Maxing out the Synology NAS DS923+ with 32GB Ram SSD cache and 10Gbe networking 

Thank you for the feedback!

Haha thank you!

You are welcome!

Thank you for watching and I appreciate your support! You make a good point. Pricing and risk was a major factor when I put my unit together. If I have a RAM, Disk, or NVMe issue i'll deal with it myself. If I can track the issue to their hardware ie backplane, fan, network, ect i'll then reach out to Synology for support.

Glad I could help

I will add that to my list of videos to make. Thanks for the feedback!

You might be able to put in 32gb of ram but because of the architecture the OS will not be able to access the extra ram.

I asked because my 920+ recommended 412GB. So I think 1tb each is a good idea

I simply with 1tb because of the cost and performance.

@@23eightfiveok thanks

SSDs that are NOT synology brand can only be used for read and write cache which is automatically managed by the unit to increase the read and write performance of the unit. So add this to your NAS could increase performance in certain circumstances.

I noticed that as well and did my best in post to minimize it. I have ordered a new mic setup so better quality audio is on the way. Thanks for your comment and I hope you see the quality of my videos increase in the future!

Much appreciated. I spend a lot of my personal time trying to learn more about video, lighting, and editing. I hope you will continue to see an uptick in the quality of my content. With that said I 1000% agree with you on the NVMe issues with non-Synology drives. It’s unfortunate, but we see this kind of stuff all the time. Dell used to do this with their internal RAID controllers (only supported Dell branded disk), and RED cameras with their flash cards, Apple with.. well everything, and Synology. I do have a few more Synology specific videos coming up so stay tuned! Appreciate your feedback!

@@23eightfive TURN DOWN THE MUSIC VOLUME and increase the volume of the talking! Please!

Thanks for the feedback. I've got some new audio equipment and this should be resolved in future videos. Thanks for your support and for watching my videos!

Noted!

As someone who’s used NAS/SAN both consumer and enterprise the majority of my life. I have not found that consumer drives fail any sooner than regular drives. I believe back blaze have even done a detailed analysis on this in a blog post.

@@23eightfive Thanks, and that's interesting.

I usually see the full 10gig speed during daily tasks but for some reason when I was making this video I just couldn’t get the system to go full tilt. I believe my Synology was being used by some other devices on my network at the same time. But I can assure you I’ve hit and sustained full 10gig speeds for multiple seconds copying 30gig files around. As for the RAM you can absolutely use the RAM just not all 32gigs. Some of your RAM will be used by the Synology itself and you want to have a littler overhead there so I would count on leaving ~6-12GB of RAM for the Synology unit and whatever hypervisor you’re running. Would leave you with about 20gigs of RAM. If I were you I would look at what your trying to accomplish and see if Windows makes sense or if you can get away with a container. Containers are much lighter and require significantly less resources to operate. But like everything there is some give and take. If you’re not experienced with containers it could be a bit difficult but might also provide a valuable learning opportunity. Thanks for the feedback on the audio and in my latest videos I’ve invested in new recording equipment to try and make the audio more consistent and clear. Hopefully you’ll subscribe as I continue to up the quality in each new video!

@@23eightfive Good to hear about the speed! Now to shop for a 10GbE switch! I haven't done anything with containers yet, but seems to be the way of the future. Your audio quality seems good to me, just had me adjusting the volume a few times for the mismatches. Thanks again.

Try taking a look at the Ubiquiti 10gb 8 port Aggregate switch. It's relatively cheap compared to other 10gb switches with similar specs.

Get subscribe as I have a video coming up on my setup!

I believe you can out more in the unit but even with my 1TB I don’t think that’s even come close to being used. Synology might have a software limitation here but nothing I’ve been able to confirm in documentation yet. Be interested to see if anyone else has data on this.

I'm glad you enjoyed the video. Get subscribed as I'm defiantly making a video on my computer/monitor setup!

