That's just not what a ssd cache is for. If you use any of the apps that require a ton of iops the ssd cache will save your bacon and may be almost mandatory. An email server photos app plex ui .... That's there the ssd cache makes a humongous difference. At least felt adding it changed my ds920 from a pretty sluggish interface in these apps to more or less faster and more responsive than Google services. But a halfway scientific benchmark would be cool. Add 200gb of photos to your system and then scroll through some random albums with and without a cache would be fun to see
@@tviesoit does, ssd cache will save the thumbnails, etc. with plex, it loads my favorite movies super fast, obviously shows I don’t watch are slower since it has to fetch it from the hard drive.
Way back when I got this in 2022 I picked up two SanDisk 500gb M.2 drives and really helped my WD Red Pro's when it came to uploading multiple TV Series files and with Skipping Through and jumping to different files in my Music and Movie archives I have setup on Plex. Before it used to buffer alot when going through alot of files with album are and so forth.
You CAN utilize increased performance with just 1 host accessing the NAS. You just need to break the bond and leave those 2 NICs separate. Latest SMB protocol is capable of transferring data over multiple sessions, via multiple network interfaces with no NIC bonding/teaming at all. You just need to either have 2 gigabit NICs on your host PC, or have one 5Gbps/10Gbps NIC. I can confirm this works because I am using such setup myself and can see data transfer speeds waaaay over 1Gbps, close to 2Gbps.
@@Gt3ch , yes, I have enabled it, and I have experienced the corruption bug, but it was due to unreliable and crappy USB-C network card on my computer's monitor. Once I disconnected that NIC and used only proper PCI/PCI-express NICs, the problem disappeared. Also, this issue is no longer present in latest versions of SMB as far as I know.
@@Gt3ch , BTW, I actually use 4x4 NICs: I have 4 proper gigabit NICs on my desktop PC, plus I have connected 2 more gigabit NICs to synology over USB-A ports. It's pretty nice, and I can see throughput of up to 3Gbps sometimes.
Exactly! File transfers are not going to see a single benefit because its really the network cards which is the bottle neck. Apps that require storage or file IO access is going to benefit the most from using the SSD cache.
I’ve been using Synology for over a decade. And so many people act like they are experts with NAS’s and Synology. Your video and explaination are right on point. Even so things you explained better than I do with people who ask me about my servers. Good video.
Synology boxes are beasts, but they still have their flaws. That Atom processor flaw and the need to add a resistor to make it boot up properly was a major issue. Its not Synology's fault, but it caused a lot of boxes to fail including mine. The other design flaw was the failure to boot because of a simple NPN transistor blowing up. Depending on the box, its either Q1 or Q4 which requires a replacement after it blows up. The symptoms are a failure to start after pressing the start button. I was able to fix my box by swapping the transistor and soldering a replacement, but they are great servers. I think it was one of the best bang for the buck I spent when it comes to server for home or small business use. I love these units.
When the DS920+ has connected 2 LAN Ports to a Switch and a PC with Windows 10 too. Then you can activate SMB Multichannel on the DS920+ and get more than 1 Gbit with a single Filetransfer. You dont need LACP or something. But its ONLY for SMB (not FTP, SFTP, NFS oder other) because its SMB Multichannel.
Glad you did this vid. I bought an extra 4GB RAM for my DS920+ - not that I need it, but it wasn't expensive anyways. $20 bucks Was thinking more caching means less write to HDD and may improve HDD durability but I could be wrong
The RAM is really important when you plan on running additional packages like Plex and backup on the NAS. We need to do more testing on whether the caching helps with other apps/packages installed on the box. Thanks for watching!
@@2GuysTek Great video but I watched all of it and the answer to the question I came for is vague. I mostly use my NAS for Plex should I do all of this? It seems like the answer is it'll probably help a little but you won't really notice it. Have ya'll done another video on Plex or other packages yet? Thanks again for the effort.
Extra RAM will not help with disk durability, the written data will be flushed to disks sooner rather than latter, for reliability reasons, and since RAM is small, eventually the cached read data will be evicted. Also, most HDD failures have to do with the controller card and the spindle mechanism, and not with the head pivot mechanism. Having said that, if you go the route of @weeem, and do special configurations in the DS, like devoting RAMDisks for /tmp and/or logs (I did that in the Win3.11 era, compressing the RAMDisk, to boot) the performance of the system will increase significantly and durability of the disks will increase slightly as well. Nonetheless, this route is only for advanced users, use EXTREME caution.
@@keithbaker5293 If you are mostly using Plex, you will not notice. In plex, the Bandwidth you use is limited by the bitrate of your videos. Even 4K HDR video will not exceed 50Mbps. 8K will be 200Mbps, well within the capabilities of a single 1Gbps interface. Having said that, going to 9000Byte jumboframes could be a gamechanges for you. Also, be sure to use 720RPM non-SMR drives. Warning: If you are consuming the Plex content over WiFi, be careful about the 9000Byte Jumbo packets, and use all your might into reconfiguring/optimizing the WiFi instead of optimizing the NAS
Really appreciate this vid! Like a few others, it just clarified this piece for me as well. My use case(s) will be similar, as I'm not dealing with a massive household and a bunch of machines/devices all trying to transfer stuff to/from the NAS.
Synology states 8GB is the maximum amount of RAM the DS920 can be upgraded to, however there are plenty of accounts on the 'Net of people getting 16GB functioning in their boxes. And in regards to the NVMe caches, I'm not entirely sure - I don't see any reference to maximum size in the specs, but considering it's only for caching, I wouldn't (personally) go above 500GB.
There is no such thing as a ds920 Surveillance app. It is called Synology Surveillance Station and it can be used on several Synology devices. yes you can connect PoE cameras to it but you will require a PoE Switch inbetween as far as I know.
I don't expect much improment over a simple typical file transfer. What I am intersted to know are performance differrence on running concurrent activities of the following: 1. Multiple VMs 2. Multiple Media Streaming - Video, Music 3. Multiple large file (over 10GB) copying 4. Multiple Apps like Synology Chat, Office Suite, Cameras, DHCP, Proxy, VPN, Encryption Will maxing RAM and using Read NVMe have a significance diferrence compared to its default config?
1: If the VMs are running on the Syno, the extra RAM is mandatory, and the Flash cache will help inmensely (the bonded interfaces will be moot), if the VMs run on another machine, and the NAS if storing the VM file, you will need everhting you can throw at it, extra ram, flash cache, bonded interface and 9000Bytes jumbo packets 2. Yes and no. First, extra RAM and Flash cache will not help at all with sequential read. As a rule of thumb, a good 720P stream is 3Mbps, a good 1080p stream is 6Mbps, a good 4K stream is 50Mbps, and a good 8K stream is 120Mbps. A RAID5 of 4x7200RPM non SMR disks will saturate a 1GBPS link, but will not saturate a 2Gbps link. 9000Bytes Jumboframes will help with sequential reads too. Do the math on the streams you want to move around and see. And if you are consuming the streams via WiFi, optimize the WiFi 3. Multiple 10GB file copying will benefit from Flash cache as long as the cache can contain said files entirely, if not, then, as soon as the cache fills, the performance will revert to the r/w perfomance of the RAIDed HDDs. Also, bonding two ports and enabling 9000Byte jumboframse will help you a lot. 4. RAM and cache upgrades are the only things needed in that scenario.
Synthetic tests here will not do justice at all. What you should have done is installs various VMs (virtual machines) and then measure boot time (after multiple times) or put MySQL docker instance and try to populate large DB. These things make difference for advanced users and I'm pretty sure the difference will be there!
joke? advanced users do this on some Dell server rack, not on a bunch of disks with calculators CPU. It's primarily a storage solution, why people always get it wrong
Thank you this finally answered my question about transfer speeds from 1 pc to DS920+ regardless of which router and switch you have. But I still can't wait to get my unifi udm pro & unifi POE+ 24 port switch. It will still improve network performance between all devices within the intranet perspective.
