Installing 2x NVMe SSD Cache + Speed Test (they’re are FAST) on Synology DS1621+ (10GbE Test)

all right how's it going y'all today we're going to be talking about how to install m.2 nvme ssds in a synology ds-1621 plus and this is only allowed to be used as an ssd cache you cannot stick these two in here and create them as their own separate all ssd super fast volume on synology nas unfortunately they have locked you out of that i am not sure why it seems like it would have been a great thing to have added but they purposely that made that not possible so there are a ton of benefits to super fast nvme ssds for caching and they mostly come about when you're having a lot of iops basically when a lot of people are trying to read from the drive all the same time having a lot of it stored on ssd cache can make everything so much faster this is because while hard drives can have really fast sequential speeds especially with large raids like this having individual files that they have to read means the disk has to rotate around and get to wherever that file is stored and that is a mechanical action that is actually really slow compared to the speed of an ssd the access time for an ssd can be so much faster than it is for a hard drive and so when you're having a ton of people trying to get a bunch of different files off of a off of a nas it pays dividends to have an ssd cache basically storing the most commonly used files and handing them out without having to ask the disks for them and so it's really hard to test without actually having a bunch of people i've done videos in this before and something like final cut pro with a single user actually made my entire experience so much easier because when you scrub through a timeline you're doing a ton of random reads and so first off let's go ahead and do a quick disclaimer synology sent me all the things on this table for free i do have to send them back they had no input into this video though they didn't say hey do a video on ssd caching this is all my opinions synology is just nice enough to send me these things now and so i can really start testing them so one of the things note you do not need to buy the synology branded ones though you should check out the compatibility list m.2 does not mean nvme specifically with western digital's m.2 drives they're actually sata drives not nvme drives therefore they will not work in synology nas i know a lot of people have made that error so go ahead and make sure to check the compatibility list and i'll go through and do some research and put my recommendations and amazon affiliate links down below but i'm going to be installing two synology ones that are 400 gigabytes each and i'm going to set this up as a read only cache in raid 0 so we're going to get some really fast performance that's one thing you know i've got a dual 10 gig sfp plus card in this and so if i just had the drives there's no way i would be able to saturate however nvme drives are so fast that i should be able to saturate it with just two of these because one of them alone can give about 1.5 to 2 gigabytes per second generally and so that's way fast enough to saturate two 10 gigabit connection as long as what you have is in that cache and so one of the things note synology has made this a totally tool-less installation but you need to make sure the sizes of your nvme drives are correct a lot of computers will allow you to use multiple sizes but you can only use the 2280 length nvme drives because it's actually a tool-less installation in here all right and so now let's go ahead and set it up i'm going to go ahead and open these guys up on the little ssd all right and so installing these drives is actually really easy but it's kind of weird the first time you do it so what you're actually going to want to do is remove at least probably the first three bays you can remove more it'll probably make it easier i'll just remove all of them and if you look in right here you can see there are two m.2 slots in there and so all you do is basically slot them in there and so m.2 drives only go in one specific way so look for the hole here and the nub there and line those two up to make sure you know where it is it's actually backwards the way i thought it would be the logo actually goes inside in this case for synology's version and you simply slot them in there i don't think i'm going to be able to show this in a video at all but basically slot them down and then push them in and they should get locked into place yeah there's just no way i can really show this easily i'll see you might see some nice b-roll but probably not and that's it you basically just slot them in there and you are good to go it is actually incredibly easy a totally tool-less installation so now i'm going to go ahead and put some drives in this thing and we're going to go ahead and boot it up all right so now let's hop into dsm and now we're gonna go ahead and set up the ssd cache i'm gonna be doing this in dsm six that'll probably do another video in dsm seven now that i have this much more powerful hardware and really do a cross comparison between the two all right and so before we actually go through and set up the ssd cache i want to go through and actually test out and see what the sequential read performance is beforehand and then after this is because this is a 10kb connection and i've only got three mechanical hard drives in here and so we are only getting about 600 megabytes per second read because that hard drive limitation we just do not have enough drives they are in red zero but that's just for testing so what i want to do is i want to see because these nvme drives are so fast if we're able to saturate a 10 gigabit connection even though we do not have enough spinning discs for this generally when you're using a ssd cache it's not actually about saturating a faster connection than what your hard drives can do when you set up a raid they just keep adding together and you get really fast performance in sequential reads and writes but where it really slows down with hard drives is random read writes which happens a lot when you've got multiple users trying to connect to nas or if you're doing something video editing and so really that's where ssds have their bread and butter is they have incredibly low latency because they do not rely on spinning disks instead they can access any part of the disk almost as fast as any other part of the disk which is absolutely a huge speed increase compared to a spinning hard drive that can read things very fast sequentially generally but takes forever if it's got to go to a different section of the disk because the head actually has to spin and wait to get to the data and so for a while you really only want an ssd cache if you were going to be doing a lot of random read writes but now with nvme drives they are so fast that they're actually able to do everything kind of by themselves they are incredibly fast and read and write and so it actually does not matter and so just one fast nvme drive if everything goes well basically has the read speed of like 10 conventional drives all in a raid 0 configuration and so because of that you can actually use nvme drives as entire main media because very few of them can be so much faster than the spinning discs behind them and basically the spinning discs are just in charge of long term storage and so that's what i really want to test out here if you're doing this with two and a half inch ssds it's probably not worth it but if you're going nvme drives it might be worth it so we're going to go ahead and test that out here all right so the first thing we want to do is basically i've mounted this over smb and this is all over 10 gigabit and i want to transfer this how to protect your nas this is the full prores file it's 80 gigs from the nas to my local drive and this is just transferring off of three of the new eight terabyte synology drives and so they're in a raid zero configuration but we're gonna go ahead and do a copy and i'm gonna start a timer as soon as i drop it one two three and so we'll go ahead and see how long it takes to transfer and so if we look right here we're getting about 76 650 700 megabytes in well actually probably right around 700. that's pretty good considering how these are three drives so that's what like 230 megabytes per second read which is really close to their advertised speed we'll go ahead and average out