bay expandable) and used the 6TB (x2) + 12TB (x2) netting 24TB. Eventually shelved the 6TBs and went to 12TB (x4) netting 36 TB. Lived haunted by no backup. Got a Raid PRO 4 bay USB enclosure. Increased NAS to 16TB (x2) + 12TB (x2) netting 40TB. Put 12TB (x2) + 6TB (x2) with raid 0 (JBOD) and netting 38 TB for backup. The era of my 4 bay NAS has a maximum drive size of 16TB. So I can only expand the NAS another 8TB without buying the expansion case. I'm at 40% utilization so I won't see a problem soon. I doubt ever, but I also thought 6TB (x2) was enough at the beginning. The raid capable USB enclosure was huge as a backup solution. Low cost enclosure using demoted NAS drives. I don't have offsite backup, but if/when I do, it will likely be an inexpensive multi-bay USB enclosure. Understand a USB enclosure is NOT a NAS. It's just raw storage. Any services using that storage must be hosted/run in a different device. For me, it's just a 38TB drive on my desktop. Having a NAS is a learning experience and well worth the effort. I couldn't live without one now.
You didn't build anything - you just bought a NAS off the shelf, slapped some drives in and configured it. I was expecting you would build a NAS from components, install Proxmox, FreeNAS etc with a title like that.
Great video Jimmy. I'm running a DS920+ with 40tb. Backing up my pc, plex along with 10 other friends cell phones, "photos," and 2 friends pc's. I have a 16tb external NAS drive for backup plus a friends NAS at her place. I was using C2 but it was going to cost more so I stopped it. am looking to get a larger NAS when Synology comes out with an intel version.
My (starter) recommendation is that you spend money on good quality drives and buy a reasonably recent (2~4 years old) second hand Synology NAS. Synology has very good long term support, even for older hardware. Even just a 2 bay model is a good starting point for basics and getting you used to the workflow etc. My current setup is a new 2 bay model (DS220+) with a media transcoding & docker capable CPU (2x4TB in RAID0 for 8 TB of quick access, I now wish I sprung for larger TB drives), and a second hand 8 bay (DS1817+) that's ~5 years old with a 5 drive expansion box (2x 36TB volumes in various combinations of disks, RAID 6 on the 8 bay and RAID 5 on the expansion box). The smaller NAS is my "work in progress" machine, the big one is "The Vault". My "cloud drive" folders, file shares, Plex, PC backups etc all happen on the small NAS. The small NAS is backed up every night to the vault, along side my servers (for website/game hosting etc) backup nightly to the vault. Select important files are also backed up to Backblaze2B with immutable copies setup with a month long retention time (meaning they are undeletable for at least a month) at ~1$USD/month cost. Those same files are also backed up to a NAS at my parent's house via the hyperbackup thingy, while their important files are backed up on my box. The vault also holds a "media archive" for when I run out of diskspace on the smaller NAS. The big one is on a power on/off schedule to save power/heat/noise, it reduces wear, reduces possible attack surface (since its not on the network when my PC/laptop is on). It can be powered on via Wake-on-lan via my router if I need to access the archive for some reason. Actually, the DS1817+ is still capable of decoding some media files, but can struggle with H265 or super high bitrate formats, so I don't usually even have to copy stuff back to the DS220+ if I want to re-watch something old. All of this hardware was built up over quite a few years, but man does Synology make it easy to stick with them once you're used to it. The one downside IMO is the lack of native high-bandwidth connections. Now you have to choose to give up your SSD cache slot for faster ethernet. I would love to see at least a 2.5G port become standard... As a sidenote: Their surveillance station is also quite usable, although for more than 2 cameras you need additional (perpetual, one time cost) licenses. I use the second ethernet jack to hook the cameras into their own dedicated POE network, so it doesn't interfere with the rest of the network.
Obviously one downside of this system is that you cannot send/receive data to/from the NAS unless you are actually attached to your LOCAL network (LAN). This is unlike Cloud Storage where you can access it anywhere over the internet after authenticating into your account. Yes the NAS storage is MUCH faster but cannot be accessed outside of your LAN. Question: how do you handle taking a project off-site? Do you download the needed files first, then sync with your NAS when you come back home?
DSM (Synology's NAS operating system) gives you the ability of accessing your NAS from outside your LAN. You can either do it via their QuickConnect service, or by setting up DDNS. You just have to be very careful about setting up firewall rules on either your gateway router or the NAS itself (or both).
@@dmnddog7417 Oh, okay! That's interesting. I wonder what the read/write speeds are when accessing across the internet. Is it simply limited by your internet speed?
An idea I thought of for you was to just give one of your family members a NAS and turn it into a plex server for them to use. Then reality hits and you realize that you've just volunteered to be their 24/7 free tech support by doing this.
IMO when starting, id invest in getting a nas that has a few more slots. Most users eventually nees to grow and the most costly thing to do is have to buy another nas. If your planning to use 4 drives, get a 5,6 or 8 slot nas. The diff is not that much. Id also invest in getting a unit with the pci-e expansion slot. Alway good to have a path to improve, add a 10g card or a m.2 card or both. Plan ahead, specially if your a video editor or data junkie!
My setup: 1. Use an OWC Thunderbay to get a fast RAID setup at your desk. This also means it's technically a desktop-attached drive, and not a NAS drive, which you can backup using a standard unlimited Backblaze plan. 2. Sync the data from that Thunderbay to the Synology (over 10Gbe if you want that to be snappy) There you go. You've got 1 copy in the thunderbay, a second on the Synology (plus RAID assurance on both), and back up to the cloud to Backblaze.
I ran across your channel last night. I like your humor and you're right on par with the things I've been working on. I started using Synology a few years ago with a 5-bay (DS1019+), but I have the same one you set up a year ago and donated my 5-bay to my church. Eh... free off-site backup location... I didn't do the 10Gbps card, since I didn't want to re-purchase my equipment. I am building a house within the next year and the plan was to get the 10Gbps equipment there. Thanks for the videos and I'll look forward to many more.
You missed another solution is to have DAS - direct attached storage - via thunderbolt - this will be fast for working data back it up or mirror it to the NAS - also backblaze cloud storage for a single computer and all directly connected drives is only 99$ per year,- unlimited size - use the NAS os a onsite backup and for data not needing fast access 3-2-1
Indeed. To exactly achieve what Jimmy does with the full-flash NAS, you would probably need to utilize OWC SoftRAID to create a storage pool for a multi-drive DAS system, right?
That's what I do, and it works fine. In addition, I run PLEX and file sharing on my computer, and every device in my home office has access to the files, even to the point of NAS-level speeds.
Be sure to add a UPS (and connect the Monitor USB to the NAS) Up sizing a drive is easy in a RAID set, Simply replace one at a time and let it rebuild. Repeat. Cool /vent that closet. Heat is hard of drives. (my middle drives on my ds416slim run hotter) A bathroom exhaust fan in the ceiling and a slightly larger gap at floor level will work wonders)
Good video although a bit deceiving because building a NAS implies that you went out or on line and purchased a case, mother board fans, ram, and an OS from one of those sites on line that offer that kind of thing. NOT an off the shelf complete unit Like Synology or QNAP. OK, now that I got that off my chest, lets move on. SSDs are a great solution if you're going to use them as part of your 3,2,1 backup solution. I had considered that at the time I got my 918+ in 2019, but further investigation suggested that I wouldn't gain a noticeable increase in speed. Also continuous read and writes have been found to cause premature failures and unexpected crashes on the drives. But they are a great back up solution. The only complaint I have with my NAS is that the video station doesn't work as well as I would like it to, and I find more often than not that I have to download my movie from my library stored on my NAS to my computer before I can watch it. Now I'm at 78% on my NAS and I'll start to worry about increasing my capacity when I get to 95%. Maybe by that time I might also need to replace my NAS too cause they don't last forever, so I'll rest more easy once I get my SSD drive and back up all my current data. Have you given any thought as to what you would replace your 8 bay with if and when it does fail? Sorry for the long winded comment.