I would recommend against the UDM/UDM PRO. Ubiquity make good Switches and APs but their routers are lacking too many features and are essentially beta products. Check their forums to see the huge list of problems / missing features.
Brother once i switch to unifi my network has ran flawless. My door lock detect me quickly, my stream do not buffer at all and my brother had lots of problems gaming Especially on red dead redemption ? And GTA 5 all gone.
For me the SSD cache is not for improving performance. The SSD cach lowers the noise because alls the files Download Station, the home drives and all stuff my family mostly ready but rarly writes are now an the SSD cache. The whole system is much quieter with ssd cache. I would never expect that the ssd would make any difference unles maybe you have MANY user accessing the system at the same time. On another note. Of course the RAM upgrade make hardly any difference for normal operations. But if you are running a lot of stuff in cirtual machines/docker containers the 4GB it came with just does not cut it. Long story short: for me the RAM upgrade and the SSD cache made a notable difference - just not in the way you might expect. Bottom line: after 3 years of service I'm still impressed with the 920+
.......GREAT VIDEO! ...so would you still buy the 920+ today - or do you recommend another NAS? ...and which HDDs do you recommend (8GB 10GB or 12GB, from WD Red, WD Red Pro or Ironwolf etc)???
The DS920+ is a really great NAS, and I would easily recommend it to anyone looking for a NAS regardless of our results on caching. Where Synology really shines is their UI, apps, and features! Regarding the drives - if you’re a WD fan, get the Reds and get the largest drives you can afford, the Seagate IronWolf NAS drives are just as good too. No matter what you choose make sure the the drives are CMR drives (which the Reds and IronWolfs are).
Thanks for a well done video. I believe that if you try to run a virtual machine without expanding the RAM, it will perform quite poorly. For that reason alone, I'm going to try it.
@07:33 Increasing your Ram (I have 16Gb in my 918+) makes it easier to use ram drives for low importance log files as well as being enough room to host your Plex Transcode folder (in /tmp) to minimise disk wear and noise. I wouldn't say it makes it faster as the CPU is the limitation on transcoding, but comparative read/write speeds of log files will decrease
Could you test if the CPU can actually use the ram over the 8GB addresses? according to intel's specs the integrated memory controller can only address 8GB memory, so it might be seen as 16, due to SPD reports that value, but at the end the CPU cant read/write data from the upper half of the address range...
No issues with the RAM and SSDs aren’t required for anything. The SSD caching would help for database activities, or apps that are reading and writing very frequently.
I have found use for more RAM with my DS918+ that is serving as a NAS, Video station and also runs a few VMs. The extra RAM comes in handy with my 2 VMs doing: * Logging of the speed i get from my internet provider, because I'm tired of my internet cutting out from time to time, and now I want PROOF!! * Background scripts that makes my life easy like: + Log and control power use in my apartment (handy when away from my appartment for a long time), + Survelance (I see you), + Offensive network security (poor dude that tries to enter my network without permission), + File dublication management (don't need that, YEET!), + Backup management (can I help with a previous version of ya' stuff, sir?), + Device synchronisation (handy with savegames accross systems), + Scripts to annoy the hell out of phone- and e-mail salesmen with random phone calls, e-mail bombs and so on (hella fun; I do recommend!), ...and lots more.
@@swaghili I do agree that we need more of them, but I don't know it it's a good idea to basically post a tutorial on how to shut down an entire company. Sorry, but it's properly for the better if I don't. Same goes for my anti-hacker-worm/virus/mallware/tracker/doomsday device. 😊
I'm curious what was the setup on the PC side, was it just using a single 1Gb connection for instance or did it also have a bonded or greater speed port as I was considering some upgrades on my DS920+ but after seeing this are a little unsure as to weather I'd benefit any. My PC does have dual ports, one of which is a 2.5Gb connection, so with an appropriate switch would I see and better transfer speeds or would the results be the same as here? Thanks in advance.
It’s likely you won’t see any performance improvement with single-file transfers, but if you were reading/writing multiple files or data streams concurrently then bonds all the way would produce better performance overall. Keep in mind that you’d need to have bonded or aggregate connections between switches if the the NAS was on one switch and you were on another.
Practically any would work. The RAM we used was budget focused, but only because RAM prices are competitive. You could save money and throw a few Crucial disks in there or similar to save money.
That bonded connection is a no brainer. If you're not using two LAN connections from your computer to the NAS or the switch box, there is no way you're going to double the data rate. You're better off adding a 10gbps network card and adding a E10G18-T1 card to the Synology box if it can take that adapter card. Go 10gbps or go bust. As for the SSD cache, it really depends on the applications you are running on the server. There is a huge advantage if you are running apps and use the SSDs for storage. If you're just doing a file transfer, it would not make a major difference. If you are running VMs on the Synology box, you will get a major speed boost in file IOs if you use the SSD drives instead of a hard drive.
The 920+ doesn’t have an interface fast enough to support 2.5gb (USB3 is ~300mbps) so there is no way to add a faster interface. 2x1gb is the best you can get.
so, 16gb stick of ram "unsupported" pass? 2x500gb nvme drives "unsupported" install? I would also recommend swapping out the stock synology fans for more airflow while at the same time quieter operation. 2x Noctua NF-A9
@@RJ_Cormac the fan swap has been amazing! super quiet and much more air. and to clarify, i added both nvme drives and made them both just storage. store the nas apps on them and they run from them. they are not cache drives. One drive is the apps, the other nvme drive is my downloads drive.
@@hoxlund14 I got the DS920+, 4x 6TB HHD, 4GB RAM expansion, and 2x NVMe expansion today. The Noctua fans did not get delivered until tommorow. This is going to be a big upgrade from my DS216 maxed out 8TB no RAM upgrade.
Great channel. Was thinking of throwing in some cache but not now. I play movies through my smart dvd to my old non smart tv. Only thing that helped was hard wiring the dvd!!
Glad it was just a connectivity issue! Being connected directly with Ethernet will always provide better performance over WiFi from a packet reliability standpoint! Thanks for the comment!
The DSx23+ are out and ... still trying to hoc 10Gb expansion cards. So no 802.3bz (N-baseT, autonegotiated 1Gb → 5Gb), not even a hobbled/planned obsolecence 2.5Gb. I still bought a 723+ for ECC memory in a package that draws 8w at idle without breaking the bank, but only because I don't require huge speed I just want uncorreupted data (so also using btrfs for combined data checksums and raid1.)
But isent the "upgrade" better if you use for example plex server and stuff like that? I know it's mostly cpu but the memory should make a difference aswell. But the ssd have no idea if it's good or not.
Hmm, the specs of the Syno don't tel what speed the m2 slots do? i think its gen 3 1? and then you never got the speed of the cards, what do you think?
There are some great videos on the subject here, but this one really gives practical information which one might not otherwise be aware of, obviously. I find this very helpful in considering the DS920+ for purchase. One question on the value of said upgrades - if one wanted to run Windows in a VM, would those upgrades have more benefit compared to the parameters you tested for? Thank you, Jake.
RAM is important for your VM for sure, but I'm not sure how much the cache will help virtualization on the NAS. VMs, like PCs, live in RAM and CPU and only when booting or reading/writing data do they really put a demand on disks. That being said, if your VM was a SQL server then the cache would be helpful. However RAM will be the one thing you'd want to invest in if you're running VMs since you can't upgrade the CPU in the DS920+.
I have not tried vms i only have ds218+ but i keep hearing that it run slow even on the 920+ the 4 core celeron is still to slow. But if you do try it let me know how it goes.