across the entire thing to really see what it was but honestly it's a lot faster than i thought it was and we've clearly exceeded anything that the ram buffer would be able to do all right and so just transferred in two minutes and eight seconds okay so that is our baseline we do some quick math here just a guesstimation what was that a 81.6 gigabyte file and that's what two so that was about 637 and i'll multiply that by a thousand two so that was about 637 megabytes per second which is honestly pretty good considering how that's three spinning disks over an s b transfer and so now what we want to do is we want to test up the setup and see what happens when we set up a ssd cache for this so now we're going to go ahead and go into dsm and we're going to go ahead and check it out and so basically from dsm it's really easy to set up an ssd cache i've already done it before and i've got a video on that i'll link leave a link in the description but we're just going to go into storage manager and because this is dsm 6 when we set this up it's going to actually nuke everything out and we're just going to create a read only cache we'll set up in a raid 0 configuration and so it's basically about to unmount everything and kind of redo everything but hopefully that process should not take too long here all right and so now it actually did not take that long our sd cache is up and it is on ssd cache for storage pool one it's the only option but we should have a pre or sorry volume one it's the only option and so now we should be able to go ahead and do a baseline test again this one actually might be slower than the original test because what's happening is it's actually got to send the data to two different places now and that's actually why setting up an ssd cache when you don't need it is a bad thing sometimes because now it has to send the data both to the ssd cache and to my computer and so for first time cold data can actually be slightly slower with an ssd cache because that overhead and so we're going to go ahead and try that transfer again all right and so i did forget to do one thing which was incredibly crucial for this which was i forgot to configure the ssd cache because right now by default the ssd cache is configured as an ssd cache which is basically store the random bits of information but don't store sequential i o and this is good for two things for most people because if you're using two and a half inch sata drives this is going to probably give you the best performance because if you stored sequential i o in here it would actually run slower than your raid probably but with these nvme drives what we want to test is to see if it's all sequential if we can really saturate a 10 gigabit connection whereas we would not be able to without them and the other reason is this is actually to save the write cycles of the ssds ssds are not like spinning disks they actually have a basically preset amount of times that the thing can be written to before it just cannot be written to anymore and you cannot read the data off of it anymore and so the more you write to an ssd the shorter its lifespan gets now for the vast majority of people this is going to be long enough where the drive will probably be obsolete or something else will have broken or something like that but if you're talking about an ssd cache like this it could get overwritten five times a day if you're in an office where a lot of people are hitting the nas and so by sq by skipping the sequential i o you can drastically reduce the amount of writes to the drive and hopefully get about the same performance maybe even a little bit better because it'll only be caching the files that are randomly accessed but for this video we are a single client so we want to configure it to not skip the sequential i o and so unfortunately i have to rerun that test and so now that we've done that basically all the data should be written directly to this drive and so now i'm going to go ahead and do this test again and it started and so i should note in this real quick so before i did that pre-test i actually did a pre-pre-test to basically load the file in the ram the exact same way so before i started the video i actually copied this exact file to this exact folder one time before starting the video that way that our pre baseline was accurate basically there could have been a situation where if this had a lot of ram a lot of the file was just stored in ram and so it would have been faster but it's an 80 gigabyte file which is far larger than the size of the ram and so that really should not come into play too much but i still did that just to be i don't know proper testing etiquette and so now we're going to see the performance degradation hopefully and how long this takes to transfer because it's got to be right into those two different places it's got to be sending the data to us and also right into these nvme drives all right and so that occurred in two minutes and 16 seconds which is about eight seconds longer than our baseline test and so that's pretty much what we expected the performance is degraded because it has to be writing not only sending the data us but also writing to the disks and so that is what is slowing it down and why if you've got slow ssds and you're only ever reading random files in full sequence from the nas it's probably not a good idea to use an ssd cache because the first time you transfer a file in a long time you're going to have slightly slower sequential performance but now that data should be hot and so we're going to go back into dsm and check out this ssd cache and so we should see that now we've got 76 huh didn't transfer the whole thing in there for some reason but we've got a fair amount of data in the ssd cache so hopefully we should be able to saturate this 10 gigabit connection so now we're going to go ahead and delete it and we're going to run this performance baseline one more time all right i've got my reset and it's resetted and go oh yeah look right there 1.03 gigabytes per second so we are wow we are going very fast we are clearly in the nvme space and it is flying through this and it is actually surprisingly sustained so you can see right off about this test is going to go a lot better because these nvme drives are so fast that reading off of them is butter this is essentially saturating a 10 gigabit connection realistically with smb 1.1 is basically the highest number i've really seen between a mac and a linux system over smb and it is essentially at that this entire time just super stable very impressed yeah that's a lot faster that occurred in a minute and 21 seconds compared to the two minutes and eight seconds for the original test and so let's just go ahead and do some quick math real quick and see how fast that transfer was on average yeah so we averaged out at one gigabyte per second because that was in the ultra fast nvme cache and so that is what like roughly 80 faster performance because that data was in the nvme cache and i'm actually really excited i'm going to try to see if i can saturate two 10 gigabit connections with link irrigation and synology nas on this but that's going to be a very different video for this because i might have to try some different things but this is a case where because nvme drives are so fast it makes it so that even if you've got a pretty large rate of drives having the data in the nvme cache especially if you've got two of them like this it's just going to be so much faster if i had to guess to beat these two nvme drives in sequential performance if the data is in there you would probably need about 16 to 20 spinning disks all if they were running optimized so that is the reason why nvme is a completely different beast than sata because that interface is so fast and the drives can be incredibly fast all right well i think that's going to be it for this test hope this was interesting i'm blown away by how fast nvme drives are this actually my first experience with nvme drives and they're really fast if i did this with a sata ssd cache i would probably be getting maybe 500 maybe maybe i could get to 600 or 700 just because that interface is a lot slower but with two of these just blew right through it i was very impressed by them we'll go ahead and put any other tutorials you'd like to see me make in the comments below and have a good one [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: SpaceRex