Before Christmas I purchased a DAS and filled it with 2 8tb Ironwolf drives, 1 16tb Toshiba HD and another 2tb Ironwolf disk, copied all my files to these hard drives, this is my backup device In February I purchased the Synology DS920+, started with 1 14tb Toshiba HD, then 2 months later added another then a month later another, in a month or so's time will add the 4th. I opted for this NAS as it did transcoding and I primarily use it as a media server although have now stored all my 80,000 photos on it. I use the open source FreeFileSyn to sync data from my NAS to my DAS every month or so. The Toshiba drives were slightly more expensive but after the failures of the Ironwolf drives upon delivery and not long after I can't trust them anymore Like yourself I am now looking at storing my steam games on to my NAS to free up space on my laptop, don't know if performance will be an issue To be honest I'm really glad I have set this up, it was an expensive initial outlay but with everything being in one place I'm not messing around plugging and unplugging different hard drives. I can recommend the Synology NAS to anyone. I've never used one before but the help with youtube videos makes it a dream to set up
Hi Jimmy, you have demonstrated a good approach, showing the system dedicated for performance access and data backup. Personally I think that direct attached storage will work way faster for your video editing. I would oppose a combination of a high capacity NVMe SSD connected via thunderbolt interface to your PC and the NAS for the data backup. On my MacBook I'm using embedded rsync - command line toll to backup data from directly connected storage. Mac automator helps me to schedule backup process and avoid use of common line interface.
I incorporate a redundant file management process as much as possible with: 1) 64TB, 10GBE NAS in my work office 2) I keep a duplicate 64TB NAS at my home office 3) 4x2TB portable SSDs for file storage redundancy when I'm on location for photo/video production. I mail one of the SSD's to my work office, a second to my home office, hand a third to a colleague for safe keeping and keep the fourth on me when I'm traveling. My 14" M1 Pro MBP has the same files stored internally. 4) Drafts and final deliverables are saved on Cloud Storage to share with clients and key stake holders. I typically keep all client files for three years, then archive the final deliverables and discard the drafts, unused clips and images.
There is one more think to keep in mind about the size of the HDD. Restoring. I've seen an 8TB HDD take 24 hours to restore. 20TB should take quite a bit longer.
Its worth noting that flooding damage is as likely as fire and data storage hates water. Also a physical spinning HDD while prone to failure in mtbf is technically possible to rescue. For an ssd, thats a frisbee once damaged. In reality, its as cheap for manufacturers to fit 10gb lan ports as 2.5. the extra cost is marginal and many business just ignore NAS with 2.5gbit so even Apple offers 10gbit in even its mac mini. I've seen some nice 2.5in ssd 4 bay NAS. This cuts the heat engineering killing drives and offers compact size. At present ssds in the 1gb are affordable but that will change. Data centres like SSD. Less space, less heat, less cooling, faster access speeds so more hpc tasks are possible (simple AI computing stuff). Fast storage means less investment in ultrafast network pipes, faster syncing. Even drives size and storage is less. The issue now is capacity vs cost. That demand from DCs (and AI tasks) will drive that cost down.
You have a single point of failure on the SSD drive. Always get two of each and at least run in Raid1. So if it dies you just rebuild with a spare. Also the second NAS for backup should be the same as well. "Sneaker netting" an offsite backup every so often is not a bad idea.
The DS923+ offers storage pool for the NVME bays on the bottom of it, so long as you use their drives, which are expensive but you’d be getting a twice as fast experience with it. Personally I’d suggest just plugging the SSD in to your Mac as that’ll be faster than 10Gb (with an NVME) and using the NAS as archive data.
I got 2 synology NAS, one with 4x2TB drives and another 2x3TB drives, all I ever use it for normal data backup, meaning no video or big file size. Its mostly documents, imges, some software since i do work around machines like CNCs, also some CAD desings. Then I needed another one NAS and I decided to buy an 30$ old machine HP xw6400 Workstation which has 2 CPUS on MB 2x4cores cpus and 16 GB of DDR2 (4x4GB DDR2) I installed TRUENAS on this one but the reason i went with this old machine is it supports up to 11 disks. For me it works like a charm. It doesnt have bells and whistles like a Synology NAS ( I'm huge fan os Synology for NAS, super simple to setup) but it gets the job done.
definitely going to try and get a NAS going once I'm out of college since I will most likely need it for all my complex electrical simulations and projects. This helps a lot to get a good handle on how they work and their pros and cons.
Granted, my response is a year late, but this nas has mounts for two nvme drives that can be used to cache files when they are read or they can be used for a read/write cache. The read/write option does as another potential point for failure during a write.
I have settled on a schedule of replacing my home office NAS about every 5 years. When I get a new NAS, the old NAS become a backup NAS. The primary NAS runs 24/7 for years at a time without reboot. The back up NAS only turns on a couple of hours per week to run the weekly back up of the primary NAS. For my needs, a four bay NAS is plenty of disks. As much as I dislike synology's business practices. I really like the ability to replace hard drives. Typically, I get one new drive every 12-18 months to replace the smallest drive on the NAS with a larger one. Then that disk replaces the smallest disk in the back up NAS. With a little thought and planning this results very stable setup at a reasonable cost and power consumption. This usage might make the heads of any storage purist explode... but it has worked very well for me. Note: The backup NAS is located off site. I am really looking forward to the add/upgrade single drive feature to become stable in zfs and TrueNAS so I can finally dump synology.
Why? If it continues to work, keep using it unless you need additional functionality out of it. In that case buy a mini pc and go to town on that for services.
Jimmy if you have the budget, I would look into Tape backup and store the tapes offsite in a safety deposit box or with family. Definitely post a video if you go that route!
I still use an old DROBO for nightly backup and I’ve pooled multiple external USB 3.2 SSD drives attached to my primary computer into a single Windows Simple Storage Space which is surprisingly fast with none of the latency inherent to NAS devices. I synchronize my most important documents to Microsoft OneDrive for added redundancy. (Only 1TB comes with Office 365 subscription however). My experience with NAS devices is that unless you are willing to make a significant investment in fast drives and upgraded networking, they work better for scheduled backups than anything else. While you can purchase or build NAS devices that provide great media transcoding / streaming capabilities, they usually aren’t the most economical solution except perhaps when your media collection exceeds dozens or even hundreds of TB.
Why are people making this point? The thumbnail has a bought NAS in it. However I will give him credit for "building" it because he's running docker containers on it, which most people don't do.
I have my rack mounted Synology NAS with an external disk and I run Hyper Backup to run daily backups to it. I also pay Synology C2, which is their Cloud backup for 60.00/year and Hyper Backup backs up daily to C2. When I make videos in my mac, I store the video file on my mac, but Synology Drive syncs it to my NAS as a backup, when changes are made to the video file.
HDMI, if you have a device connected to the tv (or the tv itself) capable of accessing network drives and running video files just open it as you would a file, or streaming using one of the onboard programs/apps. I've heard generally (and experienced with QNAP) that streaming can be hit or miss depending on the devices using it, streaming software, drivers installed, and video file encoding/file type.
I had similar issues when considering offsite backups. I like to be the one in control of my files so I decided to back up everything on a flash device and store in onsite but in a Waterproof/Fireproof safe. The likelihood of something happening to the safe itself where the safe goes missing is low in my area such as a tornado coming through and picking up my safe and tossing is miles away. So if there was a fire or flood, I should still be able to locate it afterwards.
