Plex is about 90% of the activity my NAS tackles everyday. My living room AVR system doesn't need transcoding, but all other TVs in my home would die in buffer hell without the NAS transcoding support. Hard pass
Thanks for the review. I was seriously looking to buy the DS923+ given it could potentially do 10GbE + NVME volumes (natively) till I saw this. Having to use their NVME SSD is an absolute deal-breaker for me considering I can't even slot in my own spare X520 10G NICs like in the larger (older) siblings and buying their proprietary NIC/ SSDs would push this into the DS15XX/ DS16XX cost territory.
Neither this nor the DS1522+ come with onboard dual 2.5GbE. You keep saying 800MB/s but with the built-in 1GbE You're limited to 125MB/s. The extra add-on $250 E10G22-T1-Mini Network Upgrade Module 10GbE is only a single port.
I don't get it either. This 923- and 1522- are lead balloons. The Synology of yesteryear is majorly lost in the forest right now and not taking any calls. All anyone has to do is read other channels or social media, people are really disappointed. Hate to be so negative but I feel like I'm in fantasy land sometimes with this stuff. Many users are complaining about the fan noise on this NAS, with one buying new Nactuas to replace them, the cpus run hot and burn twice the energy of the competition. You can saturate the entire 1gbe with only one drive, you can buy the single port 10GBE but you will still have the bottleneck of 1gbe if you use multiple NICS. I get the whole idea of profitability, and I have always thought highly of them for this, need the company to be strong and grow to be any use to the users, but in 2023 to release something just so behind new hardware that is half the price. Everything on the thing is old tech, even going back to 1999 for 1gbe. There still is plenty of cool aid to go around I'm sure, but I'll pass...
Thanks for the honest review. I find it hard to believe they would ignore plex needs for a home centric nas as well as the nvme limitation. I suspect the nvme compatibility will be expanded in the future.
Thank you for the review. This NAS seems to be somewhat useless really. The fans in this unit have been found to be loud by some users, at least from reading comments on the internet. The processor is weak, yes it has a faster clock speed but is only dual core without graphics, uses more energy than the competition, it is loaded with 2018 and earlier ports and tech, even if you add the 10gbe (which you really have to with almost any raid setup) you only get one port. IMHO, they will eventually figure this madness out but in the meantime the competition will be benefiting from it. I know more than one Synology user that left the platform within this year... The profit they are making on their devices has to be the best in the NAS industry by a large margin, hats off to them for that! You don't need high volume if you have high margin, I bet that was the strategy.
Anyone dissapointed at having an AMD CPU instead of an Intel CPU hasn't been paying attention to CPU development over the past 5 years. Intel continues to fall behind, using a 10 namometer design, compared to AMD Ryzen with its 5 namometer design. In this case, the smaller the nanometer cores, the lower the more circuits that can be placed on the CPU and the lower the power draw, both which lead to AMD Ryzen being much better than the older technology used by Intel.
I have a DS920+ with IronWolf 16 Gb PRO drives and it is VERY quiet. My old DS418 with IronWolf 8 Gb drives sounded like an old school coffee percolator!!
Thanks Rex. I was hoping they'd extend the m.2 as pool feature to other units (I recently acquired 920+), however, with compatibility thing, I am not holding my breath anymore. Pity, really. Didn't see much practical benefit from cache in my usage scenarios, but would love an extra pool.
Nice test would be combination of 1 NVMe for SSD cache + 1 NVMe for Storage pool and virtualization (i think SSD cache itself is important for overall performance). Generally i use my NAS more as application server (domain server, mail server, photos gallery, web server) combined with iSCSI LUN storage, Active Backup and Synology Drive. My idea was also to use it as virtualization engine, but i realized the performance was bad. Mainly disks were overloaded and had negative influence on directory server services. Therefore i have dedicated HPE microserver with hyper-V for cca 10 Windows virtual machines with local NVMe and i do not keep VHD storage files directly on NAS, due to performance. So question is, how better would this 923+ be with virtualization directly on this device (with max memory 32GB) and VHD storage files on NVMe storage pool. How it would behave.
Thanks as always for you technically astute and honest video. I think this is a good model for product tests. Manufacturers handing over a product for a no strings attached, honest test. Hopefully they let you keep it and, presumably you don't need it so can therefore sell it to raise a few bucks to pay for your time. We all win here.
Many thanks for this! I've been grinding on what to replace my DS1513+ with, which has received its last update with DSM 7.1. Your information & advice has pushed me over the edge, and I've ordered a DS923+ today. May use the 1513+ as a backup device.
Super informative review. One thing I will mention is the noise produced by those two units. I have the 923+ and the 1522+ and the noise coming from the 1522+ is noticeably louder. I can really only hear the 923+ when the drives chirp, but I can hear both louder fan noise and more chirp from the extra drive in the 1522+. I solved the Plex problem by keeping the DS920+ as the plex server. The DS923+ and 1522+ seems to be targeted more as a SMB device than a home user IMHO.
