Last year, we experienced the Polar Space Z4 Pro, and my colleagues commented that the NAS was simple to operate, but it was also able to meet the needs of some advanced users. Now, the NAS Z423 Flagship Edition, which is known as the pinnacle of performance, is on the market, with a new design and a major upgrade in hardware configuration. So what is the performance and functional experience of the Polar Space Z423 Flagship Edition?
Appearance and configuration introduction:
First of all, the Polar Space Z423 Flagship Edition can still be seen in the appearance of the Polar Space Z4 Pro, but this time it is an upright design, which can be regarded as a smaller footprint.
The top of the machine is a magnetic cover, after removing it, you can see four SATA hard drive bays, the push-pull design of the hard disk tray experience is good, and the installation is very simple and fast. After the hard drive is placed in the machine, the hard drive can be fixed by flipping the switch on the bracket.
In addition to the hard drive bay, there are power on/off keys, reset buttons, hard disk status indicators, and a C-port and USB-A port for external devices.
On the side, the Polar Space Z423 flagship version is equipped with eSATA, HDMI, USB-A, power supply and UPS interface, in addition to a Gigabit Ethernet port and 10 Gigabit Ethernet port. In terms of interfaces, this NAS is very rich, which also lays the foundation for the machine to achieve more functions.
There's also a UPS interface here,That's right, Polar SpaceZ423The flagship version also supports external UPS power supply,This UPS power supply model is2600T,Designed for it,The appearance style and NAS itself are still more compatible。 This is to prevent the device from accidentally losing power and causing damage to the hard disk data, in the settings we can also set the safe shutdown time and other settings.
Of course, the Polar Space Z423 flagship version also supports third-party brands of UPS power supplies, but some models may need to be matched with an adapter or something, and it is definitely the most suitable to use Polar Space's own if you want to save worry.
When we remove the two screws from the bottom and remove the cover of the case on the side, we can see the memory and the SSD slot. In this regard, the extreme space Z423 flagship version is also very sincere, given two memory slots, we inserted a 32GB DDR4 3200MT/s memory, and there is an empty memory slot.
The M.2 2280 has four SSD slots, which is convenient for us to insert SSDs to speed up the storage pool or create a new storage pool. However, it should be noted that the Polar Space Z423 Ultimate Edition does not support SSDs with the PCIe 4.0 protocol. When purchasing an equipment and preparing to install an SSD, you need to pay attention to it.
In addition to what we can see, the Polar Space Z423 flagship version is equipped with AMD Ryzen 7 5825U processor on the core, which uses TSMC 7nm FinFET process, has 8 cores and 16 threads design, L3 cache 16MB, and thermal power consumption is 15W.
In terms of visible configuration, the performance improvement of the Polar Space Z423 flagship version can be said to be very large, providing more possibilities for many aspects of experience.
After introducing the basic configuration, let's build a NAS. In terms of hard drives, the Polar Space Z423 Ultimate Edition supports a single disk up to 22TB, and we chose 4 Toshiba N300 NAS hard drives, including two 12TB and two 16TB versions. The Toshiba N300 NAS hard drive uses CMR vertical technology and has 1.2 million hours of MTTF, which is optimized for NAS systems and has always been our first choice for building NAS systems.
We built RAID5 for 4 hard drives, one of which is used as a data backup to prevent damage to other hard drives, so that there is still 32.7TB of capacity.
If you want to use SSD for cache acceleration, then only 1 SSD is needed for read-only cache, at least 2 SSDs are needed for read-write caches, and SSDs are best to have an independent cache design, so that the acceleration effect is better, otherwise it may be counterproductive. We're using two 1TB PCIe 3.0 SSDs here.
It is worth mentioning that at present, the Z423 Ultimate Edition not only supports RAID1, ZDR, and RAID5, but also supports RAID6 and RAID10 in the future. Moreover, the NAS supports SATA and M.2 interface hard disks directly plugged in, and can be used directly without formatting, which is a very good experience.
Features & Performance Experience:
If your mobile phone has NFC function, after downloading the Extreme Space App, paste it directly to the NFC logo on the fuselage, and you can quickly bind the login device. Extreme Space NAS supports multi-terminal access, including browsers, mobile apps, PCs, TVs, and even applets that can be logged in to view NAS data files.