You could put the 10gbe in the synology and then hook the cable direct to your computer after configuring static IP addresses on both. You’ll then need to find an alternative way for your computer to hit the internet by either using WiFi or adding another Ethernet adapter. I hope this helps.

Personal I’ve just had good luck with Samsung. The Samsung EVO Plus drive do have faster writes, but if you really want to get crazy look at the Samsung 980 Pro series, 7000/MBs reads and 5100/MBs writes!

One of the main reason to use 2 NVMe in RAID is protection. Data is written (and read if enabled) to the SSD's and NOT always written directly to disk there after. So if you had an SSD failure with just a single NVMe drive you could cause data corruption. I'm not a 100% sure but at least in the DS923+ it doesn't seem like you can configure both a storage pool and SSD caching using the NVMe drives. I will also note, i'm not using the Synology branded NVMe drives which restricts me from using NVMe storage pools all together.

@@23eightfive thanks for the info. Much appreciated.

Also I don’t think you can use third party NVME for storage pool - there is no bypassing the warning flag

@@grantos8276 You are correct. You can not use third party NVMe drives for storage pools. Only caching.

I haven’t had any issues at all. Manufacturers usually just want you to buy their stuff to maximize their profits. Sometimes you’ll see custom firmware to make something work better with some hardware, but for the synology I don’t think you’ll haven any issues unless you want to use the cache as a storage pool which you’ll then need the synology branded modules.

You can get a thunderbolt 10gbe adapter BUT if you don’t have a 10gig switch you’ll need to plug directly in to the NAS and configure static IPs on bother your laptop and the synology to have the full throughput.

@@23eightfive got it, thank you for the response!

2x 1TB in my experience is more than enough. I’ve personally never seen my cache get close to half the 1TB.

Thanks for the feedback!

You don't NEED 1TB. Synology's native NVMe SSDs for the 923+ (different sizes available for other units) come in 2 different variants of 400 and 800 gigabytes. Having more cache allows the unit to do less work by keeping more in cache at any given time. When you have smaller cache with a lot of it being used, the unit needs to work "harder" to decide what needs to be removed from cache and overwritten by new data. This can be further compounded with read and write caching enabled. When write cache is enabled the system (in some cases) would need to take time to write data to the spinning disk to free up space in the cache. This can cause reduced performance on highly used systems while these background operations are happening. I went with 1TB because I have a large network that uses the SSD cache extensively across multiple computers and devices. Also, I did not buy the Synology NVMe branded drives. I bought two Samsung NVMe drives at a considerable discount. Here is a link to Synology's compatibility tool: www.synology.com/en-us/compatibility?search_by=products&model=DS923%2B&category=m2_ssd_internal

I'm not sure how much throttling Synology does for heating but the SSD's definitely aren't the bottleneck. 10Gbit is fast, but it has nothing on NVMe speeds!

My setup is still running great! The only thing I’ve done is expand the disk in the array for more storage as I talked about in the video. As far as RAM goes I personally haven’t looked at anything new RAM wise on the market since my current setup is working flawlessly!

@@23eightfive Thank you! That's great...appreciate your time on the video as well.

1500

You can use other SSDs but only for caching NOT for storage pools. Storage Pools requires Synology branded NVMe drives.

@@23eightfive okeeey, still usable. Can i use 1 cache ssd and 1 synology ssd as storage pool?

On the DS923+ Synology forces you to have caching in RAID 1 to prevent disk/file corruption in the event one NVMe disk fails. So it’s all or nothing. At least that’s the case with my non-Synology NVMe disk. There maybe an option with Synology branded disk to create a cache with half the disk space and then use the other half in a pool but I would not bet on this working based on the documentation I’ve read. If you want to do something like this I would just put regular SSDs in a few of the drive bays and then just use the NVMe for cache only. Even with 10gbe networking, NVMe performance is way out of reach from a throughput perspective.

Haha