Well, they don't provide much of a performance improvement for SMB network shares - but they may help with running containers and VMs on the NAS itself, we didn't test that. 2TB however are much too large. You'd be better off having 250-500GB disks at most.
When enabling IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic Link Aggregation when clicking ok it says: Under Network Status: 1000 Mbps,Full Duplex MTU 1500, (Failed to establish IEEE 802.3ad connection) Any Ideas on this thanks in advance...
Make sure your switch is configured for the LAGG as well. 802.3ad requires both sides (client and switch) to be configured, and many systems require at least two connections to be part of a LAGG.
thank you for you explanation.. but my english is so bad.. i wanna make sure about it.. Did you mean add 2 slot NVME and Additional RAM is not need to do? thank you before..
The read/write cache from the NVMe disks didn’t make any significant performance improvement. However we know from personal experience that adding more RAM is beneficial to a Synology NAS, especially when you start running apps on the box.
I do apologize for commenting on this video over a year after it was posted, but I did just stumble upon it while searching for videos about Synology speed testing. I do thank you for the video, but I do have a slight issue with the information. The LACP or 802.3ad topic is a very confusing one because there was no real standard for it which had numerous companies labeling technology as they felt. This is why some LACP or 802.3ad equipment bonds connections together using the fail over or fault tolerance modes (Modes 0-6 except for 4) while others use LACP or 802.3ad bonded connections (usually 802.3ad bonded or Mode 4) that has all connections act as a single connection with traffic on all connections at one time for a faster connection. Unfortunately, the Synology DS920+ does not actually use the 802.3ad bonded Mode 4, so it cannot combine the two networks for the faster speeds.
Is the DS920+ limited to 500GB per NVME? I almost bought two 1TB Samsungs, but then i realized that i couldnt find the capacity specs anywhere. Please Help
I’m curious if that network link bonding would be a benefit for a single computer if say it has a 2.5,5,or 10gb Ethernet connection into the switch. It’s not a common use case yet but it’s rapidly approaching and a curious though experiment
You'd have the same scenario play out - albeit at higher speeds due to a faster single connection (2.5, 5, 10gig). The faster you can get a single connection at, the better your performance over a LACP trunk will be. The issue is with the way the switch manages sessions, one session will be channeled over one of the multiple connections and not spread across all. Thanks for the comment!
Nice video. I have a DS920+ and DS718+ sitting side by side. The files transfer performance of DS920 is much faster than DS718 in my single computer environment. Not sure if it is due to different HDD (IronWolf on 718 vs Seagate Enterprise HDD on 920), or the 2x500G SSD cache.
Keep in mind that the DS902+ also has a higher performance CPU too and the increased compute will increase your throughput out of the NAS! Thanks for the comment and consider subscribing!
"IronWolf" and "Seagate Enterprise HDD" says nothing useful about the drives; RPM, magnetic recording type, density(capacity), number of platters and heads can be the same in both of those product lines. (Not to mention SATA vs SAS, but synology x18 and x20 are limited to SATA only.)
So I happen to have extra storage and memory and was considering throwing them into this machine since they'd otherwise collect dust. In what year case would extra ram and memory yield a benefit since it didn't here?
More RAM is always really beneficial for a system, especially if you install packages from the Synology package manager app. Adding more services, like Plex, backup, etc. will utilize more memory, so adding more memory will help keep your NAS from slowing down - with the caveat that you only have a finite amount of CPU power, so if you have applications installed that require a lot of cpu performance your system will also be impacted.
Switch treats the port as one logic port. This does not mean it uses a single connection. Both ports are used. Since your computer only has 1Gbps, there is no way to fully use up a 2Gbps link. The same thing happens if your NAS connects to a router with 2.5GbE and your computer uses 1GbE. There is no way that a single network uses up a 2GbE. For example, if your computer connects to a switch using a single 10GbE, you can use a 2 * 1 GbE LAG trunked link. Some switches without negotiation will even require connecting ports in the same sequence (low to high). It is not true if your computer only has one physical link, LAG will end up with a solo physical link when you send the package. The package might indeed try to be sent in the same physical channel as much as possible to reduce out-of-order packages. But it depends on the scheduling algorithm. If you connect using a single TCP link, the hash will likely use one Physical link to avoid any out-of-order. (But you can use SMBv3 MultiChannel)
For video editing I think your biggest issue will likely be the 1Gb connectivity over anything else. The nature of caching is that the data most accessed would be, in theory, what’s kept in the cache, but because your need would be throughput for editing, the caching wouldn’t really add much benefit because the network is so slow. Of course this all depends on what video format you’re editing and file sizes.
Honestly good shit bro .. ty for the Video, shit made me lol 😂.. but still I love the Honest un bias truth your channel brings. Worth my SUB.. keep up the great work guys.
What we would like to see is what will be the performance with a client with a 2.5GB network connection, connected to a switch with 2.5GB and 1GB ports were the NAS has the LAG on the 1GB ports of that switch and the client is obvious connected to a 2.5GB port of the same switch.
@@rahjinkurzol7495already give up on Synology, went with QNAP with native 2.5GB nics, no more trics just to have speeds above 1GB, just one cable and one 2.5GB switch and DONE.
The NVMe caching is a waste of time and money for 99% of users,adding more RAM is a must DSM os loads super fast with a Samsung 8GB stick 10gb ram total in DS720+,dual lan no just wait for 2.5gbe
well without a SSD cache, its most likely you will still max out the bandwidth out of it, this only make sense if the NAS have 10gig network connection but as this is just 2 1gig connection, anything that is like caching is pointless. And its not like you synology uses ZFS, this makes more SSD pointless. I only recommend running SSD if you want to run a couple VMs as well as Docker container as well, of course having more RAM on a server like this specially if you run a couple docker containers, to me I think you should at least aim 8GB ram minimum to get all thigs run smoothly, my NAS runs a 16GB RAM. also most SMB anyway uses multi-channel connection this make utilize two ethernet connection at the same time, without using any kind LAGG/bonding switches.
I think to say it makes no difference is completely false. It might make no difference ONLY for file transfers. If you're regularly opening/editing files on NAS, running any additional APPs, the extra RAM and SSD cache makes a very noticeable difference. I think if you actually used it in real world scenarios, you would not say it makes no difference.
What's a bit confusing here is that Snyology recommends 1TB SSD's with 4 populated Bays.... AND I wonder if because you did NOT use the Recommended approved hardware, if somehow the device hampered itself due to their own programming.... HEY other companies do AND it seems like a growing practice.... so I don't think the story is complete without all things being tested.
Wait. Am I missing something? Why would anyone buy a diskstation that's capable of running virtual machines that can only be maxed out to a measly 8 GB of RAM? Heck, wouldn't think you'd want to setup a Windows 10 VM without at least allocating 8 GB of RAM to it. Makes me think you'd be better off just copying over your VMWARE VM files to the diskstation and powering it up over your PC and use the PC's RAM and hope the read/writes are fast enough on the diskstation.
There's a lot to unpack in your comment - but overall I think you're right, these low powered NAS systems aren't the best place to run VMs due to both the lack of compute and RAM available. There are exceptions to this, but overall, expecting high performance for the VMs in a system purpose-built for disk storage functionality means you're gonna have a bad time.
8GB? they say 16GB last i saw.. i currently run 12.. But yea a bond only works in an office and cache only helps when you use your stuff for weeks so it builds up something to cache.. Oh and they said DSM 7 WILL improve performance when you upgrade hardware. 6.2 doesnt do much. so redo this test with DSM 7!
When you're using a write cache, it's absolutely paramount that you have some sort of redundancy or protection against failure. For Synology, that means building a mirror, or RAID1 for the NVMe. Here's why, a write cache is where all incoming data lands before it's written to disk. Committing that data to disk ensures it's safe as your NAS has some sort of disk redundancy in play. If your incoming data lands in your write cache and that device fails before the data is committed to disk, that data is lost and cannot be recovered, for this reason you need added protection of a write cache. And this approach is industry standard - Whether it's via a battery-backed RAID card, battery-backed NVDIMM, or traditional mirroring.
