A few years ago, China suddenly entered the era of great leap forward in cloud services such as online disks and cloud notebooks. Users shouted that the future of cloud storage was coming, and that they would upload the entire hard disk to the cloud with a small pipe with an average of less than 200KB/s, and manage many cloud backups painfully and happily. However, no one expected that the cold winter of capital and policy restrictions had almost wiped out online disks, and most cloud services were on the road of advertising or paid operation.
After experiencing the convenience of cross device synchronization and remote access sharing, many users simply cannot go back. However, the flagging cloud service can not be accepted, and the domestic upload broadband has not improved. Together with the social events such as pornographic photo door, blackmail virus, three color kindergarten, and the tightening of domestic copyright, it finally pushed the private cloud NAS (network attached storage, network storage device) that was originally praised by geek players to the general public.
In the foreseeable years, the public cloud service is unlikely to recover its prosperity, but the multi device explosion trend of mobile phones, tablets, and PCs continues, and the gap between multi device synchronization and storage sharing will only grow. The future that many industry insiders see is that NAS, a private cloud, will be popular among households and small and medium-sized enterprises.
Regardless of the industry trend, if you have a large number of data scattered on various devices in your personal or home that need centralized management, or your team needs private cloud to provide private data management and office collaboration, then you are probably a potential user of NAS. But NAS is still very strange to ordinary users, so this evaluation of Qunhui DS218+and DSM 6.2 systems will be mixed with a lot of relevant background and popular science, hoping to help you understand and purchase NAS.
Science popularization and background information
The concept of NAS can be traced back to 1983. It was first used to solve the capacity bottleneck of local storage and expand and share storage through the network. After years of development, it can be roughly divided into two types: storage type and platform type. The latter has its own complete operating system, which is far beyond simple network storage. After years of competition from Qunhui, Weiunicom, Tiemawei, Xishu, Huayun and other manufacturers, the NAS field has already entered an oligopoly era.
Qunhui has almost become the synonym of NAS in China, and its share has remained above 50% all the year round. According to the data from the Consumer Research Center on December 6, the share of Qunhui has exceeded 51%, which is larger than all other NAS manufacturers combined. The advantages in volume made Qunhui focus on breakthroughs in other fields at the earliest. At its global conference in September, Qunhui put forward the concept of "collaboration, intelligence, virtualization", and entered into enterprise system office, in-depth learning and other fields on a large scale.
But when it comes to the product level, Qunhui's product strategy remains the same. The positioning of different products can be distinguished by naming. DS, which starts with the name, refers to the common chassis storage, while the rack type server usually starts with RS. The suffix with J (the abbreviation of junior) means that it is for individuals and SOHO offices. The value series in the middle is for small offices. The naming will have play or no suffix, while the suffix Plus is a high-end product for companies/workgroups, and the XS/FS series designed specifically for enterprises is further up.
The number sandwiched in the middle represents the number of disks and the year. The first number generally represents the number of hard disks that can be loaded. Qunhui new products are mostly released at the end of the year, so the number will be the release year plus 1. According to the naming rules, the dual drawer NAS that Qunhui updated at the end of 2017 is the DS218 series. From low to high, DS218j, DS218play, DS218 and DS218+are sold at prices ranging from 1450 to 2800. This time, we are evaluating the highest DS218+in the series.
The appearance of DS218+is almost the same as that of accessories and DS218, while the 218play and 218j molds are the same, only different colors are distinguished. In terms of configuration, the maximum DS218+uses the X86 platform, which supports memory expansion and richer interfaces. It has obvious advantages in performance and scalability. The gap between the maximum number of simultaneous connections, the number of office users and other hard food performance is more than twice. In addition, DS218+comes with AES-NI hardware encryption. Even with encryption, it can achieve 113 and 112MB read/write performance. The hard disk supports hot plug, Btrfs snapshots and other advanced features.
Product appearance
After two years of color box packaging, Qunhui now has a full range of packaging, which is still a classic kraft paper box.