I set up a Synology NAS in the past year and found a lot of the same benefits, getting off cloud drives was goal 1...done, having local storage that's always available for my home network...done, consoldating media on one shared device...mostly done, backups of local PC's to a local server...done. I have it connected to Cloudflare Zero Trust networking, so that's cool. I could not get Hyperdrive to stop backing up to Backblaze S3. It seemed like it was always running, driving up my bandwidth and finally just shut it off. I have a three drive backups, one local to the NAS and two external drives I swap. I may install Duplicati in a docker image on the NAS and try again as having a remote backup has always been a goal. The suggestion to put a large capacity fast SSD in one bay, I didn't really consider doing that but it's an interesting idea. My two bay NAS suits my data storage needs, easy on the budget, but a pit pokey on the network. Great video, very useful and the discussion of ways to get faster network bandwidth is spot on.
Thanks for your experience. I watched a bunch of videos about NAS, but you covered the topic of network connection speed in more detail. And another important topic, about storing copies in different places, in Ukraine there is a high probability of a fire in any house. This seems obvious, but it didn't occur to me. 💙💛
Thanks for the review... I just jumped in with a synology entry level DS220j with a pair of 18TB in jbod. I just wanted it as a media server for movies. I have everything on it backed up on a stack of internal HD's that I connect temporarily with a HD dock. I do this once a week... and store them in a media fire safe. While off site is the best solution.... buying a beefy Fire Safe is the next best thing (Keep in mind a proper media firesafe will run you over a grand!) don't just buy one from Target.
I don't know if I am missing something or not, but I am checking up this current NAS setup, and it seems that the hard drive and ssds wont work together within the NAS drive? So I am confused how you are able to make a small setup using the SSD with the other hard drives? Let me know!
If it's for backup then just use aws glacier, which is much cheaper. You'll pay for retrieval though, but that may never happen unless you lose the other backups.
Brilliant. At the moment, I just have one DS418 that I keep in my room next to my PC that I have turn off each evening at 11pm and on again in the morning at 7am using it's Power Schedule allowing me to sleep. Currently, use it to store my Photography and Videograohy but understand a backup is needed just incase. Will contact my friend in swizerland who also uses a NAS and see if we can share files together to backup
One HUGE feature of the 1821+ you didn’t mention was the two MVMe bays to setup for cache to assist in the delays in writing and retrievals of files. I have 8 16tb drives in mine with 4 VM’s running with little issue. Also, you can group the 4 NIC’s built in together and do a LAG for 4gbps to a switch. I see you use Unifi, and that is possible very easily.
Just a thought I had, I also have a DS1821+, why not split the bays, as in, make half 4TB SSD's and the other half 20TB mechanical drives, then create 2 storage pools for each. Edit off one, then back it up to the other storage pool. As long as they are 2 different pools that have the same physical media in each pool, what could go wrong?
Error on my part. The smaller NAS in the video is the DS923+ The number after "DS" in the Synology naming convention means how many drives it supports when you include the expansion units they sell. These add 5 drive bays. The larger 8bay one supports 2 expansion units for a total of 18 (DS1821+). In my mind, I kept thinking the smaller one had support for 2 expansions but it only has 1, hence me saying "14" instead of "9". Not sure how the 14 stuck through my script review. But everyone can enjoy my blunder now 🙃
Correction
I have 12 Bay Extension unit for synology
Don't be so hasty in stating things you may not know fully
You didn't mention about the nvme cache, that would help to speed up a lot of things. plus if u are using mac you should utilise the thunderbolt port. just get ur self a thunderbolt nvme external enclosure and connect to ur main mac or mac mini it will speed things up alot its actually faster then mac drive it self. then u can do a backup to your synology drive.
1. get your self a mac mini
2. daisy chain ur external thunderbolt nvme enclouser
3.share that drive too
4. do your back up to synology.
5.clean up your external thunderbolt nvme files when u no longer use it. just treat it as a scratch disk.
A bit confusing… so in a few sentences what would be your recommendation looking back? Less bays and higher capacity drives plus a cloud copy and an off-site copy? Also go with a NAS that uses M.2 SSDs to speed up workflow?
Does it work on Xbox?
You Really should check out the HighPoint SSD7540 PCIe 4.0 x16 8-Port M.2 NVMe RAID Controller ... 64TB storage 55 GB / sec reads 52 GB sec writes.
If that's a bit pricy for you, they also have the HighPoint SSD7105 PCI-Express 3.0 x16 4-Port M.2 NVMe RAID Controller for one third the price.
I have a suggestion:
1. Build a NAS type device at a relative's house with WoL.
2. Backup the data.
3. When you need to update the data, send WoL signal to turn the machine on.
4. Connect to the device
5. Update the data slowly via internet (cus it's long distance).
6. Turn off the device remotely.
7. Realize you forgot something and start again from step 3.
preferably a relative that places his home-brewing beer apparatus right over your half-rack server setup
@@rickacton7540 lol
WOL usually requires a device on the remote subnet to send the magic packet. A cheaper solution is to schedule the turning on and powering down of the remote NAS. The remote NAS should also be configured with a full on firewall, and preferably some sort of VPN connection. But overall, the NAS is designed to run 24x7 anyways, so leaving it running is often a smarter, cheaper, and easier choice. You'll also want to make sure that it's locked down so it can't be removed, sold, or traded because it's a convenient source of cash.. If your relative is using the NAS, you should also reciprocate their data to your location as an offsite backup for them.
Backblaze is very affordable. 3 copies, 2 locations (Client and NAS), 1 off site (Cloud).
I came here because I want to buy a Nas now I need two
lol for real though 🧍🏽♂️
😂
Which NAS do you wanna buy?
Why 2.
If you use SHR-2 system (and you really should on larger Synology NAS as it gives you 2 HDDs worth of redundancy), you can upgrade your drives and this way increase available capacity as you need it, without investing a ton of money upfront. I also recommend having an extra HDD configured as a hot spare so that NAS would automatically begin restoration of redundancy in case of HDD failure, removing an urgency of buying a new HDD after a failure. For your video editing, add SSD cache and upgrade RAM on your NAS to 32 GB, and your experience with change dramatically without the need for extra NAS as it uses free RAM as a disk cache too. I also have DS1821+, loaded with 6 HDDs of various capacities (some were leftovers from my prevous NAS DS1512+. which served me well for over 10 years!) for a data storage, and one more as a hot spare. When I get close to running out of space, I buy two new larger HDDs and replace two lowest capacity ones I had, this way I get more capacity, save some money (as HDDs get cheaper over time) and reduce a chance of failures because my HDDs are newer on average than they might've been if I would've followed your advice and invested into a few huge drives upfront. Over my ~13 years of owning Synology NAS (DS1512+, then DS1821+) I had 5 HDD failures, and none of them caused any data loss.
Would love if you have a link of how this "external hot spare" and auto restore process was explained, it sounds great.
This is the kind of information I was expecting from the video. Thank you for share.
So your saying this better to get your minimum storage you need vs just getting a high ceiling and see if you reach it? And just swap as you go? And what can cause hard drive to fail? I only ask because I have PCs with 2 drives and haven't gone wrong for 4+ years. Would like more info
12TB drives are the best bang for the buck size right now for a 4-5 bay NAS. In case anyone was wondering. I got 8TB drives due to not wanting to go too big, but now wish I got the 12 TBs as the total size of 4x8TB in RAID 5 is filling up shockingly fast and not much room for expansion (I have 5 bays). 3x12TB would have cost me the same with lots more room to expand in the future. Seagate Exos are currently the best in price/performance, if you don't mind the noise. You should have the NAS in a separate room anyway so it shouldn't be a big deal.
I think most people way underestimate how much space they need. I did the same, bought 12TB drives and now replacing those with 22TB ones.
@@micker9830 I'm worried about going that big. In case of failure it takes a very long time to rebuild. You'd want to have 2 drive fault tolerance RAID array if you're going that big on drive capacity.
I know RAID is not a backup, but for many people it kindda is as they're not that good doing actual regular backups.
@@BlockThrone I just replaced a drive with a 22tb drive and it took one day to rebuild.
@@micker9830 that's not too bad. What sort of NAS do you have?
@@BlockThrone Synology 920+ 4 bay.
