Hello and welcome to the show!
My name is Alex and this is TechFlow!
Right, we're reviewing a NAS today - a network attached storage, so bear in there.
Let's do this.
Now guys, the real reason why this has taken me so long to review is because, well, I've
had this NAS for a year and you can't just get a NAS and then review it.
I wanted to actually use this in my personal life for an extended period of time before
bringing you guys my "is it even worth buying a NAS" video.
Because, yes, it would be super simple for me to stand here and read you off the specs
of this NAS and what it does but I want to tell you guys: Do you need one?
Is it going to function well in your life?
What's it going to do for you?
So, let's do this.
So, before I get in to this review, I want to say that I have had a network attached
storage on my network for the past five years but all that has been is a simple hard-drive
- a one terabyte hard-drive - plugged in to my router's USB port and then my router giving
me the option to use it as a NAS and I was able to have movies on there and stream them
to the TVs connected on the network and share files.
But a NAS, a NAS is actually a lot more than that.
So, this model, the DS416play, coming in on Amazon at £383, currently as recording this
video - as always guys, pricing and availability down there in the comments section down below.
That is coming with no hard-drives; just the enclosure.
So, hopefully this review will help to justify that price tag just a little bit.
So, first off, let's go over the design because this is a, this is a big unit.
In essence, this is a black, plastic box with two Synology logos on either side which intuitively
double over as ventilation holes for the two rear mounted fans.
And these fans don't really ever get loud.
Next to these two fans on the rear of the device, we can find two gigabit ethernet ports,
a power port - which is a proprietary port by the way which comes with a rather large
power brick - so you're going to have to function that in to your set up somehow as well.
It also has kensington lock capabilities and then two USB 3.0 ports for attaching even more storage.
Flipping the unit over to the front, we can see these glossy finish panels which are subject
to picking up fingerprints - so, once you've got your NAS set up, don't touch it, please.
This panel is removable with four rubber grippers to hold it in place to stop vibrations but
my goodness does this thing suck in a lot of dust.
I'd say at least once a month, you're going to want to turn this thing on and just take
a vacuum to it and get all that dust out because nobody wants dust.
WOMAN: Nobody?
No?
Dust.
ALEX: Next to this extremely fingerprint magnety, dusty panel which covers the four drive bays,
we have a couple of lights on the front here.
One of them, the top one, is a status lamp and then underneath that we have specific
LEDs for the four bays to show hard-drive activity.
Below that, an extra USB 3.0 port and a power port.
OK guys; bear in mind - this is a NAS.
It looks very nice for a NAS but let's talk about these four bays.
So, removing the front panel that's held in place by the grippers, we find the four bays
and in mine I have a six terabyte drive, a three terabyte drive and then another three
terabyte drive and then a two terabyte drive, totalling me with fourteen terabytes of storage.
Now, this NAS can go up to forty terabytes of storage.
So, that's a lot of storage!
And one thing that I really liked about the drive, coming from a newbie myself - last
year I was new to all of this NAS stuff - the drives are toolless entry.
So, you put the drives in the cages, snap in the sides without the use of tools and
then simply slide the drives in to the NAS bay.
Really simple and really intuitive.
So, you're probably thinking to yourself: Alex, in essence, I'm buying a plastic box
for almost £400.
Am I being ripped off?
And you're not.
MAN: Ah, what's in the box?!
ALEX: Introducing the disk station manager.
So, when you first enter the DSM or Disk Station Manager, obviously it's going to ask you to
set up your NAS and this is where it asks you to choose your raid configuration.
Now, Synology let you do any raid under the sun but by default it comes with, what Synology
call the Synology hybrid.
Now, this is really good for those newbies, like I was this time last year, because it
has a one drive redundancy which is absolutely awesome.
Furthermore, it lets you add further drives down the line.
So, say if you wanted to start out with a couple of one terabyte drives, you could then
go ahead, further down the line, six months later, and add a ten terabyte drive if you wanted.
Really cool stuff.
Thanks for that Synology.
Now, talking about that hefty price tag - again, it's not the hardware that you're paying for
here, in my personal opinion.
It's this incredible software that comes along with it.
So, you access the DSM via your web browser.
It'll go through the updates, it does it all automatically - absolutely brilliant.
Once you've got your raid configuration set up, you can then go ahead and start installing
apps on to the Synology drive through the DSM - the disk station management software
- and it's absolutely awesome.
So, Alex, what apps do you use and how are you using your Synology drive?
And, mainly, I just use this thing as a simple NAS - network attached storage - and that's
what it is.
On my Windows based machines, in the My Computer portion, I can double click on my NAS and
it will just show me all of my folders and files.
I can manually drag things in here and take things back out, watch films on the smart
connected TVs, access it via the finder on my Mac - do the exact same thing; navigate
the drive, navigate the folders - absolutely everything.
I have a library of movies which I can stream through FTP.
That is the main reason as to why I use my NAS - to share movies.
And in my testing, doing multiple 1080p and 4K streams to smart TVs and laptops around
the house, I managed eight 1080p streams before I started to see lag and I also managed four
- four 4K streams to four 4K TVs and laptops without seeing lag.
And I've also managed to edit A7S4K footage, recorded at 100 megabits per second in Premier
Pro without stutter.
This thing, this thing works hard and does it well.
Over a gigabit network, I was seeing transfer speeds of about 120 megabits per second.
But there's a few other things as well.
You can actually set up different users on this thing.
So, if you're in a large family, you could allocate a certain amount of the drive - let's
say 500 gigs - and give someone their own username and password.
So, on a computer downstairs, that computer can have its own section of the NAS as to where
they log in with their username and password and they have a 500 gigabyte space to play
with and they can move files to and from the NAS like a virtual space and that is also
really cool if you have a large family.
Another main plus as to why I love this Synology drive is it's super easy to allocate a little
bit of space - I know on mine I have 700 gigabytes - to my time machine capsule.
So, every night when I come in and I plug in my computer or my Macbook to charge, it
automatically, as its connected to my WiFi, backs itself up seamlessly without me
even knowing to the Synology NAS.
I love it.
It's like a local iCloud back up.
Mad.
As well as all of this, you can link your Cloud services, or your Cloud drives, i.e.
Drop Box or Google Drive, to your Synology drive so that you have a local back up of
your Drop Box or your online storage and I'm a massive user of Drop Box so this is absolutely
awesome to me, having my Drop Box constantly being backed up automatically to my Synology NAS.
Furthermore, I use one of Synology's thousand apps, called the CCTV app, and this, this
is incredible.
So, if you guys have any IP network cameras around your home, and just to test this out,
I just bought these to test it - I bought two £50 Fos cameras and these are wireless
IP connected cameras - you can connect to your WiFi - they're just really rubbish really.
They don't have any purpose to me.
But, couple them with this Synology drive and tell the Synology drive their IP address
and the Synology drive can actually find the cameras, live view the cameras and then also
be a full on CCTV system, recording all of the cameras that you have, all of these IP
cameras, to the NAS.
And you can even live view them to your phone.
If you guys have a medium to large home or a medium to small sized business and you're
looking for a NAS, look no further than this DS416play.
I absolutely love it.
My name's been Alex, this has been TechFlow, and we'll see you in the next one.