Accessories include installation and operation instructions, hard disk fixing screws, 1 meter super five class network cable, and the 60W power supply standard for all DS218 series, which is similar to the common laptop power supply.
In terms of appearance, DS218+is more robust than its predecessor. The side of the front cover is uniformly polished. Although it is easy to scratch, it is really more beautiful. Under the logo on both sides, there is a horizontal grid heat dissipation net. There is very little hardware interaction in NAS. The logic of Qunhui is to place the indicator lights of devices, network ports and hard disks on the upper right corner of the front. When using, click Start, press the tone for 5 seconds, and then it will automatically shut down. If you press the tone for 5 seconds, it will be forced to shut down. USB 3.0 and one button copy button on the front are used to quickly copy/backup USB device content.
The back 9cm cooling fan is equipped with dual USB 3.0 interface, security lock, eSATA interface and power interface
The overall layout of the DS218+is not different from that of the previous generation. The front cover is fixed by four magnetic silica gel discs. The inside is a hard disk rack that supports hot swapping. The fan bracket has shock absorption. The fuselage is ventilated from both sides and the tail is ventilated, but the dust-proof net is still not added.
In terms of hard disk, we used two 4T Seagate NAS special disks this time. Because NAS operates 7x24 hours a day, Seagate NAS special disk has been strengthened in terms of security, stability and durability. It is more suitable for NAS than ordinary hard disks.
Home users can provide a certain degree of security through the RAID 1 array of ordinary hard disks, but for deep users or enterprise users, in addition to the priceless "old adage" of valuable hardware data, the downtime and post-processing caused by any hard disk failure is absolutely catastrophic. For them, Seagate NAS dedicated disk or products of the same level are not optional, but mandatory.
The core of Qunhui NAS: DSM system
The core of general hardware manufacturers is resource integration and hardware configuration, but in the NAS field, the core is not hardware but systems for a long time. Qunhui's DSM system is jokingly called "buy system and give hardware away" by netizens because of its overwhelming advantages in ease of use and functionality. Qunhui keeps the pace of hardware synchronization for system iteration, and very few of them, like large operating systems such as Windows, provide both official and beta versions of NAS systems.
DSM has been enhancing its functions. DSM 4.0 was released at the beginning of 2012, and Qunhui introduced the real-time file synchronization function of Cloud Station. Later in DSM 5.2, the concept of private cloud was added, and the note/knowledge management tool Note Station was introduced. In DSM 6.0 two years ago, Qunhui introduced a new Btrfs file system, brought high-speed snapshots, architecture upgrades and other optimizations. In September 2016, it introduced the enterprise cloud collaboration suite that now looks very advanced. In October this year, Qunhui launched the DSM 6.2 beta, continuously updating several suites such as chat, email, calendar, cloud disk and office. At the same time, the Moments launched began to introduce the characteristics of deep learning.
Desktop of DSM6.2 Beta
New Kit Center
DSM is famous for its ease of use and versatility. The system is huge and has many functions. From the official 73 pages of use documents and super detailed instructions on the official website, you can see ordinary, interested users, and the official website of Qunhui, as well as the virtual experience portal. In terms of system architecture, DSM is aimed at many home and enterprise users at the same time. It is composed of a relatively simple system framework and various "function kits" that can be installed at will. The latter can be understood as programs or apps on DSM, which can be downloaded, installed and managed through the kit center.
The main interactive end of the DSM system is the browser, which carries out basic management in the form of "web pages". The system desktop is a status bar+application drawer similar to Linux Gnome. The suite supports dragging to the desktop in disorder. Here, we have to mention Qunhui's QuickConnect, which provides DDNS network penetration through the account system of Qunhui. Users can access their NAS remotely using the external network without any technical foundation. Of course, in order to improve the connection speed, many players finally made their own port mapping.
A large number of mobile clients
Because NAS has to target all terminals at the same time, DSM system has to provide different supporting software for mainstream PC terminals such as web terminals, PC/Mac/Ubuntu, mobile terminals such as Android and iOS, in addition to dozens of official and third-party suites. Because there is no Google service in China, some supporting apps are divided into two versions at home and abroad. Normal home users may use about 10 Qunhui apps on their mobile phones alone. In terms of the richness of functions and terminals, Qunhui NAS is certainly the most complex intelligent product.