I went the DIY route and for the networking went SFP+ + DAC cables. The NAS (running truenas) cost me about 300 before drives and mellanox cards + DAC cables about $90. Throw in a switch for another $200 and I was set. Currently rebuilding my little home lab and picked up an Epyc CPU/mobo and some ram to replace my NAS and VM box with one machine. I totally get the convenience of using Synology and understand not everyone wants to DIY for something like this though. In the end so long as you get to where you want to get it's all good.
How is the power consumption?
@@trrjecto4459 It's honestly been years since I've measured power consumption so I honestly don't remember but TDP for the CPU is 65w and it's 8 spinning drives + 2 ssd's. Power consumption is not high on my list of priorities though, if it was I could switch to a Xeon L and get TDP down to I think 35w and set the drives to spin down to save a bit more. I'm still testing the EPYC system but TDP on that is around 125w iirc.
There’s one thing I’ll say. It’s nice to have the large storage capacity but if your HDD fails and you have it in raid for redundancy. It would take almost 3days to rebuild that 20TB and if any of the other HDD fail while it’s rebuilding for 3days you loose all your data. VS if you had 8TB it could be rebuilt in Hours. I’m pretty sure i heard this from somewhere before but all those cloud storage companies use 8TB instead like a 16TB or 20TB bc of how expensive they are and how long they take to rebuild your data. Thanks for an amazing and informative video Jimmy!😊
I have an unraid machine set up. I always worry about this when the idea of having to rebuild from parity comes into my head. I know unraid and your scenario are not a 1:1 analog, but still… the fear is real haha.
Who sane is running RAID5 on anything bigger then 2TB array
RAID6 is absolute minimum for that size
@@WizardNumberNext tell us more about this please:
RAID is not a backup. Keep your data in an offsite backup to protect from fire, flood, or theft. It will be inconvenient to load on a new NAS, but not lost.
How fast your array is rebuilt depends on the hardware running it all and what raid configuration you go with. You can also set up more than just redundancy for a single drive. You can set it up for failure of any number of drives depending on how much capacity vs redundancy you want, and depending on the number of drives. Typically though, multiple drives don't ordinarily fail within days of each other unless there's something else going on. And rebuilding your array doesn't prevent you from using it in the meantime.
What I did for backups: my synology is attached to a cheap small micropc with a celeron and 32gb of ram. I installed Ubuntu and then mapped the storage to it, with a good password. Then I have crashplan for small business running and backing it up. Wayy cheaper then backblaze. Now I am also planning to get a second nas to keep at my mom's house as a second nas.
My synology also has nvme cache, with 2 256gb ssds wich made it snappier for my lightroom collection.
I was thinking of a similar solution. But I don’t follow completely. When you say “attached” what do you mean? Over the network or via USB? Can you talk in more detail how this is done? Thanks.
I'd recommend considering AWS S3 deep archive for your remote backup. It's
I have a 4 bay QNAB NAS, and I definitely agree with you about HD size. I made two mistakes. 1st I bought 4 8TB drives. NEVER thought I’d run out of space within 4yrs. And, unlike Synology, QNAB doesn’t allow you to mix drives. So, I have to replace all of my drives before I can use all of the drive capacity. The 2nd mistake was going with QNAB over synology. It works, but for my use case the user friendly OS from synology would’ve been the better choice.
Unless you use disk striping (RAID0), it doesn't matter what hardware you use, you cannot use all of the drive capacity when you mix drive capacity. Whether you have a Synology or QNAP, you will have to upgrade all your drives to the same capacity.
@@pavelbuchnevich1229 With Synology you have SHR though. With this you can mix hard drives with different capacities. On the website there is a raid calculator where you can simulate the whole thing.
There will still be unusable storage, but it is significantly better than with a normal raid.
Remember 4 years may be the end of life of your drives so you made the good choice. I have lost a lot of old drives. Age matters.
I found SFP+ cards and switches years ago when I built my NAS. I think I spent around $300 on the networking side and got a 4 x SFP+/gigabit eth switch, along with 4 SFP+ PCIe cards, and all the cabling.
Later on I’ve picked up other switches with a mix of SFP+ for cheap 10gig and SFP+ to 24+ port gigabit networking.
Been keeping things cheap while hardlining everything that stays in one spot. My next network upgrade will be when 100gb gets cheaper.
My NAS is an old full tower currently running TrueNAS. with 10 x 3.5” hard drives, 8 x 2.5” SSDs, boots from mirrored intel optane drives, and has a couple PCIe Cache SSDs(Sun/Oracle F80s), handling metadata, read cache, write cache, etc. and 64GB of DDR4.
So I got the 8 bay Synology NAS and put eight 4TB WD Blue SSD's in it, there was a killer deal for Christmas about a year ago on those drives. I get some amazing speeds doing that, however at the cost of adding a larger storage pool. SO, enter the 5-BAY expansion unit for the Synology, I plan on a later date, getting that unit and populating it with 20TB drives and using that as my backup and catchall since my 8bay SSD solution is only 20TB total usable pool storage. I do love how the only sound from that setup are the fans. So quiet and I get 821 MB/s write and 1126 MB/s read! Holy smokes! So I am ready for that 8k edit!
4:00 Also another thing to point out is that having a 10GB connection to your router or main switch is useful if you have for example 10 devices using 1GB/s. So having a faster connecting from the server to the router could be advantageous even if you don't have 10GB on your devices but instead have multiple users connecting to the server and pulling or uploading data.
Great video! I started out similarly. Got a DS1621+ as my main NAS, but almost immediately got the 1821+ when released a month later. It became my primary and the 1621+ became my backup. I had (7) 14TB drives and a 2TB SSD for VMs, but recently replaced it with another 14TB drive with the intention of using one of my NVMe drives as a storage pool when I upgrade to DSM 7.2. I use SHR2 on the 1821+. On the 1621+ I have (6) 14TB drives using SHR and it’s now my backup NAS for my 1821+ which includes PC backups along with data. As for and offsite backup, I got a 920+ with (4) 16TB drives using SHR and keep it at my daughters house. I do as you mentioned. I have two storage pools, one I backup my 1821+ to and the other I give to her for storage. I also backup her data to my 1621+ to return the favor. I will also eventually hang a HD off my 1821+ for critical data and store it on my safe. So, I think I’ve more than covered the 3-2-1 strategy. 😊
One critical thing I would mention to your subs is absolutely, positively get one or two UPS’s. They can be a NAS lifesaver! 😉
An Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) is a requirement in my experience.
I was going to suggest the same thing: use a lower powered Synology at a family member’s house as your offsite backup. I saw you mentioning Ubiquiti equipment. I use a site-to-site VPN and use Hyperbackup to do an rsync across (I just keep one remote copy). Locally, I have two Synology’s, one as a backup, both with external drives hanging off of them for more local backup. I’ve found that for my photo editing light video editing, I use local drives, use Synology Drive for some files, and rsync to the NAS for others. The lag you mention is real. I like the idea of a small pool of SSDs. I need to try that. :)
I purchased Synology 213J with 2 WD Reds, probably 7-8 years ago. Still rocking without any problems. Synology makes such a great devices :) Now it's time for upgrade...
Thanks for sharing your experience with us.
I'm still rocking a 213J as well. awesome piece of software. very reliable for file transfers.
@@leoguevara9303 I cannot achieve promised 100MB transfer speed. LAN or wireless, it is always 40-50MB/s.
Not sure is NAS too slow or disks are dying :/
Just be sure it's backed up too. See my experience posted above...This was after about 6-7yrs. Drives died consecutively before they could be replaced. RAID corrupted and lost it all.
and...........drum roll please....what are you going to purchase now , to update your present system....please and thank you !!
Good video, Jimmy. I use Synology exclusively at the office for editing I have about 18, 1821+ at this point. I just started adding 1221+ rack units. One thing that is really important with the Synology NAS is to increase memory. I typically add a 16 GB memory chip but in my last build I added 32. Every unit gets 10 GbE cards for network performance, and we are able to edit massive amounts of video through the Synology without lag.