TLC SSD drives, at full capacity utilization (no overprovisioning) as cache drives??? That's a disaster waiting to happen. I hope none of the viewers of this video actually follow these instructions
For anyone concerned about this - To run a full read/write cache you need two NVMe disks working in a mirror pair for fault tolerance (as stated in the video). Stating that running TLC SSDs is "a disaster waiting to happen" ignores the required added protection of the pair of them for the sole purpose of protecting the write cache functionality. All disks die. SLC, MLC, and TLC disks and running a single disk for a write cache is never a good idea. The Samsung 980 NVMe has a 5-year warranty and is guaranteed for 600TB worth of writes so we feel they make a perfect fit for this role. Couple this with the fact that the instant the mirror faults, Synology instantly begins writing through (bypassing the cache) and no longer uses the cache until the issue is resolved. Hope this helps!
this video is very poor. Whilst the author has gone to some effort on setting up the lag. They have failed to optimise the networking. Users should google 'tuning 10gb' and use this as the basis for configuring the network options on the synology. At a very minimum you need to configure MTU of 9000 on both ends, transmission queue size, rx/tx checksums/offloading, scatter and gatter, large receive offload, and kernel rmem/wmem MAX. On a 4port lag on my older synology box (DS1815), i can get throughput to over 400MB/sec read, 300mb/sec write. On my newer box with 10GBE i can get over 800MB/sec read and 300/sec write. And they don't have SSD cache.. With all due respect to the author. this video should be deleted.
It's great that you're aware of MTU size and jumbo packets. Those are valuable settings for a storage network where everything connected is configured the same. However, the DS920+ is not 10G. It's 1G. Also, configuring systems to 9000 MTU in a network with mixed MTUs will cause performance issues when clients with a default MTU (1500) attempt to communicate with a server configured for jumbo packets. Each packet sent will have to be retransmitted because the 'small side' can't consume a packet that large, leading to packet fragmentation and retransmission. A fragment and retransmit here or there isn't an issue for low throughput communications as a few packets here and there won't amount to much. However, for a storage system serving various clients on a network, unless you intend to reconfigure every client connected to run with jumbo frames manually, you're gonna have a bad time. This also assumes that whatever 1G-connected clients you have can support a full 9000 MTU frame, as support for jumbo is highly dependent on the NIC and its drivers. Now let's talk about LAGs. Synology supports various means of creating bonds. Adaptive load balancing, which is not a LAG, 802.3ad for dynamic load balancing, Balance XOR for draft v1 802.3ad, both of which are standards, and active/standby, which is not a LAG. IEEE 802.3ad does not increase single-stream data transfers. It provides load balancing of multiple streams of data over multiple physical links to increase overall throughput, but individual data transfers are not necessarily faster. Our SMB testing was done between the DS920+ and a standard Windows 10 client. This is a single-stream transfer. We can argue all day on what file transfer protocols are better, but SMB, as configured, is a single stream file transfer protocol, and LAGs do not increase the throughput of a single stream protocol.
@@2GuysTek Thanks for the follow up. For clarity. 10BGE tuning is not about specifically 10GBE, it could easily be called 2.5 GBE tuning, 25GBE tuning 100GBE tuning. The Linux kernel foundation released the paper called "10GBE tuning", these are instructions to go about increasing the speed. The Linux kernel is not optimised out of the box for high transfer rates. The kernel network stack has many things to do and is optimised for the basic use case you are referencing. As such, many kernel bypass/offload technologies exist such as VVP, DPDK, XDP to bypass these restrictions. These technologies allow for 400GB/Sec and higher from standard commercial off the shelf (COTS) hardware. (telecoms world) If the users here, are setting up LAGS, and buying cache drives, it seems to reason they want higher transfer rates. They will do whatever they can to get there. They are not going to buying Lamborghinis to drive them at 30km/hr. Please consider doing a follow up video.
**PRODUCTS USED IN THIS VIDEO**
Micron PC4-2666V 4GB DDR4 SODIMM: amzn.to/3u4Ypea
Samsung Electronics 980 SSD 500GB - M.2 NVMe: amzn.to/2Sc92P3
you used a 8GB RAM stick, but gave link for a 4GB stick .. can you please give the link for 8GB model you used ?
I maxed my 920+ out and also noticed no difference. Thought it was just me. Cool video.
That's just not what a ssd cache is for. If you use any of the apps that require a ton of iops the ssd cache will save your bacon and may be almost mandatory. An email server photos app plex ui .... That's there the ssd cache makes a humongous difference. At least felt adding it changed my ds920 from a pretty sluggish interface in these apps to more or less faster and more responsive than Google services. But a halfway scientific benchmark would be cool. Add 200gb of photos to your system and then scroll through some random albums with and without a cache would be fun to see
Yes and change RAM
To DUAL FOR SPEED
AND UP MHz on FSB
ANY ON KNOW THAT
INLINE NOT AFD SPEED JUST RAM SICE
Do you think it would it make it difference for Synology Photos then?
@@tviesoit does, ssd cache will save the thumbnails, etc. with plex, it loads my favorite movies super fast, obviously shows I don’t watch are slower since it has to fetch it from the hard drive.
This video saved me hundreds of dollars! Thank you!
Dont belive these F-Lamer's
ANY on KNOWS THAT when you
just add ram .. you get INLINE
No speed.. you always use DUAL
TO UP MHz and SPEED!!
Way back when I got this in 2022 I picked up two SanDisk 500gb M.2 drives and really helped my WD Red Pro's when it came to uploading multiple TV Series files and with Skipping Through and jumping to different files in my Music and Movie archives I have setup on Plex. Before it used to buffer alot when going through alot of files with album are and so forth.
You CAN utilize increased performance with just 1 host accessing the NAS. You just need to break the bond and leave those 2 NICs separate. Latest SMB protocol is capable of transferring data over multiple sessions, via multiple network interfaces with no NIC bonding/teaming at all. You just need to either have 2 gigabit NICs on your host PC, or have one 5Gbps/10Gbps NIC. I can confirm this works because I am using such setup myself and can see data transfer speeds waaaay over 1Gbps, close to 2Gbps.
Did you enable SMB Multichannel? Any concerns about the corruption bug?
@@Gt3ch , yes, I have enabled it, and I have experienced the corruption bug, but it was due to unreliable and crappy USB-C network card on my computer's monitor. Once I disconnected that NIC and used only proper PCI/PCI-express NICs, the problem disappeared. Also, this issue is no longer present in latest versions of SMB as far as I know.
@@Gt3ch , BTW, I actually use 4x4 NICs: I have 4 proper gigabit NICs on my desktop PC, plus I have connected 2 more gigabit NICs to synology over USB-A ports. It's pretty nice, and I can see throughput of up to 3Gbps sometimes.
SSD Cache is quite useful if you use VMs and/or multiple Docker containers.
Exactly! File transfers are not going to see a single benefit because its really the network cards which is the bottle neck. Apps that require storage or file IO access is going to benefit the most from using the SSD cache.
I’ve been using Synology for over a decade. And so many people act like they are experts with NAS’s and Synology. Your video and explaination are right on point. Even so things you explained better than I do with people who ask me about my servers. Good video.
Thank you! We appreciate the feedback!
Synology boxes are beasts, but they still have their flaws. That Atom processor flaw and the need to add a resistor to make it boot up properly was a major issue. Its not Synology's fault, but it caused a lot of boxes to fail including mine. The other design flaw was the failure to boot because of a simple NPN transistor blowing up. Depending on the box, its either Q1 or Q4 which requires a replacement after it blows up. The symptoms are a failure to start after pressing the start button. I was able to fix my box by swapping the transistor and soldering a replacement, but they are great servers. I think it was one of the best bang for the buck I spent when it comes to server for home or small business use. I love these units.