First of all, I have to praise that the system of Polar Space is very simple and easy to use, whether it is team collaboration or personal entertainment, even a novice can easily get started.
Personally, I use NAS to store photos and videos and other files taken daily, and I also use the large capacity of NAS to store some high-quality video videos.
After using it during this time, Extreme Film and Picture Album can be said to be the two apps that I have used most frequently and for the longest time. First of all, let's talk about Extreme Cinema, which can make your NAS your high-quality private theater!
When you download or import videos from your NAS, the Extreme Film and Television app will automatically retrieve these videos, and when you open the app, you will see that these movies have beautiful posters, just like the cards you treasured when you were a child, and they are waiting for you to watch.
After clicking on the cover of the movie, we can also get more information about the movie, including the movie type, release time, duration, introduction, ratings and even the cast and crew form, which is no less rich than a professional video website, and it is much easier to use.
In terms of search classification, it also has a good experience, you can search by entering the name of the film or cast and crew when searching, and the film can be filtered by video resolution, audio quality, age, genre and other options.
That in the video playback settings,The player of Extreme Film and Television is also very powerful,You can set the bitrate of the playback video、Audio track、Subtitles、Channel channel,You can also chooseHDR/Dolby rendering,Even choose whether the video is decoded by soft or hard decoding。 It can be said that as a player software that comes with a NAS system, the player of Extreme Film and Television has many functions and is easy to use, which is beyond my expectations, and it is also worth learning from other traditional NAS manufacturers!
Extreme Film and Television also supports the unification of multi-terminal playback records, for example, you watch movies on your mobile phone on the subway after work, and you can continue to watch the other half on TV when you get home. Friendly reminder, there are many users sharing various resources in the Polar Space Forum, and it is recommended that users who start to visit more, I believe there will be a lot of gains.
In addition, Polar Space's Polar Film and Television not only supports mobile phones, tablets, PCs, but also supports Android TV and even Apple TV, supports Blu-ray 4K and various Blu-ray original video files, and also supports Dolby Vision, HDR video playback, which is a lot more friendly to us to create Blu-ray home theater.
For me, Extreme Film is a private theater of my own. Find good film and television resources on the Internet, throw them in the NAS and download them directly, and when you get home at night, you can directly open Extreme Film and Television, and watch high-quality movies immersively, which is really a beautiful enjoyment.
As a photography enthusiast, the photos and videos in my mobile phone occupy more than 100GB, so after being automatically uploaded to the NAS through the Polar Space App, not only is it safer to back up, but also the Polar Album will also classify the photos, and in the latest version, it also brings the function of AI lab.
To enable the AI Lab for the first time, you need to download an AI engine with a size of about 1.5G to the NAS device, which is more for experience and data security considerations, because the functional experience in the AI Lab is computed locally on the NAS device and will not be uploaded to the Internet. At the same time, after the relevant functions are enabled, it will also occupy about 1.2G memory.
The AI lab mainly provides three functions, one is intelligent search, that is, enter the description text to get the theme photo, the second is graphic text recognition, that is, identify the text on the picture, you can also quickly copy and extract the text on the picture, and the third is to quickly search for photos with similar content, which is convenient for us to classify.
Then my personal most commonly used is intelligent search,After a period of experience,It can be said that there are enough advantages,At the same time, there is also some room for improvement。 For example, when searching for images, you can not only search for corresponding pictures according to the content of the picture, such as searching for keywords such as flowers, dolls, and buildings, but also you can search for macro, ultra-wide angle and other shooting angles to find the corresponding photos, which are indeed very detailed.
In the search results, the photos closest to the keyword will be ranked first, but when you click "more", you will find that they are followed by some irrelevant photos. If you are confident enough about the AI recognition results, you can directly remove the photos behind you and display the photos of the corresponding keywords. In addition, the accuracy of AI recognition can be further improved.
It is worth mentioning that local intelligent recognition will consume the CPU and memory of the device, and the performance of the device will affect the recognition time. It is believed that with the addition of more AI-related functions, the higher the performance requirements of the NAS local device, the better, which is why a NAS should also be equipped with a high-performance processor.
In addition, the polar space photo album also has a baby album function, which is very suitable for partners with babies to record the baby's growth time, and there is also a family album, family members can watch it, and the functions are quite comprehensive.
Since the Polar Space Z423 flagship version has such excellent performance, how strong is it, and can it run a score?