This right here plus the internal NVMe slots.
Hi Brian, quick question for you. You're telling me you edit video, without lag using: Synology NAS, updated 16gb (or 32gb) RAM, and Synology E10G18-T1 10GbE PCIe expansion card? Are you running HDD with 7200RPM? Thanks - really need help on this!
@@OrigEntertainmentOfficialAre you using the internal NVMez as cash or extra storage? 😊
@@MarkMcCabeMarkMcCabeVideoI would assume editing off an ass for anything higher than 1080p is going to be lackluster. I use an NVMe for the render and work drive and then offload it to sata after. I am getting a NAS soon but I'm still undecided on the drive sizes as it is very expensive
@@pizzlespettime as the cache.
perfect view timing!! was going to purchase another WD external hard drive and stopped short of doing so...just came across your vid; new inspiration b/c wanted to do this RAID type storage years ago...nice
Your explanation on speeds is so true, remember when Fiberoptics first came out people were paying through the nose for it not realizing that some where wasting ther money because although those speeds came to their Home ( the pole on the street in front of their home) it is the internal part of their home that also had to be able to fully support the fibre optics which at that time pretty much no homes were
Built is a pretty strong wording here :)
Although nice video, I love how happy you seem by adding this to your workflow.
Was using a Synology DS218+ for general storage and Plex for a few years, then moved to a DS418 for just file storage and the DS218+ for a dedicated Plex machine. Both are being backed up to Backblaze B2. Also have a DS220 for video projects for the day job. I'm definitely a Synology fan. haha
you are an investor
This should be called,"I bought a NAS, then got sent another one free". But the principal is there.
Yea…you didn’t really build anything
Big beefy external HD in a small safe deposit box is what I'm doing for off site back up. My total data archive footprint fits into a 14 TB or bigger single drive, so a single drive works for me. I update it every 6 months.
One thing to think about is having at least 3 of the backup drives that you rotate. You don't want all the drives in the same place at the same time. And protect against what would happen if lighting struck while freshening up the external drive backup.
2:57 "giant gaping pipes" - toilet humor has never been so advanced. subscribed.
Incredible video. Loved how you introduced them sending in the product (they are seeing this video the same time you are). I have been using a single TB external SSD and was on the fence about purchasing a NAS system. This video was extremely helpful. Subbed
Great video! I also purchased the DS1821+ and super happy with it. I have x6 - 10TB HD (Raid 5) and x2 - 4TB SSD installed (Raid 0) (Yes i have nightly backups to external drives). I updated the RAM from the standard 4GB to 20GB and used a dual port 10GB NIC I already had to install in the expansion slot. Runs great but I am not stressing it very much, the larger array serves all my ripped blu-ray movies. The smaller array is for photos, music and data files.
I used to run a custom built Ubuntu server, learned a LOT but in the end the maintenance of it was overwhelming at times (botched updates, incorrect command entries by me!) and the giant server box was just too much (x14 - 2TB drives!). Synology makes it all so easy, very happy with my purchase.
so 2 volumes as well? The SSD one for photos, music and data while the other houses the rips?
eeyy, saw that LTT screw driver ! Also dude you are so chill, its refreshing to watch your videos. Youre kind of a upper end regular tech nerd that people can still relate too.
Thanks for the update. Viewed your previous video on NASs a little while ago when doing research on what to get. So a few weeks ago I set up my DS1821+ with currently 5 14TB drives for all my storage and editing (with 1 drive redundancy), and 1 x 14TB without redundancy for the media server. That means I have 2 bays empty, ready to be filled for more storage in the future. Actually planning on using one bay for surveillance once I decide on the right cameras I need to keep an eye on my dog while working in the homeoffice lol. And what I also did was added 2 x 1TB NVME SSDs in a read/write cache which makes the whole experience lightning fast... the speeds over 10Gbit network are amazing, nothing lags and basically viewing/editing 4k footage is smooth as butter. There is that initial delay when all the footage is loaded, but 750GB of cache will keep things around when you are working on something longer than a minute.
The 3-2-1 backup problem I havent also solved yet, but as a first action I'm thinking of running those hard drives I migrated all my stuff from to the NAS as backup drives. These are WD 2-drive RAIDs that in RAID0 will have 16+20TB (36TB - plenty for now!) of space for that first backup of most important stuff, just in case the NAS gets fried. But yeah they will still be in the same house and connected to the NAS via USB. Even if I could have a wall between the actual devices... still not ideal. Backblaze seems like an option but will get a bit expensive. Will have to see. If you find a good affordable solution in the mean time, let us know ;)
PS, Maxed out RAM To 32GB - which also helps when running multiple things on the NAS.
Just before I recently retired, I got a QNAP TS-1635AX, and a few 12TB and 14TB drives, planning a big re-design of my multi-computer network. My dream of lots of spare time in retirement is slow coming, so also is my incorporation of the NAS box. I appreciate videos like this one to help me understand the finer points of what I'm getting myself into.
External backup, store a NAS in a purpose built water & fire resistant box, outside the property, possibly even underground, keep it connected via cat 5. It’s more likely, if you survive a fire, the fire department will put the blaze out and you can rescue your data. Just make sure the cables are coming out of the box from the bottom side so water from the fire truck won’t penetrate the box. Obviously much more thought would be needed but the option is there
This is the best video I’ve seen. I’m talking about NAS systems. Thank you so much!
I have a DS1520+ which I’ve bought at least 2 years ago. My need for extra large storage space wasn’t as huge when I bought it, but it was still a need to back up a lot of media files I had. Instead of buying like large capacity single 20 TB HD drive which 2 years ago was extremely expensive. I just bought smaller drives, all 4 TB HD drives and populated all 5 drive bays for total 20 TB. I did the raid option that allowed in future replacing any drive with a larger capacity drive. That allowed as drives got cheaper over time I could buyer larger capacity drives at cheaper prices each going into the future and slowly increased the DS storage capacity as needed and as prices got much cheaper. With just 1 large drive, you have no backup. I don’t make vids or anything, but my DS1520+ sits on my computer desk. I hardly even notice it’s even there and running unless I don’t see the blue lights to even notice it’s not even on from a power failure.
I have a 8-bay NAS with total usable storage of 24TB, which I only use for archiving. I had the idea of using it as my personal cloud storage, but the noise and heat makes it less practical for keeping it running all the time. Thanks for sharing the idea of using a smaller NAS with SSD for stuff that are fequently access. I'll have to look into whether it can be run quieter and cooler with SSD, maybe my a solution for me if it can.
No mention of the NVME cache that the 1821+ could take advantage off. Certainly faster than the SSD in the 923+ and cheaper than buying a second NAS
Thanks for the tips! NAS' are so costly to setup, so this video was helpful.
As for cables, if your runs are less than 37m, then you can get away with CAT6 which is way cheaper than CAT6a (required if longer runs are needed up to 100m). My Synology 1010 is still chugging away nicely.
Thanks for the video. This 'One Year Later & Lessons Learned' is a great idea!
I don't technically have a NAS, but I do have a server running Proxmox and I can set up a NAS in a container or VM in a handful of clicks.
I am considering a NAS though, any streaming whatnot can be done via the cloud, that's what it's there for.. so the NAS doesn't need many features, it only has to be reliable.
Thanks for the video. I have a DS416play, which has a miserable 1GB of RAM and for the last year or two hasn't even completed a backup. Saw a comment about adding more ram and it suddenly became obvious why it would only start backing up right after a boot. The speed of your UI is insane compared to my unit!
Yr video was awesome. Really appreciate yr sharing. I own a small PC repair company I just bought a small two bay synology I have been backing up by creating images of my clients PCs externally. So now I plan to use synology
Ok I thought I was crazy for thinking about all this, but apparently it's a real thing. Thanks for sharing! About to possibly get my first NAS.