In the initial use scenario, the most popular suite of Qunhui NAS mainly focuses on "file management, backup, photos, videos, music and download". It is mainly used to provide functions such as scale map, transcoding and media management for mobile device access. Mobile and web terminals can directly play videos and provide custom subtitles, The download suite is the basic knowledge of most people about NAS. Even though Xunlei closed the third-party remote download in July this year, the cross platform addition of download tasks and power consumption below 20W are the main reasons why NAS has become an excellent download tool.
Download Station
Because of the history and the limitation of the size of each package, many packages are still named in English, and the naming standard has not been unified. "DS file, DS video, DS audio" is a series, and "Download Station, Cloud Station, Photo Station" is another series. Some of the "extensive and profound" functions, such as backup, are separated from multiple suites, such as local snapshots, cloud synchronization, and inter NAS synchronization, which is one of the reasons for the numerous DSM suites.
However, because the setting of "kit" has been used for many years, the logic and completion of the interactive interface are very high, making Qunhui DSM still the most simple and easy to use NAS system. The system also has many official auxiliary software. Even the creation of network maps has software generation, function suite and its own automatic update function. Although it seems very complex, as long as you play, you will find that many geeks and low-level things have been solved by the system itself. Later, Office and Moments album with AI deep learning ability joined in DSM6.0/6.2 are all signs that DSM is evolving towards functionality and intelligence.
Usage and basic performance
Because Qunhui NAS does not have the "tradition" of built-in Flash, the machine is bought as a bare metal machine without a system. After the hard disk is inserted into the network, the first access on the browser side will trigger the system installation and user registration boot. You can choose to download the system online or upload locally (the installation package has soared from the previous 100 MB to the 200 MB level of DSM6.2 beta). The installation process takes about 10 minutes. Subsequent registration, setting a quick access domain name, entering the system installation kit, etc. will be guided by detailed wizards, without any technical barriers.
Network hard disk direct display
Join the storage pool through iSCSI
The most basic network storage function of Qunhui NAS can be realized directly through Network Neighborhood even if no suite is installed. Qunhui NAS can be directly found in the system's network neighborhood, and the network hard disk mapping can be established using official programs, just like using local hard disks to read the data on NAS.
Test the input power through a power meter. After adding adapter losses, the power consumption of DS218+hard disk after sleep is only 5.6W, while the working power consumption fluctuates between 17W and 22W. As a comparison, the power of general incandescent lamps is about 40W.
The background noise in the office is 42 dB. In the default mode of DS218+, even when facing the air outlet, it will be about 48 dB later. The wind noise is negligible.
The room temperature is 23 degrees. Under working conditions, the body temperature has been maintained below 30 degrees. The 20W power consumption has no pressure on the 9cm cooling fan.
Write performance test
Read performance test
This year's DS218 series has reached the performance of 113MB/s and 112MB/s respectively for reading and writing. DS218+supports AES-NI hardware encryption, and even encrypted transmission can reach the performance of 113MB/s and 112MB/s, which is enough to eat up common desktop mechanical hard disks and gigabit network ports. The actual measurement shows that the speed can reach the official preset value by simply adding network disk mapping when iSCSI is not turned on.
Use fastcopy to transfer 3.1G ISO files between the NAS and the computer. The average write speed is 115MB/s, and the peak value is 111.9MB/s; The average reading is 91.2MB/s, and the peak reading is 108MB/s. The Seagate NAS special disk of DS218+with 4T has a lot of spare power. On the contrary, the speed of 112MB/s has actually exceeded the write limit of most mechanical hard disks below 2T. These devices simply cannot eat up the read and write performance of NAS at this level. In addition, the gigabit network cable has become a performance bottleneck, which needs to be solved by multi link aggregation.