Would also love to see benchmarks from multiple Crystal disc sessions from different computers accessing the nas simultaneously
Thanks a lot for making this video! 👍🏻👍🏻
Glad it was useful!
When the DS920+ has connected 2 LAN Ports to a Switch and a PC with Windows 10 too. Then you can activate SMB Multichannel on the DS920+ and get more than 1 Gbit with a single Filetransfer. You dont need LACP or something.
But its ONLY for SMB (not FTP, SFTP, NFS oder other) because its SMB Multichannel.
Glad you did this vid.
I bought an extra 4GB RAM for my DS920+ - not that I need it, but it wasn't expensive anyways. $20 bucks
Was thinking more caching means less write to HDD and may improve HDD durability but I could be wrong
The RAM is really important when you plan on running additional packages like Plex and backup on the NAS. We need to do more testing on whether the caching helps with other apps/packages installed on the box. Thanks for watching!
@@2GuysTek Great video but I watched all of it and the answer to the question I came for is vague. I mostly use my NAS for Plex should I do all of this? It seems like the answer is it'll probably help a little but you won't really notice it. Have ya'll done another video on Plex or other packages yet? Thanks again for the effort.
Did you use the official RAM?
Extra RAM will not help with disk durability, the written data will be flushed to disks sooner rather than latter, for reliability reasons, and since RAM is small, eventually the cached read data will be evicted. Also, most HDD failures have to do with the controller card and the spindle mechanism, and not with the head pivot mechanism.
Having said that, if you go the route of @weeem, and do special configurations in the DS, like devoting RAMDisks for /tmp and/or logs (I did that in the Win3.11 era, compressing the RAMDisk, to boot) the performance of the system will increase significantly and durability of the disks will increase slightly as well. Nonetheless, this route is only for advanced users, use EXTREME caution.
@@keithbaker5293 If you are mostly using Plex, you will not notice.
In plex, the Bandwidth you use is limited by the bitrate of your videos. Even 4K HDR video will not exceed 50Mbps. 8K will be 200Mbps, well within the capabilities of a single 1Gbps interface. Having said that, going to 9000Byte jumboframes could be a gamechanges for you.
Also, be sure to use 720RPM non-SMR drives.
Warning: If you are consuming the Plex content over WiFi, be careful about the 9000Byte Jumbo packets, and use all your might into reconfiguring/optimizing the WiFi instead of optimizing the NAS
Really appreciate this vid! Like a few others, it just clarified this piece for me as well. My use case(s) will be similar, as I'm not dealing with a massive household and a bunch of machines/devices all trying to transfer stuff to/from the NAS.
Hi great video ...what is the max capacity of the RAM that can be used 4 GB???? also for the NVME cache what is the max ,,,you used 500GB..thanks
Synology states 8GB is the maximum amount of RAM the DS920 can be upgraded to, however there are plenty of accounts on the 'Net of people getting 16GB functioning in their boxes. And in regards to the NVMe caches, I'm not entirely sure - I don't see any reference to maximum size in the specs, but considering it's only for caching, I wouldn't (personally) go above 500GB.
Sweet thanks! Although admittedly a little bummed. That LACP graphic was clear, nicely done.
Glad to hear! Consider subscribing!
You just saved me $100. Can you do a video on the DS920+ Surveillance App? Specifically, how can a user connect PoE cameras to it
There is no such thing as a ds920 Surveillance app. It is called Synology Surveillance Station and it can be used on several Synology devices. yes you can connect PoE cameras to it but you will require a PoE Switch inbetween as far as I know.
I don't expect much improment over a simple typical file transfer. What I am intersted to know are performance differrence on running concurrent activities of the following:
1. Multiple VMs
2. Multiple Media Streaming - Video, Music
3. Multiple large file (over 10GB) copying
4. Multiple Apps like Synology Chat, Office Suite, Cameras, DHCP, Proxy, VPN, Encryption
Will maxing RAM and using Read NVMe have a significance diferrence compared to its default config?
in that case yes, don't forget Plex server,
1: If the VMs are running on the Syno, the extra RAM is mandatory, and the Flash cache will help inmensely (the bonded interfaces will be moot), if the VMs run on another machine, and the NAS if storing the VM file, you will need everhting you can throw at it, extra ram, flash cache, bonded interface and 9000Bytes jumbo packets
2. Yes and no. First, extra RAM and Flash cache will not help at all with sequential read. As a rule of thumb, a good 720P stream is 3Mbps, a good 1080p stream is 6Mbps, a good 4K stream is 50Mbps, and a good 8K stream is 120Mbps. A RAID5 of 4x7200RPM non SMR disks will saturate a 1GBPS link, but will not saturate a 2Gbps link. 9000Bytes Jumboframes will help with sequential reads too. Do the math on the streams you want to move around and see. And if you are consuming the streams via WiFi, optimize the WiFi
3. Multiple 10GB file copying will benefit from Flash cache as long as the cache can contain said files entirely, if not, then, as soon as the cache fills, the performance will revert to the r/w perfomance of the RAIDed HDDs. Also, bonding two ports and enabling 9000Byte jumboframse will help you a lot.
4. RAM and cache upgrades are the only things needed in that scenario.
Synthetic tests here will not do justice at all. What you should have done is installs various VMs (virtual machines) and then measure boot time (after multiple times) or put MySQL docker instance and try to populate large DB. These things make difference for advanced users and I'm pretty sure the difference will be there!
joke? advanced users do this on some Dell server rack, not on a bunch of disks with calculators CPU. It's primarily a storage solution, why people always get it wrong
@@Hephasto Advanced users is relative category! Here it was in context...
Thank you this finally answered my question about transfer speeds from 1 pc to DS920+ regardless of which router and switch you have. But I still can't wait to get my unifi udm pro & unifi POE+ 24 port switch. It will still improve network performance between all devices within the intranet perspective.
We love the UniFi gear!
I would recommend against the UDM/UDM PRO. Ubiquity make good Switches and APs but their routers are lacking too many features and are essentially beta products. Check their forums to see the huge list of problems / missing features.
Brother once i switch to unifi my network has ran flawless. My door lock detect me quickly, my stream do not buffer at all and my brother had lots of problems gaming Especially on red dead redemption ? And GTA 5 all gone.
For me the SSD cache is not for improving performance. The SSD cach lowers the noise because alls the files Download Station, the home drives and all stuff my family mostly ready but rarly writes are now an the SSD cache. The whole system is much quieter with ssd cache. I would never expect that the ssd would make any difference unles maybe you have MANY user accessing the system at the same time. On another note. Of course the RAM upgrade make hardly any difference for normal operations. But if you are running a lot of stuff in cirtual machines/docker containers the 4GB it came with just does not cut it. Long story short: for me the RAM upgrade and the SSD cache made a notable difference - just not in the way you might expect.
Bottom line: after 3 years of service I'm still impressed with the 920+
.......GREAT VIDEO! ...so would you still buy the 920+ today - or do you recommend another NAS? ...and which HDDs do you recommend (8GB 10GB or 12GB, from WD Red, WD Red Pro or Ironwolf etc)???
The DS920+ is a really great NAS, and I would easily recommend it to anyone looking for a NAS regardless of our results on caching. Where Synology really shines is their UI, apps, and features!
Regarding the drives - if you’re a WD fan, get the Reds and get the largest drives you can afford, the Seagate IronWolf NAS drives are just as good too. No matter what you choose make sure the the drives are CMR drives (which the Reds and IronWolfs are).
Thanks for a well done video. I believe that if you try to run a virtual machine without expanding the RAM, it will perform quite poorly. For that reason alone, I'm going to try it.
