Using nas for video editing - Synology ds1621+ review - should you edit video on a NAS performance

hey what's up guys welcome back to the channel on today's episode we're going to talk about this the synology ds1621 plus and we're going to be talking about maybe if you should be using it for 4k editing or video editing or if you're a content creator and things like that it's not going to be a full comprehensive review of this item exactly it's going to be mainly focused around its performance and if you should be using it for video editing purposes so stick with us all right you guys so we picked this um synology ds1621 plus up a couple months ago it's been a while and we've been using it so we can pretty much give you um some some ideas about it we have been using technology products for a while ever since they first came out um i recently just upgraded to this one couple months ago from a ds213j i think or something like that and then also a rackstation 24 1 4 or something like that somewhere around that there's some rack station up there but anyways we still have those um but we picked this up mainly because it can do 10 gig purposes so we're going to be talking about that so this item and full disclosure nobody sent this to us we purchased this with our own monies the reason it looks a little bit beat up is because it was actually shipped in this box and we got a heavily discounted item from buying it from the amazon warehouse so it was i can't remember how much ridiculous amount ammonia was off but as most of you guys know on the channel don't buy anything at retail price so it was significantly discounted i'll probably put it in the uh description below but mainly because it was a used item maybe returned use or whatever it is but anyways it's been working fine so this is the box that really comes in we'll give you some stuff basic stuff here it this is one of the newer models um so it's a 1621 plus so this one has the amd ryzen 4 core cpu has support for two nvme slots it has the optional 10 gig capable pcie slot has expansion ports and the ram is upgradable when you get it or when it ships or what not it comes with one 4 gig stick it is upgradable i think to like 32 or 64 gigs if you're going to be doing something like that although i would say the process is probably going to be limiting you but i did upgrade my other models you could probably check that in other videos with i think it's called arch memory it's a direct replacement for the synology ram and it works perfectly significantly better cost and value oriented but it still works perfectly fine so like i said this is ds 1621 if you don't know how to read that model number how you basically read it is ds is a disk station lineup so it's kind of like sits on your desktop type thing rs like rackstation and stuff like that that's what the ds means 16 is pretty much the maximum number of drives one system can be capable of okay so in here this holds six drives right now okay it has two expansion ports on the back so if you come if you add all the expansion ports and things like that you can connect up to 16 drives to this unit okay and you have a 21 so this model was actually released in 2021 okay so this is a 2021 model that's how where that comes from plus so this is more of a value more performance a higher model tier than just the big just the basic ones without the plus a higher model one would on top of this would be xs plus or something like that so that's pretty much how you read that okay so we're going to get rid of this box i did purchase this thing here separately this right here is an intel r ethernet converge network adapter x540-t2 if you don't know what that means it pretty means much means it is a dual port base t 10 gigabit ethernet card based on the x540 chipset all right so we'll take you around to the back here real quick so you in order to install this car here you do have to unbolt or unscrew one two three four five six screws take this thing off and you put the card in and then you put it back in and pretty straightforward pcie and card installation there's really nothing to it okay it does have vents um so the car sits right here and most of you guys know pcie cars get pretty hot so it has vents right here that actually suck air through the through the vents and then allows air to get to the heatsink and then the pull the system pulls it out on the back with the with the fans that are located here okay so it does come with one two three four gigabit ethernet ports and here an optional two 10 gig e-ports and it does work perfectly fine no issues on this model this is a six hard drive model okay it does have a little key that it comes with that you can turn here so you don't accidentally unlock it on my system right now i did have it installed with this um the toshiba dta01 aca 200 okay this is a pretty old hard drive and we could probably go into the into the specs or whatnot and look at it but this one apparently it says manufactured in may 2015. obviously since this is year 21 this is pretty old um haven't been using it all the time i do have another zfs server with this mod with all these hard drives and it's been working out pretty well and had a bunch of spares laying around and with the current um kogit situation with with all the hard drives and i t and you know video cards and all that stuff on shortage i didn't really think it was smart to pay a ridiculous over surcharge on a hard drive so i just pulled out some of the spare spare drives that i had and then stuck them in there okay some of these drives i have been using in a previous disk station so you could we'll get in there and figure out how long they've been on but you could all that smart data will tell you pretty much how much it's been used so in this model or i have this my um this station set up with toshiba six of these drives and pretty much raid 10 okay i mean that's what we're going to be testing with today because in reality and you really shouldn't be