Do the 923+ and 1522+ sound the same if they had the same amount of drives in them? Synology shows the same noise numbers for both on the comparison tool page.
The DS923+ is capable of more frames per second of surveillance video vs the 920+ so it looks like surveillance station does not use quick sync. The photo station AI likely is also running full software, though I have not been able to test it
I don't understand your support of the AMD CPU, given this is a home-oriented NAS. In terms of CPU performance, the Intel CPUs are more than sufficient for most users. The only area where one would really like some hardware performance is for video transcoding and here the AMD CPU falls flat. Yes, it wins the other benchmarks, but I find these performance areas to be irrelevant in the sense that the Intel CPU's performance ist just fine.
From my testing DSM feels and runs so much faster with the AMD CPU’s over then intels. It’s a leap in performance that we have not seen in a long time. And gives a far better experience to everyone, other than hardware transcodes. What I wish synology would do is bring back the Play models with Intel iGPU’s for the subset of NAS users looking for hardware transcoding
@@SpaceRexWill Thanks for your response but I don't seem to have succeeded in getting across my point. There is nothing wrong with the current performance or experience of NASs. In other words, while you appreciate the new levels of performance, they are not really missed but the lack of hardware transcoding will be missed. From memory, the "play" models weren't interesting to me as they seemed to be too simplified; they didn't support BTRFS, for instance, which was unacceptable to me.
We have the 1522+ for our photo and video company, and we love it. We use five 8tb drives in raid 5. I think the extra bay is great if you are planning to use raid 5, so you still have 4 other bays for your hdds.
@@dandelionestudios i use a D918+ with 8TB and i really need more space i`m at 89% and its starting to move slow, and yeah the extra bay will help a lot, plus the 10G connection :)
My power supply failed for my 918+ after the 4th year. Now the whole unit failed; 5th year. That’s possibly cos where I stay is very humid. Whenever I took apart the unit to clean, one can see tarnished metal frame and rusty screws. For info.
Thx for all your videos. I just picked up a 923+ and reused drives from an OWC enclosure. I want to swap out the drives for larger ones, preferably IronWolf drives. Will I need to reinstall DSM? Mainly interested in keeping all my settings.
if a DSM update is issued that allows for non-Synology branded NVMe SSDs to be used as a sharepool...you should definitely have a video on that with proof that it works and an overview of the performance. I honestly may hold off on getting a new Synology until that is released. My other option was to a 10G TrueNAS setup but I honestly like like the Synology interface.
I picked up my DS923+ yesterday and am starting to regret my decision to populate it with the Ironwolf drives. :| They are so noisy and the NAS sits on the desk beside me. I had planned to use WD Red Plus but they only had 3 of the 10tb drives in stock.
Thanks for the review. You mentioned a few weeks back that there was a work-around on this unit for those who need Plex Hardware Transcoding. You said you'd make a video on it. Have I missed it? Thank you. Gareth
I'm pretty dumb with the terminology. You said unless you have the compatible SSD you cant build the volume. But will a non supported ssd work as a cache file? What would work with a non supported ssds? Or would it be 100% useless?
Does this work well with the Roon database installed on the M2 SSD? This is the only use case that seems half attractive with the ridiculous cost of these SSDs.
For most users I would probably recommend the 1522+ as the extra bay can increase the service life of the unit significantly compared to the $100 price increase for it
Review units are very common, I get this unit with no strings attached and I don’t feel like it there will be any negative consequences if I gave a bad review.
@@SpaceRexWill Yes but you mentioned you can make snapshot to different volume, i think its not possible. But now i understand, you ment local replication from volume to volume. Misunderstood on my side.
I want to use the Nas mostly for storage of photos and videos. And then see them trough synology photos. Wich Nas would perform better fot that the ds920+ or the ds923+? Does synology photos use transcoding?
I wish they would bring back the ‘play’ models as they were designed for it. I dont see them going back to intel CPUs other than having a play model as the performance for everything other than video transcoding is much worse compared to AMD
In my opinion there's a high likelihood there will be, as well as a DS223+, both of which would be aimed at home users, consolidating the segmentation of their offer into business and home users.
@@SpaceRexWill That would be really a pity as it could mean they would add SSD Volume support on 5-bay NAS only in two years time with the next model. Overall I am really underwhelmed how they handle NVME SSDs, I mean many people use hacks and tweaks to get the drives working, so the hardware can handle it. Would be nice to have official support and be able to put any SSD in there as long as it is GEN3. Have a look how well Sony handles the upgrade options on PS5 and how bad Microsoft did with their newer consoles having proprietary solutions. Synology wants to go this way here unfortunately.
Loved this video. Just a tip from my humble opinion; Try to calm down, the fact that I can hear your every breath in between words is distracting and takes away from your walk through of the hardware. I just bought this myself to put in my office where the electric bill is paid so I can run Plex off of it. I am outfitting it with 4x4tb drives. Thanks again for the video!
And when you have to take a break and cut back - Try and cut back from another angle, so that it flows better with the entire production. You could be on LTT, but you're not so they're not going to teach you this.