Good to know! I would have thrown a lot of add. Gear to the NAS… Thanks for your video!
@07:33 Increasing your Ram (I have 16Gb in my 918+) makes it easier to use ram drives for low importance log files as well as being enough room to host your Plex Transcode folder (in /tmp) to minimise disk wear and noise. I wouldn't say it makes it faster as the CPU is the limitation on transcoding, but comparative read/write speeds of log files will decrease
Could you test if the CPU can actually use the ram over the 8GB addresses? according to intel's specs the integrated memory controller can only address 8GB memory, so it might be seen as 16, due to SPD reports that value, but at the end the CPU cant read/write data from the upper half of the address range...
If you are planning to install a VM then the upgrades are a must.
Absolutely!
Any issues with the ram you purchased? Do I need to add the SSD for Plex reasons?
No issues with the RAM and SSDs aren’t required for anything. The SSD caching would help for database activities, or apps that are reading and writing very frequently.
I have found use for more RAM with my DS918+ that is serving as a NAS, Video station and also runs a few VMs.
The extra RAM comes in handy with my 2 VMs doing:
* Logging of the speed i get from my internet provider, because I'm tired of my internet cutting out from time to time, and now I want PROOF!!
* Background scripts that makes my life easy like:
+ Log and control power use in my apartment (handy when away from my appartment for a long time),
+ Survelance (I see you),
+ Offensive network security (poor dude that tries to enter my network without permission),
+ File dublication management (don't need that, YEET!),
+ Backup management (can I help with a previous version of ya' stuff, sir?),
+ Device synchronisation (handy with savegames accross systems),
+ Scripts to annoy the hell out of phone- and e-mail salesmen with random phone calls, e-mail bombs and so on (hella fun; I do recommend!),
...and lots more.
I would love to see some tutorials on your channel on doing some of the things you've mentioned on your VM! ESPECIALLY the last one!!
@@swaghili I do agree that we need more of them, but I don't know it it's a good idea to basically post a tutorial on how to shut down an entire company. Sorry, but it's properly for the better if I don't. Same goes for my anti-hacker-worm/virus/mallware/tracker/doomsday device. 😊
I'm curious what was the setup on the PC side, was it just using a single 1Gb connection for instance or did it also have a bonded or greater speed port as I was considering some upgrades on my DS920+ but after seeing this are a little unsure as to weather I'd benefit any.
My PC does have dual ports, one of which is a 2.5Gb connection, so with an appropriate switch would I see and better transfer speeds or would the results be the same as here?
Thanks in advance.
It’s likely you won’t see any performance improvement with single-file transfers, but if you were reading/writing multiple files or data streams concurrently then bonds all the way would produce better performance overall. Keep in mind that you’d need to have bonded or aggregate connections between switches if the the NAS was on one switch and you were on another.
Very clear and simple communication. I loved your video. Congratulations!!
Thank you! 😃
I wish I saw this video before upgrading, Thank you! nice video
Thanks for watching!
Very helpful video. I plan to buy the DS920 and would have added RAM and at least one SSD card if I hadn't seen the results of your tests.
Glad we could help! Adding the RAM will help you if you intend to run a lot of packages in DSM!
@@2GuysTek video editing will be helped by RAM as well? Will NVME's help video edits and streaming if I'm constantly pulling up the same video files?
Thinking about upgrading both my 2 1/2 year old SanDisk M.2 for WD Black M.2's
Hi,
I'm the only NAS user, so I realized I'm not going to perform any more in creating BOND and putting SSD cache.
Thats it?
If the performance is not that much of a difference, which budget SSD and RAMs would you recommend?
Practically any would work. The RAM we used was budget focused, but only because RAM prices are competitive. You could save money and throw a few Crucial disks in there or similar to save money.
Really appreciated this review.
That bonded connection is a no brainer. If you're not using two LAN connections from your computer to the NAS or the switch box, there is no way you're going to double the data rate. You're better off adding a 10gbps network card and adding a E10G18-T1 card to the Synology box if it can take that adapter card. Go 10gbps or go bust. As for the SSD cache, it really depends on the applications you are running on the server. There is a huge advantage if you are running apps and use the SSDs for storage. If you're just doing a file transfer, it would not make a major difference. If you are running VMs on the Synology box, you will get a major speed boost in file IOs if you use the SSD drives instead of a hard drive.
do you think using 2.5gbe adapter/connection will make a difference?
The 920+ doesn’t have an interface fast enough to support 2.5gb (USB3 is ~300mbps) so there is no way to add a faster interface. 2x1gb is the best you can get.
@@2GuysTek I think you can get unofficial 2.5gb cards working with it. I've seen some folks on reddit talking about it.
so, 16gb stick of ram "unsupported" pass? 2x500gb nvme drives "unsupported" install? I would also recommend swapping out the stock synology fans for more airflow while at the same time quieter operation. 2x Noctua NF-A9
I hadn't thought about the fans 👍
@@RJ_Cormac the fan swap has been amazing! super quiet and much more air. and to clarify, i added both nvme drives and made them both just storage. store the nas apps on them and they run from them. they are not cache drives. One drive is the apps, the other nvme drive is my downloads drive.
@@hoxlund14 I got the DS920+, 4x 6TB HHD, 4GB RAM expansion, and 2x NVMe expansion today. The Noctua fans did not get delivered until tommorow. This is going to be a big upgrade from my DS216 maxed out 8TB no RAM upgrade.
@@RJ_Cormac why only a 4gb stick? you can install a 16gb stick to get 20gb of ram
@@hoxlund14 it was $20 for 4GB, if I need to upgrade again I can. It's hasn't pegged the RAM usage yet.
Great vid guys! thank you 😍
Great channel. Was thinking of throwing in some cache but not now. I play movies through my smart dvd to my old non smart tv. Only thing that helped was hard wiring the dvd!!
Glad it was just a connectivity issue! Being connected directly with Ethernet will always provide better performance over WiFi from a packet reliability standpoint! Thanks for the comment!
thank you... I'll wait for a synology with 2.5 Gbe. If they don't implement that port, I'll have to consider QNAP...
The DSx23+ are out and ... still trying to hoc 10Gb expansion cards.
So no 802.3bz (N-baseT, autonegotiated 1Gb → 5Gb), not even a hobbled/planned obsolecence 2.5Gb.
I still bought a 723+ for ECC memory in a package that draws 8w at idle without breaking the bank, but only because I don't require huge speed I just want uncorreupted data (so also using btrfs for combined data checksums and raid1.)
But isent the "upgrade" better if you use for example plex server and stuff like that? I know it's mostly cpu but the memory should make a difference aswell. But the ssd have no idea if it's good or not.
Great video. Thanks!
Glad you liked it!
awesome video, very informative!
Glad you liked it!
Hey man I need help, does the Seagate Nas Pro 18tb work on the DS920+? Thanks in advance.
While we haven’t personally tested that drive specifically, there is no reason it shouldn’t be supported.
As others have pointed out depends on your usage case.
Hmm, the specs of the Syno don't tel what speed the m2 slots do? i think its gen 3 1? and then you never got the speed of the cards, what do you think?
There are some great videos on the subject here, but this one really gives practical information which one might not otherwise be aware of, obviously. I find this very helpful in considering the DS920+ for purchase. One question on the value of said upgrades - if one wanted to run Windows in a VM, would those upgrades have more benefit compared to the parameters you tested for? Thank you, Jake.
RAM is important for your VM for sure, but I'm not sure how much the cache will help virtualization on the NAS. VMs, like PCs, live in RAM and CPU and only when booting or reading/writing data do they really put a demand on disks. That being said, if your VM was a SQL server then the cache would be helpful. However RAM will be the one thing you'd want to invest in if you're running VMs since you can't upgrade the CPU in the DS920+.