If looking for a much cheaper NAS solution, look into old workstations! While not the easiest option, forcing you to learn another OS like TrueNAS or Unraid and losing the ease-of-access that comes with prebulit hardware and software, it is a much more budget friendly option. I bought a refurbished Dell optiplex 5040 with an i5 and 16gb of ram just as an intro into the idea of running a NAS, and the original system came out to like $180 USD for the system and a SATA expansion card to connect more drives. Might not fit everybody, but it's a way to get into using a NAS without spending 5-600 $ on something from Synology or another company. Also allows for you to drop in something like a graphics card to make a media server at home possible with hardware transcoding! Worth checking out if for nothing else other than experimentation.
Depends, while it's hard to get up to the price of a 8 bay Synology with a self-built NAS/Server it is certainly possible especially when you start talking about other things like self hosted cloud gaming. Mini PC (new or used) and a couple of used SATA drives can be done for around $250 if you shop around. The cheapest two bay NAS from the two leaders is easily $200 or more without drives. Plus you'll be getting a ARM based CPU which may or may not handle 4K streaming to more than two users.
i love my DS920+. I plan on getting the Synology 1U server NAS with SSD harddrive as soon as i get more funds. I do hate the latency delay at time.
I wish the 3rd option for the NAS would've been considering other companies. Something like Truenas mini lineup. It uses open-zfs filesystem which uses ram as read cache and you can even add nvme drives for a level 2 read cache. Which both would be faster than your DS923+. You can fill it with large capacity drives and it caches the most recent written files as well as the most common read files intelligently and automatically. Have you considered that way to get more speed?
The 923+ supports using NVME as read or read/write cache. He should have mentioned it.
@@danielmcgowan9534 True, can you create a pool with those drives with any regular nvme drives tho?
Thanks for sharing your pros and cons of Synology units. Your video helped solve a few questions I had.
1 year later, and this video is still so helpful! Thank you!
Did you know Synology Drive for mac has on demand download? It will download the needed files onto your computer and syncs changes back to the NAS. Just like iCloud Drive.
Hey! Just found this video and I normally don't subscribe instantly, but I looked through the channel out of curiosity, because this video is extremely good and helpful. To make it short: new Sub, keep it going! :)
I have a video production company and we use the Synology 1821+ for our editing needs with 12TB Iron Wolf drives. We use 2.5Gb connections to four M1 mac minis and one M1 mac studio via a 2.5Gb switch with one 10Gb connection on that switch for the NAS. We do not experience any lag for the most part even when editing 4K projects on all the machines at once. But we did add 4TB internal PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 Internal SSD and maxed out the memory on the NAS. I missed if you mentioned upgrading these on your 8 bay. This will be key to help you improve editing performance over the network. Also, not sure what kind of cables you are using. I think you need a minimum 5e in order to have enough speed over the cable. We are using Cat8 though I know that is overkill. We have a really short run so I didn't mind the expense.
Great video, very insightful given my own similar experience. I have 3 2-bay NASs each with more capacity (HD size). I finally moved to the DS920+ which will last me for a while but lie you I am looking at purchasing a second (perhaps bigger to support 2 volumes equal to my 920+). I had free storage with Google Cloud through my University however they are ending that program next year so I will be scrambling to get my own secondary backup in place!
One idea you didn't mention, place the backup drive/nas in a firebox/safe (to survive house fire) taking it out periodically to update it!
Thanks again I now know I am not alone in the mistakes I have made (mostly financially motivated).
Started with a 2 bay Synology with 6TB (x2) netting 6TB (SNR raid). Then shelved the 6TB and put in 12TB (x2) netting 12 TB. Close to outgrowing that, got a DS918+ (4 bay expandable) and used the 6TB (x2) + 12TB (x2) netting 24TB. Eventually shelved the 6TBs and went to 12TB (x4) netting 36 TB. Lived haunted by no backup. Got a Raid PRO 4 bay USB enclosure. Increased NAS to 16TB (x2) + 12TB (x2) netting 40TB. Put 12TB (x2) + 6TB (x2) with raid 0 (JBOD) and netting 38 TB for backup. The era of my 4 bay NAS has a maximum drive size of 16TB. So I can only expand the NAS another 8TB without buying the expansion case. I'm at 40% utilization so I won't see a problem soon. I doubt ever, but I also thought 6TB (x2) was enough at the beginning. The raid capable USB enclosure was huge as a backup solution. Low cost enclosure using demoted NAS drives. I don't have offsite backup, but if/when I do, it will likely be an inexpensive multi-bay USB enclosure. Understand a USB enclosure is NOT a NAS. It's just raw storage. Any services using that storage must be hosted/run in a different device. For me, it's just a 38TB drive on my desktop. Having a NAS is a learning experience and well worth the effort. I couldn't live without one now.
You didn't build anything - you just bought a NAS off the shelf, slapped some drives in and configured it. I was expecting you would build a NAS from components, install Proxmox, FreeNAS etc with a title like that.
agreed. he clickbait us
Bro is butthurt fr
😂 Yo
This guy didn't build a shit 🤦🏻♂️
Does building a computer mean I should be soldering?
Great video Jimmy. I'm running a DS920+ with 40tb. Backing up my pc, plex along with 10 other friends cell phones, "photos," and 2 friends pc's. I have a 16tb external NAS drive for backup plus a friends NAS at her place. I was using C2 but it was going to cost more so I stopped it. am looking to get a larger NAS when Synology comes out with an intel version.
My (starter) recommendation is that you spend money on good quality drives and buy a reasonably recent (2~4 years old) second hand Synology NAS.
Synology has very good long term support, even for older hardware.
Even just a 2 bay model is a good starting point for basics and getting you used to the workflow etc.
My current setup is a new 2 bay model (DS220+) with a media transcoding & docker capable CPU (2x4TB in RAID0 for 8 TB of quick access, I now wish I sprung for larger TB drives), and a second hand 8 bay (DS1817+) that's ~5 years old with a 5 drive expansion box (2x 36TB volumes in various combinations of disks, RAID 6 on the 8 bay and RAID 5 on the expansion box).
The smaller NAS is my "work in progress" machine, the big one is "The Vault".
My "cloud drive" folders, file shares, Plex, PC backups etc all happen on the small NAS.
The small NAS is backed up every night to the vault, along side my servers (for website/game hosting etc) backup nightly to the vault.
Select important files are also backed up to Backblaze2B with immutable copies setup with a month long retention time (meaning they are undeletable for at least a month) at ~1$USD/month cost. Those same files are also backed up to a NAS at my parent's house via the hyperbackup thingy, while their important files are backed up on my box.
The vault also holds a "media archive" for when I run out of diskspace on the smaller NAS.
The big one is on a power on/off schedule to save power/heat/noise, it reduces wear, reduces possible attack surface (since its not on the network when my PC/laptop is on). It can be powered on via Wake-on-lan via my router if I need to access the archive for some reason.
Actually, the DS1817+ is still capable of decoding some media files, but can struggle with H265 or super high bitrate formats, so I don't usually even have to copy stuff back to the DS220+ if I want to re-watch something old.
All of this hardware was built up over quite a few years, but man does Synology make it easy to stick with them once you're used to it.
The one downside IMO is the lack of native high-bandwidth connections. Now you have to choose to give up your SSD cache slot for faster ethernet. I would love to see at least a 2.5G port become standard...
As a sidenote: Their surveillance station is also quite usable, although for more than 2 cameras you need additional (perpetual, one time cost) licenses.
I use the second ethernet jack to hook the cameras into their own dedicated POE network, so it doesn't interfere with the rest of the network.
Great video with all the details, regrets and possible solutions for the problem. Thank you very much for this!
Obviously one downside of this system is that you cannot send/receive data to/from the NAS unless you are actually attached to your LOCAL network (LAN). This is unlike Cloud Storage where you can access it anywhere over the internet after authenticating into your account. Yes the NAS storage is MUCH faster but cannot be accessed outside of your LAN. Question: how do you handle taking a project off-site? Do you download the needed files first, then sync with your NAS when you come back home?
