 Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the DS411 from Synology. So I don't know if you guys are that familiar with NAS brands, but yeah, Synology is like up here in terms of the overall quality, the user experience. I've never used one before. I'm just going based on hearsay. But I'm very excited to be checking this one out and I will be using it. So I have very high expectations for this particular NAS enclosure. So this is a 4-bay. Let's go over the features first. Great for file sharing. Duh, it's a NAS. Okay. Web server. Cool. So you can run a small website off of it. Data protection and RAID. So this enclosure supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10. Yes, it supports RAID 6. Very cool. Although with... Actually, hold on, hold on. Okay, hold on, hold on. Let's take a step back. Let's take a step back. RAID 6 in a 4-bay enclosure is actually kind of brain dead because RAID 6 requires two drives for parity and destroys your write performance, whereas RAID 10 will also require two drives for parity and will have fantastic performance. So okay, maybe that's pointless. But RAID 5 is good because you only need one parity drive so you can have better capacity than RAID 10. Okay. Mobile access. Okay, using your smartphone or whatever else. DLNA media server, fully compliant with that. Surveillance server compliant. Oh, cool. PC backup is supported. Mail server is supported. Compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux. No problem. Windows ADS. You know what? I actually don't know what that means, so feel free to leave a comment on the video and let me know. Online photo sharing in a print server. Okay? Cool. And so this is basically all that stuff we just saw except like with arrows. Interesting. The DS411 is slightly higher performance than the 411J. With these NAS units, it often comes down to the performance of the network controller. So most of them are gigabit now, so that's less of an issue. It used to be that a lot of them were 10 hundred, which is just way too slow in this day and age. And it also comes down to the performance of the processor because especially if you're running in a RAID configuration such as RAID 5, which is going to be exactly how I would want to run this enclosure because RAID 5 means you use... Okay, so if you have three or four 3 terabyte drives, JBOD would give you 12 terabytes. Okay? So stick with me here, guys. So JBOD. However, JBOD, just a bunch of disks, doesn't provide any data redundancy, so any protection from a data from a hard drive failure. So not ideal. RAID 1 will give you only 6 terabytes of storage, but will protect you from up to two hard drive failures as long as they're not both on the same data mirror. Okay? So there's that. RAID 5 gives you 9 terabytes of data and will allow for up to one outright drive failure. So it's the perfect balance, although you do have a bit of a performance impact. RAID 10 gives you... Oh, I already talked about RAID 10. So RAID 10 gives you great performance and RAID 5 will impact performance negatively. But... Right, so that... Right, right, right. So in your ideal configuration, which is RAID 5, to get the most out of your storage drives that you're paying good money for, the processor is a huge factor because the faster your processor is, the faster it can calculate that parity bit that's required for RAID 5 operation and for the redundancy that it provides. So let's go ahead and take all this stuff out and let's have a look at the unit itself. So it's a 4-bay NAS. The whole front is basically ventilated slits here. We've also got indicators for the four hard drives that it is compatible with. LAN indicator, status indicator, and a power switch is right at the front. On the side, you find not a whole lot to write home about. A Synology logo. On the other side, you find a completely matching Synology logo. Okay, nothing exciting. I'm sorry. Two 60-millimeter fans round out the back. Those look like low-profile fans. Yep. Hopefully, they're not too loud, but I haven't fired it up yet, so I don't know yet. Power in, gigabit LAN, two USB 2.0 ports, so that's for your print server or whatever other functionality. ESATA port, so that's kind of neat. Okay, maybe there's more of a point to RAID 6 with this thing than I thought if you want to run something else off of it. Reset switch, so that's your hard reset. And it looks like you got thumb screws to take the whole back apart. Now, what I want to know is, how do you actually install a drive in here? The bottom is on little feet, which is sort of good. And ah, included accessories. Power adapter, other more different power cable, ethernet cable, screws to install drives, and apparently to install a lot of things. Okay. Ah, welcome. Read this first. Don't mind if I do. What's in here? Probably a quick start guide. Willkommen. Lots of different languages. That's good. Ah, except that I can't find English. Come on, help me. English, English. Welcome. There we go. Ah, thank you for purchasing this. Check this for compatible hard drives. If you buy reds, you'll know that it's compatible. Um, regularly it's something something. Okay, thank you for that. That's actually the most useless read this first that I think I've ever encountered. Um, setup discs, warranty information, whatnot. So give me a second here, guys. I'm going to have to try and figure out how to open this thing up. Yeah, I totally nubbed out on those fans. Those are standard profile 80mm. So the fact that they're using two larger fans in the back of a 4-way enclosure like this is very promising. It should be extremely quiet. So let's go ahead and load this in. So you can see it's rear loaded. Oh, I'm sorry. I never even showed you guys. We, okay, here, here, here. Hold on. Hold on. Ah, we turn the, okay. Apparently this comes off now too, but we've, ah, we've removed the back piece. Okay then. So it's rear loaded. So we turned it around, see, like that. Ah, take off the four thumb screws and this just drops down like this. And then you can load in your four drives just like that. So I'm going to pull out these other sleds so you guys can see the back plane that's built into there. They're using a proprietary motherboard down in the bottom. So let's go ahead and, ah, actually let's check it out. There you go. Marvell controller over there. Whatever this is. Oh, sorry. I'm totally in the way of the camera here. So nothing out of the ordinary pretty much. There's all your activity LEDs. All of your activity LEDs. There's the, ah, that looks like a PCI Express 4X interface or like some kind of custom SATA something depending on what kind of a chipset they're using. Whatever. None of that's really important. The point is the non-J version has the higher end processor and actually this is a really smooth installation. You can install, ah, that's why it comes with more screws. Check this out. So besides installing the drives on the sleds and sliding them in, you can actually install yet another longer screw if you want even more security, like if you're going to ship it somewhere or something like that pre-installed and then you just close it back up and you're good to go. So thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the DS411 and I haven't actually gone through the specs so we're not quite done and, ah, there's no specs on here that we didn't talk about already so we're done and right, why did I say that WD Reds are the ideal drives? So they have longer mean time between failures, ah, longer warranty, they have 24-7 phone support if you have any kind of a problem. They have NAS optimized firmware, they also vibrate less so in a multi-drive enclosure like this they're less likely to vibrate and interfere with each other and they are validated by WD and by the NAS makers to be compatible so you don't even have to look it up on Synology's website you'll know that a red drive will work in your NAS. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the DS411 from Synology. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.