I have not tried vms i only have ds218+ but i keep hearing that it run slow even on the 920+ the 4 core celeron is still to slow. But if you do try it let me know how it goes.
Thanks.
I just bought 2 cache of 2TB each. As it seems it is mostly a waste, isnt it? What do you think?
Well, they don't provide much of a performance improvement for SMB network shares - but they may help with running containers and VMs on the NAS itself, we didn't test that. 2TB however are much too large. You'd be better off having 250-500GB disks at most.
@@2GuysTek Many Thanks you guys. I see it better now. 500 GB should be ok. I think i went too far with those 2 TB. I will give it a second thought
Thanks, saved me money not getting one!
thanks for the in depth investigations and present them in an easy way to understand!
Thank you on bonding ref.
Very informative! Thank you guys.
Very glad to have helped! Subscribe!
I threw in 2 x samsung 250GB SSDs and 16GB of Crucial memory and it works a charm. Thanks for the review.
Awesome! Glad it helped!
When enabling IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic Link Aggregation when clicking ok it says: Under Network Status: 1000 Mbps,Full Duplex MTU 1500, (Failed to establish IEEE 802.3ad connection) Any Ideas on this thanks in advance...
Make sure your switch is configured for the LAGG as well. 802.3ad requires both sides (client and switch) to be configured, and many systems require at least two connections to be part of a LAGG.
Great video!
I can't find any docs that show the max of m.2 cash? Do you know if I could use 4gb.s of m.2?
thank you for you explanation.. but my english is so bad.. i wanna make sure about it.. Did you mean add 2 slot NVME and Additional RAM is not need to do? thank you before..
The read/write cache from the NVMe disks didn’t make any significant performance improvement. However we know from personal experience that adding more RAM is beneficial to a Synology NAS, especially when you start running apps on the box.
@@2GuysTek thank you!
Great product!!
I do apologize for commenting on this video over a year after it was posted, but I did just stumble upon it while searching for videos about Synology speed testing. I do thank you for the video, but I do have a slight issue with the information. The LACP or 802.3ad topic is a very confusing one because there was no real standard for it which had numerous companies labeling technology as they felt. This is why some LACP or 802.3ad equipment bonds connections together using the fail over or fault tolerance modes (Modes 0-6 except for 4) while others use LACP or 802.3ad bonded connections (usually 802.3ad bonded or Mode 4) that has all connections act as a single connection with traffic on all connections at one time for a faster connection. Unfortunately, the Synology DS920+ does not actually use the 802.3ad bonded Mode 4, so it cannot combine the two networks for the faster speeds.
Great Video thank you.
Glad you liked it! Consider subscribing!
Is the DS920+ limited to 500GB per NVME? I almost bought two 1TB Samsungs, but then i realized that i couldnt find the capacity specs anywhere. Please Help
will it support Crucial RAM 16GB DDR4 3200 MHz CL22 CT16G4SFRA32A ?
Would like to see more on lacp performance testing
I’m curious if that network link bonding would be a benefit for a single computer if say it has a 2.5,5,or 10gb Ethernet connection into the switch. It’s not a common use case yet but it’s rapidly approaching and a curious though experiment
You'd have the same scenario play out - albeit at higher speeds due to a faster single connection (2.5, 5, 10gig). The faster you can get a single connection at, the better your performance over a LACP trunk will be. The issue is with the way the switch manages sessions, one session will be channeled over one of the multiple connections and not spread across all. Thanks for the comment!
@@2GuysTek makes sense thanks for the response
Great video
Glad you enjoyed it! Consider subscribing!
Nice video. I have a DS920+ and DS718+ sitting side by side. The files transfer performance of DS920 is much faster than DS718 in my single computer environment. Not sure if it is due to different HDD (IronWolf on 718 vs Seagate Enterprise HDD on 920), or the 2x500G SSD cache.
Keep in mind that the DS902+ also has a higher performance CPU too and the increased compute will increase your throughput out of the NAS! Thanks for the comment and consider subscribing!
"IronWolf" and "Seagate Enterprise HDD" says nothing useful about the drives; RPM, magnetic recording type, density(capacity), number of platters and heads can be the same in both of those product lines. (Not to mention SATA vs SAS, but synology x18 and x20 are limited to SATA only.)
So I happen to have extra storage and memory and was considering throwing them into this machine since they'd otherwise collect dust. In what year case would extra ram and memory yield a benefit since it didn't here?
More RAM is always really beneficial for a system, especially if you install packages from the Synology package manager app. Adding more services, like Plex, backup, etc. will utilize more memory, so adding more memory will help keep your NAS from slowing down - with the caveat that you only have a finite amount of CPU power, so if you have applications installed that require a lot of cpu performance your system will also be impacted.
Switch treats the port as one logic port. This does not mean it uses a single connection. Both ports are used. Since your computer only has 1Gbps, there is no way to fully use up a 2Gbps link. The same thing happens if your NAS connects to a router with 2.5GbE and your computer uses 1GbE. There is no way that a single network uses up a 2GbE.
For example, if your computer connects to a switch using a single 10GbE, you can use a 2 * 1 GbE LAG trunked link. Some switches without negotiation will even require connecting ports in the same sequence (low to high).
It is not true if your computer only has one physical link, LAG will end up with a solo physical link when you send the package. The package might indeed try to be sent in the same physical channel as much as possible to reduce out-of-order packages. But it depends on the scheduling algorithm. If you connect using a single TCP link, the hash will likely use one Physical link to avoid any out-of-order. (But you can use SMBv3 MultiChannel)
Why didn't you pin all Synology DSM7 btrfs metadata to the NVMe cache for a faster interface?
We tested DSM6.x not DSM7 on the unit.
@@2GuysTek Synology designed the NVMe cache for DSM7, skewing the results of this video as time has passed.
What if i want to video edit, would it still make no difference to add 1 nwme and 4gb of ram?
For video editing I think your biggest issue will likely be the 1Gb connectivity over anything else. The nature of caching is that the data most accessed would be, in theory, what’s kept in the cache, but because your need would be throughput for editing, the caching wouldn’t really add much benefit because the network is so slow. Of course this all depends on what video format you’re editing and file sizes.
@@2GuysTek thanks for the answer. What would you recommend for increasing the network bandwidth? Is there any devices?
lovely channel
Why i have no SSD Cache and Hot Spare icon (options) on the left side of the Storage manager windows ?
That's because the primary performance constraints are the drives themselves and the array. The bottleneck isn't the cache or the connection.
Honestly good shit bro .. ty for the Video, shit made me lol 😂.. but still I love the Honest un bias truth your channel brings. Worth my SUB.. keep up the great work guys.
Genius
What we would like to see is what will be the performance with a client with a 2.5GB network connection, connected to a switch with 2.5GB and 1GB ports were the NAS has the LAG on the 1GB ports of that switch and the client is obvious connected to a 2.5GB port of the same switch.
DS920+ Now Enables SMB3 Mulitchannel doubles speed (2cables) without much work. I get 221MB/s + transfer speed.
@@rahjinkurzol7495already give up on Synology, went with QNAP with native 2.5GB nics, no more trics just to have speeds above 1GB, just one cable and one 2.5GB switch and DONE.
The NVMe caching is a waste of time and money for 99% of users,adding more RAM is a must DSM os loads super fast with a Samsung 8GB stick 10gb ram total in DS720+,dual lan no just wait for 2.5gbe
Exactly, everyone will benefit from more RAM in their Synology - especially if they're running a lot of packages!
isnt the NVMe caching still good for large copy/writes?
But what happens if you go 10gbe. Then probably the nas will take advantage of more ram/ ssd cache.
The DS920+ is not capable of 10GbE and there is no way to add it to the unit.
Is it possible to upgrade the 920+ to 10gbe?
Unfortunately it is not. There is no PCIe slot on the mainboard.