DSM (Synology's NAS operating system) gives you the ability of accessing your NAS from outside your LAN. You can either do it via their QuickConnect service, or by setting up DDNS. You just have to be very careful about setting up firewall rules on either your gateway router or the NAS itself (or both).
@@dmnddog7417 Oh, okay! That's interesting. I wonder what the read/write speeds are when accessing across the internet. Is it simply limited by your internet speed?
An idea I thought of for you was to just give one of your family members a NAS and turn it into a plex server for them to use. Then reality hits and you realize that you've just volunteered to be their 24/7 free tech support by doing this.
IMO when starting, id invest in getting a nas that has a few more slots. Most users eventually nees to grow and the most costly thing to do is have to buy another nas. If your planning to use 4 drives, get a 5,6 or 8 slot nas. The diff is not that much. Id also invest in getting a unit with the pci-e expansion slot. Alway good to have a path to improve, add a 10g card or a m.2 card or both. Plan ahead, specially if your a video editor or data junkie!
My setup:
1. Use an OWC Thunderbay to get a fast RAID setup at your desk. This also means it's technically a desktop-attached drive, and not a NAS drive, which you can backup using a standard unlimited Backblaze plan.
2. Sync the data from that Thunderbay to the Synology (over 10Gbe if you want that to be snappy)
There you go. You've got 1 copy in the thunderbay, a second on the Synology (plus RAID assurance on both), and back up to the cloud to Backblaze.
I ran across your channel last night. I like your humor and you're right on par with the things I've been working on. I started using Synology a few years ago with a 5-bay (DS1019+), but I have the same one you set up a year ago and donated my 5-bay to my church. Eh... free off-site backup location... I didn't do the 10Gbps card, since I didn't want to re-purchase my equipment. I am building a house within the next year and the plan was to get the 10Gbps equipment there. Thanks for the videos and I'll look forward to many more.
Further proof that Churches no longer need to be tax exempt!
Thanks for this comprehensive but digestible tutorial:).
You missed another solution is to have DAS - direct attached storage - via thunderbolt - this will be fast for working data back it up or mirror it to the NAS - also backblaze cloud storage for a single computer and all directly connected drives is only 99$ per year,- unlimited size - use the NAS os a onsite backup and for data not needing fast access 3-2-1
Indeed. To exactly achieve what Jimmy does with the full-flash NAS, you would probably need to utilize OWC SoftRAID to create a storage pool for a multi-drive DAS system, right?
That's what I do, and it works fine. In addition, I run PLEX and file sharing on my computer, and every device in my home office has access to the files, even to the point of NAS-level speeds.
Be sure to add a UPS (and connect the Monitor USB to the NAS)
Up sizing a drive is easy in a RAID set, Simply replace one at a time and let it rebuild. Repeat.
Cool /vent that closet. Heat is hard of drives. (my middle drives on my ds416slim run hotter) A bathroom exhaust fan in the ceiling and a slightly larger gap at floor level will work wonders)
Good video although a bit deceiving because building a NAS implies that you went out or on line and purchased a case, mother board fans, ram, and an OS from one of those sites on line that offer that kind of thing. NOT an off the shelf complete unit Like Synology or QNAP. OK, now that I got that off my chest, lets move on. SSDs are a great solution if you're going to use them as part of your 3,2,1 backup solution. I had considered that at the time I got my 918+ in 2019, but further investigation suggested that I wouldn't gain a noticeable increase in speed. Also continuous read and writes have been found to cause premature failures and unexpected crashes on the drives. But they are a great back up solution. The only complaint I have with my NAS is that the video station doesn't work as well as I would like it to, and I find more often than not that I have to download my movie from my library stored on my NAS to my computer before I can watch it. Now I'm at 78% on my NAS and I'll start to worry about increasing my capacity when I get to 95%. Maybe by that time I might also need to replace my NAS too cause they don't last forever, so I'll rest more easy once I get my SSD drive and back up all my current data. Have you given any thought as to what you would replace your 8 bay with if and when it does fail? Sorry for the long winded comment.
That isn't misleading, you obviously read it differently. I didn't think it was misleading at all.
Before Christmas I purchased a DAS and filled it with 2 8tb Ironwolf drives, 1 16tb Toshiba HD and another 2tb Ironwolf disk, copied all my files to these hard drives, this is my backup device
In February I purchased the Synology DS920+, started with 1 14tb Toshiba HD, then 2 months later added another then a month later another, in a month or so's time will add the 4th. I opted for this NAS as it did transcoding and I primarily use it as a media server although have now stored all my 80,000 photos on it. I use the open source FreeFileSyn to sync data from my NAS to my DAS every month or so. The Toshiba drives were slightly more expensive but after the failures of the Ironwolf drives upon delivery and not long after I can't trust them anymore
Like yourself I am now looking at storing my steam games on to my NAS to free up space on my laptop, don't know if performance will be an issue
To be honest I'm really glad I have set this up, it was an expensive initial outlay but with everything being in one place I'm not messing around plugging and unplugging different hard drives. I can recommend the Synology NAS to anyone. I've never used one before but the help with youtube videos makes it a dream to set up
Hi Jimmy, you have demonstrated a good approach, showing the system dedicated for performance access and data backup. Personally I think that direct attached storage will work way faster for your video editing. I would oppose a combination of a high capacity NVMe SSD connected via thunderbolt interface to your PC and the NAS for the data backup. On my MacBook I'm using embedded rsync - command line toll to backup data from directly connected storage. Mac automator helps me to schedule backup process and avoid use of common line interface.
I incorporate a redundant file management process as much as possible with:
1) 64TB, 10GBE NAS in my work office
2) I keep a duplicate 64TB NAS at my home office
3) 4x2TB portable SSDs for file storage redundancy when I'm on location for photo/video production. I mail one of the SSD's to my work office, a second to my home office, hand a third to a colleague for safe keeping and keep the fourth on me when I'm traveling. My 14" M1 Pro MBP has the same files stored internally.
4) Drafts and final deliverables are saved on Cloud Storage to share with clients and key stake holders.
I typically keep all client files for three years, then archive the final deliverables and discard the drafts, unused clips and images.
There is one more think to keep in mind about the size of the HDD. Restoring. I've seen an 8TB HDD take 24 hours to restore. 20TB should take quite a bit longer.
That is why you back up all the creator content to the cloud. Amazon would be about $20 a month for 20 TB, Back Blaze is $9 a month unlimited data.
Its worth noting that flooding damage is as likely as fire and data storage hates water. Also a physical spinning HDD while prone to failure in mtbf is technically possible to rescue. For an ssd, thats a frisbee once damaged.
In reality, its as cheap for manufacturers to fit 10gb lan ports as 2.5. the extra cost is marginal and many business just ignore NAS with 2.5gbit so even Apple offers 10gbit in even its mac mini. I've seen some nice 2.5in ssd 4 bay NAS. This cuts the heat engineering killing drives and offers compact size. At present ssds in the 1gb are affordable but that will change. Data centres like SSD. Less space, less heat, less cooling, faster access speeds so more hpc tasks are possible (simple AI computing stuff). Fast storage means less investment in ultrafast network pipes, faster syncing. Even drives size and storage is less. The issue now is capacity vs cost. That demand from DCs (and AI tasks) will drive that cost down.
Stellar video Jimmy!! Peaked my interest - I’m a fan ❤. Subscribed. Thank you for making and putting your time into this video. Very informative. ❤
problem with synologie is that they are pushing their own drives.
I got the 1821+ with eight 14TB drives, 32Gb RAM, and a 10G card. 85GB usable...Love it! (Also two WD Black 1TB NVME drive in RAID1 for cahce
That toilet analogy was the shit!
You have a single point of failure on the SSD drive. Always get two of each and at least run in Raid1. So if it dies you just rebuild with a spare. Also the second NAS for backup should be the same as well. "Sneaker netting" an offsite backup every so often is not a bad idea.
