Synology DS920+ to the max - How much does maxing out RAM and caching make a difference?

recently we made a video on the synology ds920 plus nas check that video out if you haven't seen it yet you loved the review but questions were asked about what this little unit could do completely maxed out so let's do it after the release of our ds920 plus review one of our viewers asked us why we didn't test the nas fully maxed out and it got us thinking how much better would the ds920 plus be if we had added in dedicated read and write cache nvme disks upgraded the ram date gigabytes and bonded the network interfaces together would we unleash an entirely new beast or just see marginal improvement well we aim to find out first stop for us was getting a few nvme ssds to install in the unit for cache disks we landed on two 500 gigabyte samsung evo 980 nvme discs capable of read speeds up to 3 500 megabytes a second and write speeds up to 3 000 megabytes a second fast yes but equally important affordable at 70 each on amazon let's get the discs installed like we showed in the last video the nvme slots on the ds920 plus are super accessible just by popping off two doors on the bottom of the unit and installing both disks quick and easy [Music] hmm now let's get to the ram upgrade back to the amazons where we picked up a single stick of 4 gigabytes of ddr4 2666 ram 8 gigabytes is the maximum officially supported quantity of ram the unit will accept we've read others online have been successful in installing more than this but we're going to do what synology says here like the installation of the nvme disks installing the ram is quick and easy we'll remove the disks to expose the sodium slot on the inside right side stick in the ram and put the discs back in boom just that simple okay now that all that hardware is installed let's go back to the dsm check to see if it's healthy and set up our new ssds we'll also touch on setting up a bond on the two network interfaces once we're logged into dsm let's pop over to the control panel app and open info center you can see that the unit now has eight gigabytes of ram which means our four additional gigabytes of ram we just installed is fully functional awesome let's head over to storage manager and set up the ssd cache now we'll click on ssd cache and currently we see no ssd caches set up in the system we'll click on create at the top leave the read write radio button checked and click next okay here we can see the two samsung nvmes we just installed a bit ago we're going to select both nvmes to be part of the read write cache and hit next synology really wants you to know that they haven't tested these ssds for compatibility and encourage us to go check out their compatibility list if you're concerned about what drives to choose head over there and check first however i'm not concerned about data loss with the samsung nvme disks we chose now we need to choose which raid type we'll be setting up our cache disks in and we really only have one option here because we only have two nvme disks so we'll leave it raid one and click next caching operations take system memory and for those who haven't upgraded the ram this is an opportunity to control the amount of ssd caching you want to set up and it's ram impact to your system we're gonna fully utilize the entire nvme disks we installed so we'll leave it as is and because we've upgraded our ram and the nas we can easily assume the ram cost of 189 megabytes one last stop synology wants you to know that automatic protection mechanism will be enabled on the cache and that any existing data on the nvmes will be wiped when the raid1 volume is prepared we'll click the checkbox and hit ok and now we'll wait for the cache to be built dsm will dismount our volume and then remount it when it builds the cache disk and once it's complete we'll see our cache alright let's take a look at our bonded network setup we'll head back over to the control panel and click on network we've already set up the bond so we'll give you an overview here let's click on the network interface tab at the top and you'll see bond one which is our bonded connection from the drop down you can see we've bonded the two network interfaces on the ds 920 plus and together they equal 2 000 megabits per second or 2 gigabits there are many ways to configure a bond based on your needs and your network switches capabilities we've configured our bond to be an ieee 802.3 ad dynamic link aggregation also known as an lacp trunk this aggregates the bandwidth from both connections into a single connection providing in theory all of the bandwidth of the connected interfaces so in our case that means two gigabits of throughput now to use an lacp trunk you must have a switch that supports it so before we go in attempt to set this up you need to understand what the capabilities of your network switch are and if you can support it this is why we're not going into detail about how to set up an lcp trunk with this nas because everyone's network gear is different that being said there are other options for creating a bond as well some like the adaptive load balancing option do not require a managed switch but keep in mind you will not see aggregated performance increases with alb or active standby bonds our ds920 plus is connected to ubiquiti usw pro 24 managed switch and as you can see here we have aggregated the two ports on the switch side in an licp trunk with the nas let's get to testing now once again we'll be using windows file sharing to test the performance of our souped up ds920 plus using crystal diskmark the same way we did in our first video testing its performance out of the box let's get to those results and whoo boy do we have some results to unpack this ladies and gentlemen is an eye chart so i'll cut straight to the chase here having added read and write caches doubled the amount of ram and create an lacp trunk connection made essentially no difference to the performance of the nas there were small performance differences specifically during random read and write tests where having the super fast mdm cache made a difference but nothing mind blowing the simple truth here is that in this testing where one host is accessing the nas directly you won't see any better performance that's not to say that you won't see better performance in a multi-computer environment but as the results show with a single computer accessing the nas it makes little difference but what you say about the bond well i'm so glad you asked see there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding as to what a bonded lacp trunk does for a host it's not uncommon for people to assume that if you bond two one gigabit network connections together and create a resultant two gigabit network connection that they should be able to send double the amount of data down that pipe and unfortunately that's just not how any of this works when you create an lacp trunk with multiple interfaces you're creating a single logical channel between your device in our case the nas and the network switch copying data between your pc and that nas is a single session and will only send the data over a single connection on the trunk and won't evenly split it between the two connections when you copy a file you're opening a single session to the remote host now if you start copying a second third or fourth file from different pcs on the network the switch knows about your existing session and that the other sessions are different so it sends that data across the bonded network connections equally in aggregate you get more bandwidth where does that leave us well basically throwing more hardware into the little nast didn't change it into a different beast at least not in this use case while this might be disappointing for some i want to remind you that the network performance of the ds920 plus even without all the extras is still impressive for its one gigabit connectivity and it's likely that adding additional ram and caching would help more with apps like plex and other packages you install on the nas all that being said though however it is good to know that you don't need to throw even more money into the nas once you buy it and fill it with drives to get great performance thanks for watching this video we would love to know what you think so get down those comments and tell us tell us more what you'd like to see us test with this nas we would love to hear from you if this is the first time you've seen us subscribe like right now if you like what we do here and want to be all social follow us on twitter and instagram and lastly get on our discord it's a great growing community of people who love tech and we'd be happy to have you thank you for watching and we will see you again soon [Music] i

Channel: 2GuysTek

Views: 97,353

Keywords: ds920+ nas, how to set up a synology nas, network attached storage, synology diskstation, synology ds920+, Does adding Cache drives make a difference for Synology, how to install NVMe disks Synology, How does LACP bonding work, Does bonding network connections double bandwidth, bonding Synology DS920+, How to upgrade RAM in DS920+, How to setup cache in Synology DS920+, synology nvme ssd cache, synology nas, synology performance test, synology ssd cache performance test

Id: eHwA2GKpUkg

Length: 8min 29sec (509 seconds)

Published: Fri May 21 2021