@@2GuysTek But can any 10gbe ethernet USB adapter be used with 920+ for that?
To our knowledge Synology doesn’t support USB Ethernet dongles.
Sodium slot?
SO-DIMM Slot
@@2GuysTek oooooh. Sounded like you said "sodium" slot ;)
well without a SSD cache, its most likely you will still max out the bandwidth out of it, this only make sense if the NAS have 10gig network connection but as this is just 2 1gig connection, anything that is like caching is pointless. And its not like you synology uses ZFS, this makes more SSD pointless.
I only recommend running SSD if you want to run a couple VMs as well as Docker container as well, of course having more RAM on a server like this specially if you run a couple docker containers, to me I think you should at least aim 8GB ram minimum to get all thigs run smoothly, my NAS runs a 16GB RAM.
also most SMB anyway uses multi-channel connection this make utilize two ethernet connection at the same time, without using any kind LAGG/bonding switches.
I would like to see the deferents for running plex stock and fully tech out.
I think to say it makes no difference is completely false. It might make no difference ONLY for file transfers. If you're regularly opening/editing files on NAS, running any additional APPs, the extra RAM and SSD cache makes a very noticeable difference. I think if you actually used it in real world scenarios, you would not say it makes no difference.
Ну вот, а я запихал в свой 720+ два SSD Samsung 980 по 256GB, подключил два патчкорда и жду когда мой NAS взлетит.
Не взлетает.
I'm annoyed that the ds919+ didn't have 2.5Gb rj45 port. Call me crazy but it seems like a bottle neck to me.
100% agree.
"Detected non-Synology recommended memory module configurations. You may have " :(
That NAS has same processor as $50 Intel NUC PC
Hello guys
expand to 9 drives
What's a bit confusing here is that Snyology recommends 1TB SSD's with 4 populated Bays.... AND I wonder if because you did NOT use the Recommended approved hardware, if somehow the device hampered itself due to their own programming.... HEY other companies do AND it seems like a growing practice.... so I don't think the story is complete without all things being tested.
It's unforgivable he did not test with a client connection faster than 1GBe. It's the bottleneck and he should have talking about it.
Wait. Am I missing something? Why would anyone buy a diskstation that's capable of running virtual machines that can only be maxed out to a measly 8 GB of RAM? Heck, wouldn't think you'd want to setup a Windows 10 VM without at least allocating 8 GB of RAM to it. Makes me think you'd be better off just copying over your VMWARE VM files to the diskstation and powering it up over your PC and use the PC's RAM and hope the read/writes are fast enough on the diskstation.
There's a lot to unpack in your comment - but overall I think you're right, these low powered NAS systems aren't the best place to run VMs due to both the lack of compute and RAM available. There are exceptions to this, but overall, expecting high performance for the VMs in a system purpose-built for disk storage functionality means you're gonna have a bad time.
8GB? they say 16GB last i saw.. i currently run 12.. But yea a bond only works in an office and cache only helps when you use your stuff for weeks so it builds up something to cache.. Oh and they said DSM 7 WILL improve performance when you upgrade hardware. 6.2 doesnt do much. so redo this test with DSM 7!
This we can do!
🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏
shouldn't cache RAID 0 instead RAID 1 '__')
RAID 0 better for temporary data
also make the storage live longer
When you're using a write cache, it's absolutely paramount that you have some sort of redundancy or protection against failure. For Synology, that means building a mirror, or RAID1 for the NVMe. Here's why, a write cache is where all incoming data lands before it's written to disk. Committing that data to disk ensures it's safe as your NAS has some sort of disk redundancy in play. If your incoming data lands in your write cache and that device fails before the data is committed to disk, that data is lost and cannot be recovered, for this reason you need added protection of a write cache.
And this approach is industry standard - Whether it's via a battery-backed RAID card, battery-backed NVDIMM, or traditional mirroring.
TLC SSD drives, at full capacity utilization (no overprovisioning) as cache drives??? That's a disaster waiting to happen.
I hope none of the viewers of this video actually follow these instructions
For anyone concerned about this - To run a full read/write cache you need two NVMe disks working in a mirror pair for fault tolerance (as stated in the video). Stating that running TLC SSDs is "a disaster waiting to happen" ignores the required added protection of the pair of them for the sole purpose of protecting the write cache functionality. All disks die. SLC, MLC, and TLC disks and running a single disk for a write cache is never a good idea. The Samsung 980 NVMe has a 5-year warranty and is guaranteed for 600TB worth of writes so we feel they make a perfect fit for this role. Couple this with the fact that the instant the mirror faults, Synology instantly begins writing through (bypassing the cache) and no longer uses the cache until the issue is resolved. Hope this helps!
LMAO 8GB RAM max... Synology are such jokers.
this video is very poor. Whilst the author has gone to some effort on setting up the lag. They have failed to optimise the networking. Users should google 'tuning 10gb' and use this as the basis for configuring the network options on the synology.
At a very minimum you need to configure MTU of 9000 on both ends, transmission queue size, rx/tx checksums/offloading, scatter and gatter, large receive offload, and kernel rmem/wmem MAX. On a 4port lag on my older synology box (DS1815), i can get throughput to over 400MB/sec read, 300mb/sec write.
On my newer box with 10GBE i can get over 800MB/sec read and 300/sec write.
And they don't have SSD cache..
With all due respect to the author. this video should be deleted.
It's great that you're aware of MTU size and jumbo packets. Those are valuable settings for a storage network where everything connected is configured the same. However, the DS920+ is not 10G. It's 1G. Also, configuring systems to 9000 MTU in a network with mixed MTUs will cause performance issues when clients with a default MTU (1500) attempt to communicate with a server configured for jumbo packets. Each packet sent will have to be retransmitted because the 'small side' can't consume a packet that large, leading to packet fragmentation and retransmission. A fragment and retransmit here or there isn't an issue for low throughput communications as a few packets here and there won't amount to much. However, for a storage system serving various clients on a network, unless you intend to reconfigure every client connected to run with jumbo frames manually, you're gonna have a bad time. This also assumes that whatever 1G-connected clients you have can support a full 9000 MTU frame, as support for jumbo is highly dependent on the NIC and its drivers.
Now let's talk about LAGs. Synology supports various means of creating bonds. Adaptive load balancing, which is not a LAG, 802.3ad for dynamic load balancing, Balance XOR for draft v1 802.3ad, both of which are standards, and active/standby, which is not a LAG. IEEE 802.3ad does not increase single-stream data transfers. It provides load balancing of multiple streams of data over multiple physical links to increase overall throughput, but individual data transfers are not necessarily faster. Our SMB testing was done between the DS920+ and a standard Windows 10 client. This is a single-stream transfer. We can argue all day on what file transfer protocols are better, but SMB, as configured, is a single stream file transfer protocol, and LAGs do not increase the throughput of a single stream protocol.
@@2GuysTek Thanks for the follow up. For clarity. 10BGE tuning is not about specifically 10GBE, it could easily be called 2.5 GBE tuning, 25GBE tuning 100GBE tuning. The Linux kernel foundation released the paper called "10GBE tuning", these are instructions to go about increasing the speed.
The Linux kernel is not optimised out of the box for high transfer rates.
The kernel network stack has many things to do and is optimised for the basic use case you are referencing. As such, many kernel bypass/offload technologies exist such as VVP, DPDK, XDP to bypass these restrictions. These technologies allow for 400GB/Sec and higher from standard commercial off the shelf (COTS) hardware. (telecoms world)
If the users here, are setting up LAGS, and buying cache drives, it seems to reason they want higher transfer rates. They will do whatever they can to get there.
They are not going to buying Lamborghinis to drive them at 30km/hr.
Please consider doing a follow up video.
@@davidoneill4718 hey, thank you for starting this discussion. Do you happen to have any resources for doing this configuration?