The DS923+ offers storage pool for the NVME bays on the bottom of it, so long as you use their drives, which are expensive but you’d be getting a twice as fast experience with it. Personally I’d suggest just plugging the SSD in to your Mac as that’ll be faster than 10Gb (with an NVME) and using the NAS as archive data.
I got 2 synology NAS, one with 4x2TB drives and another 2x3TB drives, all I ever use it for normal data backup, meaning no video or big file size. Its mostly documents, imges, some software since i do work around machines like CNCs, also some CAD desings. Then I needed another one NAS and I decided to buy an 30$ old machine HP xw6400 Workstation which has 2 CPUS on MB 2x4cores cpus and 16 GB of DDR2 (4x4GB DDR2) I installed TRUENAS on this one but the reason i went with this old machine is it supports up to 11 disks. For me it works like a charm. It doesnt have bells and whistles like a Synology NAS ( I'm huge fan os Synology for NAS, super simple to setup) but it gets the job done.
definitely going to try and get a NAS going once I'm out of college since I will most likely need it for all my complex electrical simulations and projects. This helps a lot to get a good handle on how they work and their pros and cons.
Granted, my response is a year late, but this nas has mounts for two nvme drives that can be used to cache files when they are read or they can be used for a read/write cache.
The read/write option does as another potential point for failure during a write.
Can you combine SSD and HDD drives? Wouldn't it be great to have fast SSDs for daily use (like photo editing) and back them up via RAID?
I have settled on a schedule of replacing my home office NAS about every 5 years. When I get a new NAS, the old NAS become a backup NAS. The primary NAS runs 24/7 for years at a time without reboot. The back up NAS only turns on a couple of hours per week to run the weekly back up of the primary NAS.
For my needs, a four bay NAS is plenty of disks. As much as I dislike synology's business practices. I really like the ability to replace hard drives. Typically, I get one new drive every 12-18 months to replace the smallest drive on the NAS with a larger one. Then that disk replaces the smallest disk in the back up NAS. With a little thought and planning this results very stable setup at a reasonable cost and power consumption.
This usage might make the heads of any storage purist explode... but it has worked very well for me.
Note: The backup NAS is located off site. I am really looking forward to the add/upgrade single drive feature to become stable in zfs and TrueNAS so I can finally dump synology.
Why? If it continues to work, keep using it unless you need additional functionality out of it. In that case buy a mini pc and go to town on that for services.
Jimmy if you have the budget, I would look into Tape backup and store the tapes offsite in a safety deposit box or with family. Definitely post a video if you go that route!
Another good option is building your own Nas. Might be harder to set up certain softwares but would be very worth it
Thanks for this...I'm researching my first NAS now, since starting to do video/TH-cam my storage needs have just gotten crazy out of hand.
I still use an old DROBO for nightly backup and I’ve pooled multiple external USB 3.2 SSD drives attached to my primary computer into a single Windows Simple Storage Space which is surprisingly fast with none of the latency inherent to NAS devices.
I synchronize my most important documents to Microsoft OneDrive for added redundancy. (Only 1TB comes with Office 365 subscription however).
My experience with NAS devices is that unless you are willing to make a significant investment in fast drives and upgraded networking, they work better for scheduled backups than anything else. While you can purchase or build NAS devices that provide great media transcoding / streaming capabilities, they usually aren’t the most economical solution except perhaps when your media collection exceeds dozens or even hundreds of TB.
Thanks!
how can you build out of the box ready nas?
Why are people making this point? The thumbnail has a bought NAS in it. However I will give him credit for "building" it because he's running docker containers on it, which most people don't do.
Duuuuude! Thanks a lot for taking the time. Im starting now with the NAS journey and your video help me a LOOOOOOOT
I have my rack mounted Synology NAS with an external disk and I run Hyper Backup to run daily backups to it. I also pay Synology C2, which is their Cloud backup for 60.00/year and Hyper Backup backs up daily to C2. When I make videos in my mac, I store the video file on my mac, but Synology Drive syncs it to my NAS as a backup, when changes are made to the video file.
When you use it to watch movies on your TV, how do you get it to the TV? (Via HDMI or Stream/Cloud)
HDMI, if you have a device connected to the tv (or the tv itself) capable of accessing network drives and running video files just open it as you would a file, or streaming using one of the onboard programs/apps. I've heard generally (and experienced with QNAP) that streaming can be hit or miss depending on the devices using it, streaming software, drivers installed, and video file encoding/file type.
I had similar issues when considering offsite backups. I like to be the one in control of my files so I decided to back up everything on a flash device and store in onsite but in a Waterproof/Fireproof safe. The likelihood of something happening to the safe itself where the safe goes missing is low in my area such as a tornado coming through and picking up my safe and tossing is miles away. So if there was a fire or flood, I should still be able to locate it afterwards.
I set up a Synology NAS in the past year and found a lot of the same benefits, getting off cloud drives was goal 1...done, having local storage that's always available for my home network...done, consoldating media on one shared device...mostly done, backups of local PC's to a local server...done. I have it connected to Cloudflare Zero Trust networking, so that's cool. I could not get Hyperdrive to stop backing up to Backblaze S3. It seemed like it was always running, driving up my bandwidth and finally just shut it off. I have a three drive backups, one local to the NAS and two external drives I swap. I may install Duplicati in a docker image on the NAS and try again as having a remote backup has always been a goal.
The suggestion to put a large capacity fast SSD in one bay, I didn't really consider doing that but it's an interesting idea. My two bay NAS suits my data storage needs, easy on the budget, but a pit pokey on the network. Great video, very useful and the discussion of ways to get faster network bandwidth is spot on.
Thanks for your experience. I watched a bunch of videos about NAS, but you covered the topic of network connection speed in more detail.
And another important topic, about storing copies in different places, in Ukraine there is a high probability of a fire in any house. This seems obvious, but it didn't occur to me. 💙💛
Fantastic video Jimmy! Just subscribed.
Thanks for the review... I just jumped in with a synology entry level DS220j with a pair of 18TB in jbod.
I just wanted it as a media server for movies. I have everything on it backed up on a stack of internal HD's that I connect temporarily with a HD dock.
I do this once a week... and store them in a media fire safe.
While off site is the best solution.... buying a beefy Fire Safe is the next best thing
(Keep in mind a proper media firesafe will run you over a grand!) don't just buy one from Target.
I think I've just found the perfect channel to help me with a lot of the recent ideas I've been having. Big thanks
regarding latency, wouldn't filling the m.2 cache memory slots in your DS1821+ help some?
Exactly - OP, look on the underside, add max ram and a set of 1-2TB Nvme's to the 1821+ 🎉
I don't know if I am missing something or not, but I am checking up this current NAS setup, and it seems that the hard drive and ssds wont work together within the NAS drive? So I am confused how you are able to make a small setup using the SSD with the other hard drives? Let me know!
If it's for backup then just use aws glacier, which is much cheaper. You'll pay for retrieval though, but that may never happen unless you lose the other backups.
Brilliant. At the moment, I just have one DS418 that I keep in my room next to my PC that I have turn off each evening at 11pm and on again in the morning at 7am using it's Power Schedule allowing me to sleep. Currently, use it to store my Photography and Videograohy but understand a backup is needed just incase. Will contact my friend in swizerland who also uses a NAS and see if we can share files together to backup
One HUGE feature of the 1821+ you didn’t mention was the two MVMe bays to setup for cache to assist in the delays in writing and retrievals of files. I have 8 16tb drives in mine with 4 VM’s running with little issue. Also, you can group the 4 NIC’s built in together and do a LAG for 4gbps to a switch. I see you use Unifi, and that is possible very easily.
Just a thought I had, I also have a DS1821+, why not split the bays, as in, make half 4TB SSD's and the other half 20TB mechanical drives, then create 2 storage pools for each. Edit off one, then back it up to the other storage pool. As long as they are 2 different pools that have the same physical media in each pool, what could go wrong?