I made the switch to full 4K video - both for desktop tutorials and on-camera videos
- back at the end of 2016.
Between the higher resolution and bitrates and the higher bulk of b-roll being shot with
the increase in production value for the channel, my typical “Store everything locally and
archive to little NAS drives as I go” strategy couldn’t keep up with my storage needs.
I needed a solution.
A bigger drive?
Not enough.
A PETABYTE SERVER?
I wish.
A realistic solution was needed.
I needed a DiskStation.
I’m EposVox, here to make tech easier and more fun today reviewing the Synology DiskStation
DS916+ - a 4-bay (plus expansion capability) NAS with a quad core Intel Pentium processor
and 8GB of RAM.
This is a beast of a NAS on its own, and I’ve got mine loaded up with 4 6TB IronWolf hard
drives, which were generously donated by Seagate to sponsor this video.
Synology has sponsored tutorial content on my channel in the past, but is not paying
for this review, seeing it before it’s posted or anything like that.
This is still a standard review for me.
For my configuration, I decided to go with Synology’s hybrid raid system and Btrfs,
leaving me with roughly 15TB of usable space to store all that sexy b-roll and voiceover.
This thing has been serving me well for a few months now.
I reviewed a Synology NAS in the past, and the physical overview is about the same.
Great metal chassis, glossy, dust-clinging removeable front panel, some nice rubber feet
on the bottom.
The front also features a status indicator LED, indicator LEDs for each of the 4 drive
bays, a USB 3.0 port, and the power button and power LED.
Over around the back, we’ve got a Kensington lock, power input, eSATA connection for the
optional expansion dock, dual gigabit ethernet ports, and two more USB 3.0 ports.
You can hook up external hard drives or flash drives to these ports to add additional storage
or run backups.
This is an important part of my workflow, as my main working video data resides on the
internal drives, and my finished projects footage archive gets moved to external drives.
The NAS’s “killer feature” is the crazy powerful Synology DSM (or DiskStation Manager)
operating system that runs on it.
This is like a full-fledged computer operating system with a package manager, control panel,
and everything.
This lets you install your own line of apps to meet your needs - for media servers, email
servers, wikis, and so on.
I love this software, it’s the same setup used to configure my router from Synology
that I reviewed previously.
It makes managing the NAS so much easier.
Not only can I manage the file system, apps, network traffic, and so on - but there’s
even a special health monitoring tool built-in just for these IronWolf and IronWolf Pro hard
drives.
This lets me view power-on time of the drives, temperatures, SMART status, and so on.
Then you can run a dedicated IronWolf health scan to test each drive, spitting out an output
code to use to diagnose problems if something is wrong with the hard drives.
The Seagate IronWolf Pro drives also come with 2 year complimentary Rescue Data Recovery
Service, which is great reassurance that your data is safe.
One more detail I wanted to mention is that this NAS is running a Pentium Processor and
isn’t vulnerable to the Atom SOC burnout issues that some NAS devices started experiencing
last year.
I have the DS916+ hooked up with both ethernet jacks to my big Netgear switch in my server
rack from my $15 Server Rack Adventures videos and it acts as my Edit Drive.
All of my active footage for ongoing shoots gets stored on here - currently occupying
9.1TB.
I also store my video resources such as background music, sound effects, intros, lower-thirds,
and so on here, too.
I have folders divided up between “Active Projects,” for projects I’m working on,
“Finished Projects,” for projects that I’ve edited and uploaded but haven’t backed
up to Amazon Cloud Drive yet, “Vlog Storage” to keep our vlog channel stuff separate from
this channel’s footage, and a few other folders.
I also sync my phone’s photos and videos to a “Mobile Backups” folder via Synology’s
DS file app from a sponsored tutorial I released a couple weeks ago, too.
Click the link to learn more about that process.
I also have 2 USB 3.0 drives connected to the DS916+.
One contains my Software archive along with some scrap files I haven’t sorted yet, and
the other contains my Footage Archive for video projects and my YouTube uploaded final
export archive.
Sadly, this isn’t a complete archive, as I lost quite a lot of footage last year, hence
my locking down on archiving and backing up data.
This all gets shared over my network.
All local computers can access it, which is incredibly handy.
Better yet, I actually edit from this NAS!
Yes, all of my active projects STAY on this NAS and I edit straight from it.
The network transfer speeds I get of over 100 megaBYTES per second make this super easy.
I usually use 1/2 or 1/4 quality preview playback anyway, and I almost never experience any
hiccups scrubbing through the timeline in Premiere or playing back edits.
I use a local SSD as a cache and scratch disk to speed up edits and renders, and the combined
performance allow me to smoothly and quickly edit and render videos with no performance
loss, while taking full advantage of the 15TB available on the NAS.
Honestly, I’ve been blown away by the performance here.
I’ve experienced no slowdowns at all.
Every once in a while a certain effect may slow down timeline playback, or it just has
a brief hiccup - but it smooths out quickly, and these things happen to local editing,
too.
I just wish other editing platforms had the same optimizations as Premiere does, because
editing over the network with Vegas Pro and Cyberlink Powerdirector was a very slow and
unenjoyable experience.
I haven’t tried to use Resolve over the network just yet.
The NAS doesn’t get too loud, and doesn’t beep at me anywhere near as much as my QNAP
NAS does.
Drive swapping is simple and toolless - like REALLY simple - and easy to set up using Synology’s
QuickConnect “find my NAS” URL system.
Then mounting the network shares in Windows takes only a couple of clicks and you’re
off to the races.
I guess it’s worth reiterating that this doesn’t have to be an editing or production
NAS by any standpoint, that’s just my use case.
With the plethora of available configuration settings, packages to install, and so on,
it can do just about anything.
Even has a Plex server, or their own “Video Station” alternative.
Plex performs alright.
It choked on a full 10-bit HEVC file, but did fine playing back normal 720p and 1080p
movie files.
For more information about Plex, check my playlist link in the video description.
On the whole, this is a badass little NAS, and the Seagate IronWolf Pro drives give me
tons of space with the security and reliability to keep my data safe.
Plus the IronWolf Health tool is pretty handy, too.
This has been a great experience moving my video footage off of my main rig onto a more
centralized network location, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to have set this up.
This has significantly boosted my productivity this year, while still keeping up with my
4k video production needs.
Now I just want to look into getting the expansion bay and filling it up too, haha.
One day.
If you want to check out the Synology DS916+ for yourself, check out my Amazon affiliate
links in the video description down below.
For more information about the Seagate IronWolf Pro drives and health tools, I have a link
for that, as well.
I’m EposVox, like the video if you enjoyed, and I’ll see you next time.