Views: 20,469

Keywords:

Id: N0U7dOLjCY8

Length: 17min 51sec (1071 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/mightyt2000]

Another great SpaceRex video tutorial! 👍🏻👍🏻

[u/AKMtnr]

You truly a helpful, clear-headed, objective voice in the world of NAS videos. I only wish there were 1,000 more where you came from!

[u/man1uu2737]

What's the maximum amount SSD's you can put in there? You used 2x 400GB but can I use 2x 500GB?

I'm thinking of putting in 2x "SAMSUNG 970 PRO SSD 512GB NVMe M.2 MZ-V7P512BW"

[u/Pirate2012]

Very Hard to test this but would love to see Speed Test with two good SSD Cache vs 32GB (or more) of RAM

[u/chaplin2]

Can NVMe SSD (or data cashed there) be encrypted?

[u/SeriousMcDougal]

Age old question: will an SSD cache improve Plex performance? At Max I have 6 users watching it any given time.

[u/DirtNomad]

Anyone compare the performance or this vs something like the truenas mini?

[u/Pirate2012]

TEST idea : Speed Test compare from ENCRYPTED shared Folder, then copy from non Encrypted Shared folder.

Doing the usual : 1 huge file, 1000 small files, mix of file sizes

I've been finding with my RS18017 and Enterprise SATA SSD in F1 RAID, how significant the speed drop is when Encrypted Shared Folder is used.