Looking for a new NAS and down to ds918+ or DS418PLAY.
Will run PMS with about 900 local movies and about 500 more for a friend’s shared account hosting from his machine. About 1.5TB locally. Also want to use it to hose Hyper-V v-disks and it will also be a place for my local image backups to write to as well and will have some cloud storage backup integration as well.
Questions:
DS918+ or DS418PLAY (either one I would get I would immediately max out the ram capacity to its maximum allowable amount.
Most likely a RAID 5 or SSH with a 3-disk array. Would 5400 RPM WD RED be sufficient or should I be looking at 7200 RPM WD RED PRO’s? Would 5400’s with the SSD NVME for cache be just as good as just the 7200 RPM? I currently have 2 5400 wd red’s I would like to re-purpose if it makes sense to save a few bucks and then I could just get one more 5400 red and get 6TB and expand with another later if possible. If not, no big deal and I’ll go with all 7200’s. I don’t want to re-purpose if my performance is going to be horrible but if adequate, would be nice to use some of what I already have on hand.
Wait, so the DS918+ will handle 16gb of memory? I thought it was only 8.
Specs on DS918+ on Synology’s site states maximum is 8gb (4X2).
Any opinions on my dilemma on the speed drives to use and if ssd cache will help with 5400 rpm drives in raid 5 or is it better to go 7200rpm all the way across and not worry about ssd cache? I’ll be doing some Hyper-V vm’s as well; mostly for testing purposes and documents and desktop redirects to the Synology as well.
Yes, We know they say 8GB max (2x 4GB) because they don’t sell 8GB sticks. 4GB is more universal for them.
The J3455 will address all 16.
The choice is yours. I would recommend you do purchase a matched pair (either another 4 from Synology or 2x 4GB /8GB from somewhere else). Matched pairs have an added hardware performance in memory access speed. It’s small but helps.
With Hyper-V and several users, remote access and cloud sync…
I’d get 16GB of RAM because of your virtual machines and because why not.
I’d get 2x 250GB M.2 SSD, one for read and one for write cache.
Do I know when it will use them? Nope, but they can’t make it worse.
For drives, I like the 5400 for low heat and mixing with the 7200rpm
is good for testing. The RAID array and cache should smooth out the
access times.
If I could manage the heat and cost, I’d use identical
7200 rpm drives bought at the same time plus one spare that’s not
installed. The spare is for if a drive fails. When drives fail, it’s almost never
because of an actual head crash. It’s not 1987 anymore. It’s the circuit
board that will fail, and you’ll have an exact board ready to use from your spare.
Your downtime is how long it takes you to remove 4 screws and a cable.
I think the most noticeable thing would be to run it without the SSD cache
and compare that to when you put it back in, due to your usage pattern.
Oh, I always max out the memory in anything I have. Memory is cheap enough anymore it’s a no-brainer.
Thanks for the input on the SSD cache.
Yes, hot spares are helpful; however I run a lot of RAID 5’s in business servers and we rarely have hot spares set up and it has been extremely rare that 2 drives in a RAID 5 Array fail at the same time. Plus, it will all be backed up; RAID is not a backup system anyway :).
I was pretty much trying to determine if 5400 rpm drives WITH SSD cache would fair better speed and i/o wise as 7200 without SSD cache. Curious if the SSD cache helped the slow 5400 rpm drives much.
Normally, I would just get a pair of 7200 rpm drives, not even think about cache, and put them in a RAID1. But I have two 5400 rpm Wed Red’s from some WDMyCloud’s but not sure if they are worth repurposing.
Ah, gotcha. I’m not concerned about that. I’d rather have a new drive than a 2 year old hot spare personally. With a raid 5 you can lose a drive and you’re still up and running, just degraded.
Fyi:. These aren’t hybrid drives, they are wd red drives but not 7200 rpm. Just trying to determine if the slower spindle speeds with the SSD cache will be adequate bit I may have to do some additional research on that in regards to v-disks. Thanks.
I was considering all SSD bit the not sure it’s worth the decreased life span.
Just as an FYI - I’m using a 418Play for just Plex and light file sharing, and the stock 2GB is doing just fine. RAM usage is about 78% on an average day. I’ve got 8GB of Crucial RAM to swap in if needs be, but I’m leery about doing so as it voids the warranty and, as I say, so far I’ve not needed to.