Naturally, I'm going to get a virtual machine to try it out!
After clicking on the virtual machine App, we can directly choose to add or import the virtual machine, it is recommended that you can go to the polar space forum to find out if there is a shared virtual machine file, generally through the lightning transmission function, copy a password can directly download the virtual machine file shared by others, very simple.
Then follow the prompts step by step, which is also very simple, and can be completed with almost no threshold, which does not require you to have very professional network knowledge, or you need to search everywhere to download driver files.
After entering the virtual machine, I couldn't wait to test the performance of this virtual machine, so I simply ran a few points.
CPU-Z single-core 547.2 points, multi-core 3300 points.
7-Zip测试压缩评分37.556 GIPS,解压缩评分62.438 GIPS,总体评分49.997 GIPS。
In Master Lu's test, the comprehensive performance score of this virtual machine was close to 600,000 points, reaching 590965 points, of which the processor's running score exceeded 400,000 points.
Even if it is a virtual machine, it is not difficult to see from the running score that the Polar Space Z423 Ultimate Edition equipped with AMD Ryzen 7 5825U processor is very powerful.
In the past, traditional NAS did not pay much attention to the choice of processor, but as users demand more and more NAS functions, processors with strong enough performance have gradually become the choice of flagship NAS. Polar Space Z423 Ultimate Edition is a good sample, by carrying AMD Ryzen 7 5825U, it can be faster and smoother when running virtual machines and docker, which is not the best use of things, not an efficiency improvement?
As for what such a high-performance virtual machine can do, it depends on your own needs, such as going to work to fish, browsing some web pages, or playing some light-load games without leaving a trace, etc.
By the way, running a virtual machine on the Polar Space Z423 Ultimate Edition, how is the heat dissipation performance of the NAS? Although the official is also equipped with a powerful snare fan, after all, the processor performance is high, and there are still a few hard disks that are heating up wildly. In this regard, we also used an infrared thermometer to measure the temperature of the NAS, and we can see that in an environment with a room temperature of about 24°C, the heat of the NAS itself is up to 34.5°C when the file upload task is performed.
If it's a hot summer day, I recommend that you put your NAS in a cool and well-ventilated place.
NAS is a smart device with a very wide boundary, and different people may use it with different focuses. In addition to the video, photo and virtual machine functions I mentioned above, the system of Polar Space Z423 Ultimate Edition has many other functions.
For example, Extreme Music, which can intelligently analyze audio files, automatically organize and classify them by albums, singers, and genres, Extreme Reading, which supports mainstream book formats including mobi, epub, pdf, and tex, and Extreme Comics, which supports direct reading of compressed packages, Japanese comic mode, and horizontal and vertical screen adaptation.
In addition, in the network disk backup function, Extreme Space currently also supports Baidu network disk, e cloud disk, Alibaba cloud disk, OneDrive content download to Extreme Space, or set automatic download tasks. Of course, it would be better if I also supported my most commonly used quark network disk.
The last thing I have to mention is that in the latest system version, Polar Space Z423 Ultimate Edition supports switch mode, you only need to open the network-related settings in the system settings, select the bridge mode in the mode switch (applicable to virtual switches), and then connect the 1G network port on the NAS to the router, and the 10G network connection to the 10 Gigabit network port on the computer, so that you can easily realize the 10 Gigabit LAN access between the computer and the extreme space!
That's right, you don't need to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to buy a switch, you can greatly improve the transfer speed between the computer and the NAS, and transfer large files at your fingertips! I have to say that Polar Space is really attentive enough in terms of system, and it can often bring surprises, I think this is also one of the biggest core competitiveness of Polar Space NAS compared with other NAS.
Summary:
In general, as a flagship NAS with greatly improved performance, Polar Space Z423 Ultimate Edition can meet the needs of many professional users in terms of more performance requirements. For example, the 4+4 8-bay design gives the 10 Gigabit Ethernet port, and it also has the blessing of the AMD Ryzen 7 5825U processor.
The NAS system of Extreme Space is also simple and easy to use, which is convenient for more people to get started, and more importantly, it can turn many originally complex and cumbersome functions into a few simple steps to set up, which can greatly reduce the threshold for use. If you're looking to buy a NAS that will last a long time and won't go out of style, then the Z423 Ultimate Edition is definitely worth considering!