Synology M.2 NVMe SSD Pools Now Supported!

foreign [Music] hey guys we're in the storage view lab and taking a look at synology's latest four bay Nas this is the ds923 plus and while we're not done with our full review on this system there is one thing that's fundamentally different and exciting about the 923 plus and that is Synology has added the ability to use the m.2 ssds those little guys that are tucked away Synology has added the ability to use the ssds and the 923 plus as a flash volume now if you're a Synology user historically then you know that these Bays have been available either on the bottom or on the inside or via Edge card and it gives you the ability to use nvme m.2 ssds as a cache now they can be used as a volume and that really makes the game interesting it's one of the things we've railed on Synology over the years for being behind the curve on by not letting their users have more advanced functionality and control over the ssds we'd like to see tiering as an option and now we get to see volumes as an option but the trick is a couple different things first of all this is only available on the ds923 plus it's just the most recent unit and it kind of snuck into this build which is one thing but the big question of course is what happens next and will my older unit get it we'll come to that at the end the other thing is drive support Synology is historically been getting Tighter and Tighter about where they let you use third-party drives that is any hard drives or Flash not branded by Synology we're about to walk through that as well so we'll get into that but the bottom line is that Synology is making strides and by enabling m.2 nvme SSD volumes it lets us have a high performance storage option in systems like this that have in systems like this that have been primarily designed for hard drive capacity this is especially interesting in this model because we've added the 10 gig Nick on the back here with the flash volume on board that lets applications running natively on the Synology take advantage of that flash in new and exciting ways let's take a look in the GUI to see how the provisioning works Kevin will walk us through that and then we'll get back to some of those key questions and answers about system support and SSD support so here we are in the new ds923 Plus and the cool thing that this model can do is start interacting with the m.2 ssds for storage pools before it'd be limited to caching only and with that it would be create an SSD cache mount on the volume that you want to mount on and you select you can do read only or read write cache clear the data and you could select the two ssds that way but it'd be cash only would be additive to the storage space on the uh on the storage system with the ds923 plus though you can create a storage pool using those m.2 ssds so this is the same interface you'd use for creating a hard drive pool for example but now you can select mbat twos the drive check and erases the drives it's a common warning just kind of a heads up in the case of your doing something with drives you shouldn't but you get the storage pool now and you can create a volume on top of it and this would be a nice all flash volume free to use internal to the system but very cool new feature that you can do on just this model they haven't added this to any of their other prior models yet all right so Kevin took us through how this works in the first question that we probably should have started out by addressing but we've waited till the end is do other ssds work you can see we've put a couple WD Reds in here and no they don't and what happens is when you go through the interface it says drives aren't supported can't perform this action so while we can use these as a cache Synology is deemed them not good enough to be an SSD volume so herein lies the rub synology's drives only go up to 400 gig each and while we appreciate and applaud that they're adding this feature to the 923 plus and presumably more systems as they're released down the road it still leaves a very small volume and while they've given us this feature it's only just barely we also don't know how they're going to handle this rolling forward the big question we received is will they retroactively support this capability on older units our guess is probably not I think this is going to be a 923 plus engagement kind of rollout and again you're only going to be able to use Synology drives with it so it's sort of a mixed bag of like we said great that they're doing it but we're also somewhat disappointed that they're only supporting the Synology drives which are highly limited when it comes to capacity anyway they've made progress at least there's that and we'll look forward to seeing what they do next

Channel: StorageReview

Views: 23,389

Keywords:

Id: 4CBQCE93EIw

Length: 5min 4sec (304 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 09 2022