In actual use, the file reading and writing on the DS218+is not much different from the local hard disk access, even there is no pressure to decompress the file on the network hard disk to the local. The computer installation files of the whole family or the whole team can be placed on the NAS, and installed directly after the network mapping, which can save a lot of maintenance trouble for equipment maintenance.
In terms of performance, the Plus series pays more attention to performance than the play series. This generation of DS218+is equipped with Intel's Celeron J3355, which has a dual core of 2.0G and a maximum of 2.5G. Its computing performance has become a veritable PC level. It was thought that the advantage of CPU performance on NAS could hardly be reflected, but in actual use, the rendering speed of the scale map after the image was uploaded is several orders of magnitude faster than that of the previous DS216play, and the performance gap will be shown mercilessly when multiple packages and the background are backed up or accessed.
File Management and Btrfs File System
In terms of security, in addition to the extremely fast security update of Qunhui, its core includes multiple suites such as Drive, Snapshot Replication, Cloud Sync, etc.
Snapshot Replication Suite, disk snapshots
In DSM 6.2, the new drive suite integrates the functions of the previous Cloud Station Drive. It can be understood as a familiar synchronization disk, but this time the ECS has become the user's own NAS. The Cloud Station Backup tool provided on the PC side is used to back up computer data to NAS. Its backup supports 32 backup backlogs to achieve the effect of a paid cloud disk, and it is seamlessly connected with the Windows platform. You can directly view the "previous version" in the file attributes. This is the pain point of all data management users. It's really a killer function.
Cloud Sync suite
Cloud Sync is a later function that can synchronize the data on NAS to domestic and foreign network disks, and supports timing, synchronization direction and other settings. Although there is basically only Baidu in China and the speed is limited, there is an extra insurance.
In addition to EXT4, DS218+also provides Btrfs file system support, which can provide additional file protection and automatic repair functions. Among the file systems provided by the Linux kernel mainline, Btrfs is the only file system that provides both metadata and data checksum. It can provide stronger data protection through file verification.
Speaking of this, we should popularize the concept of "silent data corruption", which most people ignore. The data may be damaged due to the vibration of the hard disk during operation, the wrong or incomplete data writing position. However, until the next use, the system cannot confirm whether the file is intact. This corruption is called "silent data corruption".
Different from the previous file system, the metadata and data checksum verification functions provided by Btrfs can find the silent data corruption by comparing the data checksum verification code. Once the checksum is found to be inconsistent, the checksum can be re compared with the data of another version to automatically repair the silent damaged data in the array.
Snapshot Replication Suite, Snapshot frequency setting
In addition to security, the Btrfs file system has a Copy on write feature. The data will be written only when it is modified. Usually, when we copy and paste most frequently, we will not actually copy. Usually, data management knows that the whole disk backup requires all files to be copied once, which consumes time and space.
However, when snapshot backup is performed in the Btrfs file system, only incremental backup will be performed, and all duplicate files do not need to be copied, so as to achieve second speed and highly capacity saving. In the snapshot replication suite of DS218+, 1024 shared folder backups and 65000 system snapshots can be provided. It is estimated that even most enterprise teams can not use them up. For enterprise users, iSCSI LUNs can also be used for snapshots of virtual machine storage.
PC/Mac users can find the image files generated by snapshots in the protected folder, and view the old version files through the Snapshot Replication Suite without the need for restore operations or specific tools. The Btrfs file system can't recover and process the hard disk contents directly with the Ubuntu system, as in the previous EXT4, but it can't find any defects.
When serving enterprises, it is impossible to avoid file sharing, permission settings and various encryption settings, which are the main reasons for the high complexity of Qunhui DSM files. Officially, group permission settings have been added, which can control the read/write, read-only permission control, encryption, storage space allocation, timeliness of file sharing, and even the upload and download speed in different periods. Functionally, for most small and medium-sized teams, it is also "beyond the outline".
Enterprise collaborative office and practical experience
Although DSM 6.2 Beta is only a small version upgrade, the nature of Qunhui NAS has changed since the completion of the encirclement of the collaborative office field. In the past, NAS was trying to reduce interaction with end users. No matter network hard disk mapping, backup snapshots, file synchronization and sharing, all these functions were trying to avoid operation and interaction.
