I have a 412+ right now that mostly gets used for Plex on our internal network. Considering buying a 918+ to upgrade and an NVME drive. Would I benefit more from performance by setting up the NVME drive as just another volume where all my packages are installed on (including plex), or as an SSD cache?
That ain’t possible. The NVME drive in that model is being used just for caching (reading and with a second drive for writing) only.
Oh really? Bummer. Guess I’d have to just do a regular SSD then in a regular bay. Would I see much performance improvement with Plex for that do you think?
Alternatively, does having an SSD cache help Plex performance in any way?
If you’re going to invest in a SSD, might I suggest you first consider upgrading to a model which supports hardware transcoding?
The DS412+ is a) 5 years old b) uses an Atom CPU which does not have HW transcoding capability b) is a dual core CPU
As comparison, I suggest you look at the DS418+ variants with the new J3355 and J3455 CPUs.
@ChuckPA said:
If you’re going to invest in a SSD, might I suggest you first consider upgrading to a model which supports hardware transcoding?The DS412+ is a) 5 years old b) uses an Atom CPU which does not have HW transcoding capability b) is a dual core CPU
As comparison, I suggest you look at the DS418+ variants with the new J3355 and J3455 CPUs.
Well, my post mentioned I’m upgrading to the DS918+
Even better. I apologize for missing the DS918+
No problem. My main question is about the SSD cache - would Plex benefit from that at all (not in streaming, but possibly in loading time of assets like movie thumbnails etc)?
Right now the 412+ is pretty slow loading these things with the plex media player on my HTPC so I’m hoping to also improve that performance.
The DS918+ with a regular EVO SSD will really help, Remember to take into account the CPU and i/o bus speed of the processor.
The EVO can R/W at 500+ MB/sec. On a dedicated controller, that’s fast. Especially when compared to the aggregated 600 MB (maximum, 300 typical) you get from a Syno RAID array
Right, but I don’t think I’ll have the option to do a dedicated SSD for package installs as its own volume, as I currently need to use all 4 bays for my data and their 5 bay options don’t have hardware transcoding (just intel atom cpus). So I was considering grabbing an m.2 NVME 500GB 960 EVO SSD to use for cache with that new 918+ since it has a slot for that, hoping that would improve Plex performance.
The question to resolve then from Synology is simple:
“Can you create a JBOD, single device, volume on a M.2 SSD?”
If you can do this (my DS1815+ cannot), my installer will let you install Plex on any Volume DSM shows you which will include your SSD ‘volume’. Doing this will give you better than any cache because the data itself will reside on SSD natively.
Ok, thanks, guess I’ll see what’s possible when it comes in.