using raid 0 i guess if you're planning on actually making this like durable storage obviously because if you have one hard drive failure you pretty much screwed if you're using this for a caching device we're going to talk about why you probably shouldn't be doing that because it's just not that smart but in a real situation where you're actually going to be using it pretty heavily you do not want to be using raid 5 that should be deprecated i think in most production environments it probably is i mean raid 5 is great but if you have one hard drive failure your performance is severely impacted a lot of people have have issues and things like that with the you can't even rebuild the array with the hard drives being at such big capacity without even um being having another hard drive fail during that time or just takes forever to rebuild it okay so i would stay away personally from anything that's not raid 10 or raid 1 i would probably stay away from raid 0 unless you have like multiple of these and you can afford a single single one going down by putting in aj but i think you're probably watching this video you're probably not going to be doing that so in a real situation do not set it up with shr do not set it with shr2 avoid all that that jibber jabber jumbo whatever use raid 10 okay if you don't know what reg 10 is pretty much in this configuration with six hard drives you have three mirrored sets okay so you have these like for instance not this exact configuration but you have two hard drives and mirror two hard drives mirror and another two hard drive mirror and what that pretty much happens is you stripe all of those across the mirrors that way you're in a way you're kind of cutting your capacity a little bit in half or whatnot actually probably more in half but um if i do the math i can think about that but you're losing a lot of capacity that's for sure but you are gaining a lot in performance for instance with raid 0 you have obviously no right hit with raid 1 you have one right penalty hit depending on how you want to read it but with raid 5 raid 6 you get into all these nasty parody read write penalty hits and things like that and if you're trying to use it for video editing you do not want any of that you want to try to avoid that as much as possible because video editing scrubbing high speed scrubbing and all that kind of fun stuff you want to reduce the latency on that as much as possible okay so do not do anything that is not raid 10 okay that is going to if you don't use raid 10 okay so be warning you i would not do that all right so um interesting note here i do have i did run a few tests using an sfp card that has a super micro sap card does work perfectly fine in here i can probably throw a mod number a picture of it or something like that up here i also did use um i think was the intel sfp plus card that works fine i did connect it to the smp switch and everything like that but in the really short distances if you're using it in like a business in a household and you're probably like less than i want to say like 100 meters or whatnot you're not going to see that much benefit from fiber over sfp plus or fiber versus copper unless you're going long distances or unless you're unless you're in an area that has a lot of rf type interference and stuff like that but if you're using a good quality cat6a cable or better you won't really have that issue okay if you are sitting in some kind of business environment and this is sitting probably i don't know three stories down or whatnot or on the completely opposite side of the building a couple hundred meters away you should definitely be using sfp plus cards with fiber okay that's definitely the way to go but in a environment like this room kind of using it at my house and this is going to be sitting in like two doors down or whatnot three drawers down uh-huh different story if you guys know the band anyways if you if you are using an environment like i'm using it in you're not going to see that much benefit from fiber or copper okay so let me go ahead and grab the computer and we're going to go ahead and connect to it and what i'm basically going to do is have this connected to the local network on a different my basic local network and i'm going to connect directly to this thing using a macbook pro 16 with a probably like a cal digit 10 gig connect g type thing and connect it directly here on a 172 or complete server network that way i can route to it directly without going through a switch and we'll go through some of the benchmark tests that actually matter if you are doing video editing on an ass okay all right you guys and we're back and we're back here with the macbook pro retina usb c 16 inch whatever you want to call it this computer has i think thunderbolt 4 or something like that but it doesn't really matter because this 10 gig cal digit 10g connect is only running at thunderbolt 3 and it's fine because with thunderbolt 3 you can still get 10 gig all right so let's give you a quick rundown of how it's set up this macbook pro is connected to this cal digit 10 connect 10g using thunderbolt 3 using a cat6a cable that's roughly about i want to say 15 20 feet to the rack station or disk station 1621 plus which is right over there okay it's literally i could probably touch it if i had i don't know a little bit longer arms but it is not within screen here but it is sitting right next to us okay so let's go into the computer all right so on here we're connected directly i'm just checking out some of the stuff here let's check out what we have going on here on here we have see the drives here like i said they're not brand new but it's been on for i don't know four thousand six hundred thirteen hours so it's not brand new has been used a little bit but it's no by no means old okay and just to tell you what we got going on on here let's go and check the network preferences so if we go look at network preferences we have this network this computer is 162. 2.