However, taking the opportunity of the new Note Station note application in DSM 5.2, the chat suite chat, Synology office with document and spreadsheet editing functions Calendar calendar, enhanced MailPlus, Drive suite that directly integrates several functions such as office and file station file management in DSM 6.2, and AI album Moments are all foreground interactive products.
No hardware manufacturer has ever tried to march into the whole office field like Qunhui before. If you have no idea about this matter, you can recall the size of Microsoft Office, various mail, Outlook/Google Calendar, Google Photo Album, QQ/WeChat/line, and Impression Notes/Cloud Notes, each of which is a heavy product and has become very familiar.
MailPlus Suite
Among these suites, MailPlus and Calendar are the most logical ones. In the traditional enterprise workflow, email and schedule are the first steps of work. MailPlus is an enhanced version of the original mail suite, which focuses on the connection with Calendar, Chat, Drive and other brother suites. Their biggest pain point is to solve the problem that ordinary enterprise mailbox services do not have integrated calendar functions, while Microsoft Exchange services are expensive but slow to access.
In addition to a clean interface without advertisements, MailPlus has the same function and appearance as common QQ and NetEase mailboxes. It has common functions such as batch management, labels, archiving and classification. Its biggest highlight is that it has its own browser push, can connect directly with Chat, can automatically identify the meeting time in the mail, and provides the function of quickly generating calendar schedules, It is quite simple and violent pain point function optimization.
Calendar Suite
Calendar has complete but regular functions. Its interface is simpler than MailPlus. It has common settings such as schedule and task generation, event dragging, reminder, and location. It also has the group adding function based on the user's internal account system. It supports CalDAV, which can be directly accessed to the system calendar of Apple's platform, and even directly imported to contacts in hotmail, Gmail, and other mailboxes. Its biggest improvement is to provide the ability to insert attachments. Events in the calendar and tasks can be supplemented directly by adding attachments, which is very practical for the author, a copywriter.
Chat Suite
After email and task arrangement, the next component to be used is the communication tool Chat. The most distinctive feature of Chat is that it is a chat software running on the user's own NAS. All functional calculations and data are derived from NAS and support encryption. For enterprises with confidentiality requirements for communication content, this is likely to be provided by private chat services with minimal investment and easy deployment.
Chat is the suite that has more functions than the existing rivals in the market. In addition to the web side, cross platform software and app coverage, it supports rich media insertion, can also order/comment information in the information stream, directly bookmark in chat, support later reading, can treat the conversation information as a to-do list, and can also quickly insert the date related to the event into the calendar. The functions of information reminder, timing information and voting are simply the functions that white-collar workers who have been using WeChat and QQ for a long time have been waiting for for years.
Drive Kit Home
The last one is the Drive package that began to integrate in a big step in DSM 6.2. It is based on files and includes most of the functions of the original three suites, namely, Synology Office, File Station and Cloud Station. It is the first super large suite with such complex interactive functions in the Qunhui series.
Its basic support is similar to Google Drive, which is basically a file manager with cloud synchronization. It supports common functions such as file drag and drop direct upload, tags, sorting, filtering, multi folder management, and sharing. The advanced functions include its own history, global search including internal files, team shared folders, etc. These are advantages that cannot be provided by domestic products: not to mention the simple synchronization disk function, now there are only NutCloud and Baidu in China (one has monthly traffic restrictions, and the other has imperfect synchronization strategy); The global search of the internal text of the online disk may take some time to appear; Team sharing is the earliest function of cloud disk castration in the wave event.
Template Library
Drive built-in document function
After file and synchronization, another core of Drive Suite is that it integrates Office 3.0 with documents, spreadsheets and slides (new in this version). You can directly create new office files for editing in Drive. There are more than ten common templates for documents and spreadsheets. Chinese text editing, attachment insertion, annotation, table, picture and shape insertion, and even content outline functions are available.
