Hello in this video I'm going to talk about installing some
SSDs on a Synology
DS918+ NAS, and this is my latest video in a series on the Synology NAS and
I'll put a link in the description to my playlist there and
So I've I did a setup of it. I've installed
You know hard drives. I did a memory upgrade in it so now the next step. I'm going to put in
some SSDs for cache so
Right now. I'm in the interface. I want to show you
Where you can access that and interface if you go to the storage manager in?
The interface and you click on SSD cache
Down here at the bottom
it'll say no available SSDs to create caches, and then you can click on this SSD cache advisor and
You can hit next down here at the bottom, and it'll say it's going to take a lot of calculate you hit yes, and
This will run and it will tell you how big to make your cache, but on this system
It says here. No SSD. Cache is created on volume 1 however the memory on your disk station is full
So it is not possible to create SSD caches, so I found a bug and I've seen this documented online
I
upgraded this NAS to 16 gigabytes of RAM and
When you do that this
Cache advisor doesn't seem to work correctly
It says you have your RAM is full, and I don't know why I did test. I took out one of my
memory chips
so I only had 8 gigabyte of RAM and I ran this and it said it recommended 209 gigabytes of cache, so
Keep that in mind if you did the upgrade to 16 gigabytes that this may not work properly so
I'll close that down and
The first step is to shut down the NAS and I'll go up to my little profile icon here, and I'll just say shut down
and do I want to shut down yes and
the Diskstation will beep and lights will go off and then I'll
Meet you at my workbench, and we'll swap this out, okay, so I'm at my workbench. I have the
DS918+ here and the drive I'm putting in are the
Samsung
M.2 NVMe SSD it's the 960 Evo
These I'll put a link in the description
To these on Amazon, and it's my Amazon affiliate account, and if this video helps you out
I'd appreciate if you'd use that link it. Helps me out a little bit doesn't cost you anything extra, and it kind of offsets the
My effort for making these videos
so
to put these in the system, what we'll do is we'll turn it over and
We'll pop these tabs off here
Okay, and these are where the two drives. Go. I'll open the
box here
So these things are just super super tiny
So I'm putting these in I'll explain a little bit about how this cache works
it looks like there's a
Instruction booklet here if you put in one
Of these
chips
You can do read caching on the system if you put two in
You can do write caching also
so
Stick that in press it down and it clips it through the second one
There we go
And I'll replace the covers here
And that's all ready to go, I'll go plug this back in and we'll get back on the interface and configure it okay
I have the machine all plugged in I'm back to the interface
Okay, so we have the dual SSDs installed. I'm back in the interface now and
Before I setup caching. I want to do a couple tests
I don't know if these tests will show much because it could take a while for the cache to be initiated
but what I've done is I've created a about a 500 megabyte random file using this command and
I'm going to copy it to the server, and I'm going to type in time which will time it and
then copy and then the name of the file and
then I'll put the share on there and
This will copy it to the share and tell us how long it will take
Ok so that said
7.9 Seconds and
I'm going to run this again and
I'm probably cutting the video or I'm copying it so you have to wait through the 8 seconds
Ok so it seems to be take I'm gonna bout seven point nine to
eight point two eight point four seconds
So now I'll try another test and I'll copy it from the server
to
My local directory
Ok so it looks like we're getting 7.2 seconds 7.5 Seconds. There's a couple runs there. I'll set this aside. We'll set up the
Cache and will rerun that test and see if there's any difference and like I say it'll be hard to tell
until we get it done if it's going to make much of a difference but
So to set the cache we log into our DiskStation manager
Here, and then we want to go to Storage Manager you you may need to go up here to get to it
I have added it to my desktop, so I'll open up Storage Manager
And then I'll go down here to SSD cache
and I'll hit create and
It'll say. We can create readwrite. Cache or read-only and I want to do read right cash. I'll hit next
I'll choose my two SSDs
I'll hit next
I
Want raid one and raid one if you're not familiar with it that's mirroring, so we'll read and write everything to both drives
So you know the drives will mirror each other
and
I will choose the max size here
We can say skip sequential i/o and it says read and write sequential data directly from
Two drives to improve speed and performance as well as to increase the lifespan of SSDs. Please enable this function if you are using backup
applications
so this
You know for streaming. I think at this we're streaming like a movie from the box
It will skip the SSDs because when you stream a movie you're not going to want to read that back again
You're only going to read it once
Now as far as the lifespan of SSDs these SSDs have such a long life on them
I don't know that it would make a big difference in the
You know small office home office
application so
It's telling us. It's going to remove the data from the SSDs. I'll say ok. I'll hit OK here and
Now it is mounting the cache and creating the cache. I don't know if we can open this yet, we can ok
so we can watch here as it creates the
SSD cache
Ok the cache is created, so it says SSD cache one normal one thing. I want to mention here is that?
we put in two
SSD cards into the NAS and the as far as I know the only thing you can use them for is SSD cache you
can't create a volume with those I
Tried it myself and could not
Do it and I searched online it doesn't appear that you can take that SSD the
M.2 cards and make just a volume with it you can do that with regular
SATA SSDs, so so we have our cache here, we'll go back into our terminal
So I have read and write here
Copy my command over and we'll just do some tests and see if we get
anything different on
the
writes and reads
I should mention that I'm on I have an SSD in this Mac I'm using and I'm connecting to the
NAS through a switch on a gigabit network so
Looks like we had a slight increase there. I'll run this a couple more times
Okay, so if we look here we
had
seven point nine seconds before and after the cache then on the second time we did it we had eight point two seconds on the
before and after the cache
and then we had eight point four seconds and
Seven point five and then seven point nine and seven point two so it does look like it's slightly faster
Now it's hard to say if that's due to the cache or some other thing on the system, so let's try some read
Test here and see what we get
Okay so our read
Tests show some interesting numbers here the first time we did a read from this
It was slightly faster, and then the second two times. It was a
little bit slower than before the cache, so it's hard to say if the cache is
Slowing it down or not I did
I have tried this cache
prior and
It was running for a couple days and this one percent here went up to 35% so
According to the system it was using cash
But you know will it speed up your NAS a lot
You know with just these simple file tests
It's not showing that it's going to speed it up a lot, so I will be running virtual machines on this
Disk station and
That will likely utilize the SSD cache quite a bit so
You know that's something to take into account
But you know I'm not going to make a decision for any watching this as to if they should put cache in theirs or not
this super simple test doesn't show a lot and I've done tests like this in the past using a
black Blackmagic
speed test and
It has kind of some similar results as this command line test. I'm running so
If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments if you like this video
please click like I'll put a link down below to
my playlist with other Synology
Videos and such so and if you haven't subscribed to my channel I would love if you do that so thanks for watching bye