Spreadsheet functionality built into Drive
In spreadsheets, common functions such as cell hiding, freezing, table/picture insertion, cell formatting, automatic list generation, and selecting and pasting are available. The deeper functions include data filtering, verification, and user-defined range names. As a newly added function, the slide has no detailed functions such as template and transition animation, except for basic functions such as image and text, shape insertion, slide play control, etc.
Permission control during document sharing
The overall functions of these three productivity subfunctions are close to the open source office products on Android and Apple platforms. Their core advantage is that they support multi person fact editing and their own multi version records. Different users can edit and discuss files at the same time, and can directly share and control permissions. When they need to interact with other groups or customers temporarily, annotations and communication will be much more efficient. Cloud forms are very suitable for simple data statistics and other occasions for multiple people. The biggest problem in their experience is that Qunhui does not directly support the editing of word, excel, and PowerPoint files, but converts these files into their own formats before editing them. Only when they are exported can they generate general files compatible with the format of the three major offices.
For the five suites and three office tools mentioned above that need to open another page, their unified bottleneck is the speed of browser page loading and remote access. There is still a significant gap between the speed of opening files and that of traditional office, but fortunately, the language architecture used by Qunhui will not limit most editing operations to the network speed and server after the framework is loaded, and the response speed is fairly good.
In terms of the beta version, Qunhui's new suites have been completed to a high degree. They have not encountered crashes, bugs or unresponsive states during use. If the whole team turns to Qunhui's set of tools, the work efficiency will be significantly improved. However, even though Qunhui tried its best to optimize, the transfer cost was still relatively high. As for the advantages of private cloud security, file backtracking, office suite embedding, and the overall cost of enterprise applications, it is still unknown whether Qunhui can win so many office giants in the end.
Moments Album
In addition to collaborative office work, AI album Moments is the first work of Qunhui to show achievements in the AI field. It is completely independent of the original DS Photo suite (photo management tool) tool, and its purpose is no longer simple backup and sharing, but auxiliary management of AI image recognition. Now it supports AI recognition of faces and simple objects, and simple keyword search can also filter out specific images.
Normal thumbnail and reduced image after super-resolution reconstruction
Another result of in-depth learning is used in the "super resolution reconstruction" of mobile device thumbnails. Moments will use hardware acceleration to reconstruct image details according to the device network speed and actual conditions (only Android platform is supported temporarily).
It doesn't have much user interaction. After uploading photos, they will automatically classify images according to faces, locations, themes, etc. The effect and use are very similar to Apple iCloud albums. But the difference is that on the private cloud NAS, the number of image storage is controlled by the user, and there is no additional charge.
In actual use, its face recognition is far better than expected. The dense heads in the group photos can be automatically classified. After all, it is a Chinese enterprise, and the facial features of Asians should be captured more accurately. However, the default setting of the bottom layer of the system to store pictures by file according to the date brings trouble to the ordinary user management. Whether the final stable version will be corrected, and whether it will coexist with the original DS Photo suite, will not be confirmed until the official version of the system comes out.
summary
In the home and small and medium-sized enterprise market, whether the number of intelligent devices is soaring or 5G is coming, private cloud will be an unstoppable trend in the next few years. These are all good factors for the NAS market. For individual users, a reliable and easy to use NAS can save users a lot of trouble in file storage, sharing and management, which is much easier than tossing Google Drive and Dropbox.
In the office field that Qunhui focuses on betting, the top large enterprises have their own customized office systems, while the number of start-ups is still small. Although mail, calendars, chat tools, data, etc. are scattered among different providers, free cloud storage, team collaboration, enterprise knowledge base and other products can barely meet simple needs.
However, the office demand of a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises is sandwiched between individuals and large enterprises, forming a huge market gap. They are not only the cooperative office suite of Qunhui DSM 6.2, the original target audience, but also the largest audience of Qunhui DS218+.
Follow our Weibo @ Love Computer
Follow our WeChat official account: playphone
Of course, we also pay attention to our Bilibili account: love computer
