Top 6 UPGRADES for Synology NAS - are they worth it?

all right how's your nail so today I'm going to be talking about the most efficient upgrades for your sonology Nas so if you've already bought a Nas and you want to upgrade it you've got some money to spend I'm going to be talking about what is going to get you your most bang for your buck and the first things that I would buy when you're upgrading them this is all assuming you've already purchased the Nas and you've got what you've got and we're going to be talking about where you should spend your money and where you should get your most bang for your buck because pretty quickly you can spend a few hundred dollars and genuinely not even notice the difference compared to other upgrades especially and so this video is going to apply to both business and personal users I'm going to really be talking about the differences in them and I'm also going to be starting by just going over what the first upgrades usually are though throughout I'm going to be describing there's some circumstances where it might not be worth it and it may be worth going something else and the first one is genuinely something that most people do not think about and that is this that right there is a incredibly cheap Amazon external hard drive right now you can buy a 16 terabyte external hard drive for 230 dollars this right here should be the very first thing you buy whenever you're upgrading ass before you upgrade the RAM before you upgrade anything the first thing you should buy is you should spend a little bit money on a backup external drive that just always gets plugged into your Nas you don't need to spend money on nice drives fancy stuff just buy one of these it's either a wd easy store or seagate's version of that I'll leave a link to that in the description below and the first thing you should buy by far is this right here and it depends on how much data you want to back up if you have only about maybe 10 terabytes of data that's important one terabyte whatever your amount of data that's important to you you should just buy the external hard drive that fits that amount of data and always be setting up a hyper backup task to back up those important files to that external hard drive every single night it is absolutely worth every penny of that and this is actually what I still do today even though I haven't entirely separate backup running to multiple sources the first place I always start is something like this because it is so cheap and can absolutely save you if you have to recover from Lost files I cannot stress enough how much is worth it you really want to sit down and figure out what data is important now obviously if you've got 40 terabytes in your business and you've got to live with all of it then that money should be spent buying a backup unit that is just at the office or something at your house but the reason I bring up that really cheap external hard drive is it is by far the easiest way to start backing up your data and protects you from the most common things like a volume crash an accident they'll delete or anything stupid that's where those really help you because they're on a separate volume and they're easy to grab you just need to grab it you can but definitely definitely definitely start with that if you want to get even more fancy you can even have one sort of safety deposit box and once a month you go get it most people aren't going to remember to do that but that is an option but definitely that is the very first upgrade I would recommend and something a lot of people just Overlook all right and so the next upgrade I'm going to talk about is not something that every single person can do but it is definitely where I would start whenever you're needing performance and that is before you upgrade anything physically in your Synology run wired ethernet to the computers that are accessing it most that need the speed your Wi-Fi router says it can do 5.2 gigabit per second right it can do that that's just not true Wi-Fi is terrible Wi-Fi will get you maybe 30 megabytes per second actual usable yeah you can do a speed test right by the router and you might be able to get 80 megabytes per second Maybe but Wi-Fi is not good and having a wired connection even if it's a wired one gigabit connection makes a huge difference one thing I truly believe is I would actually take a wired 100 megabit connection over Wi-Fi in the vast majority of cases because a lot of times Wi-Fi might get you faster speeds but with packet loss and everything like that and latency you actually have a worse overall experience so really if at all possible see if you can get a wired ethernet connection to your computer and that is going to be the best possible upgrade if you've got a laptop you can get a dirt cheap this is 2.5 or you can get a dirt cheap one gig connection for it and it is absolutely worth every single penny if you can make that happen because your experience is just going to be so much better and you get the added bonus of now your internet speeds are going to be way better and honestly browsing web pages is going to be better because Wi-Fi sometimes just has these hiccups where it just doesn't work because maybe you had to hop because of DFS who knows Wi-Fi just has all these little annoyances that having a wired connection makes it so much better but obviously not everybody can do that you might not be able to wire your house for whatever reason so what you cannot see is currently I've got a ethernet cable going from upstairs down the balcony into my office right now just because we just moved into a new place and I need a wired connection to run my server the way I do but obviously not great for everybody but for those who can it is worth every single penny because it's only going to cost you maybe 60 bucks for the adapter plus ethernet cable plus maybe a switch you might need though you might it might not be worth it to wire your entire house unless you really have a lot of use case for it all right and so now the next upgrades we've got are actually going to be very use case specific and we're going to cover the three most common ones here that you're probably clicking on this video looking for and that is going to be 10 gig m.2 nvme ssds and ramp those are going to be your three most common upgrades that a Nas can do and now some NASA's can't do any of these and some nasas can do all of these right now I have the 1522 Plus in front of me and so it can do all three of those so the very first thing I would do is the 10 gig upgrade so 10 Giga upgrade is going to cost you about a hundred and forty dollars to 160 dollars for the 10 gig card for the Synology not all units have them though the majority of the plus models now that are coming out in 2022 and 2023 do have this this little card right here which is a small 10 gig pcie card that is about 160 dollars it's Synology proprietary unfortunately but it does give you that 10 gig add-ins beaten the thing is it's not just a 160 dollar cost because if you want to go 10 gig you also have to buy a 10 gig switch and a 10 gig card adapter whatever for your computer so it is going to be by far your biggest upgrade if you've already got wired ethernet to the place and it's at least Cat6 you are going to be able to go 10 gig essentially you would need to buy a 10 gig switch they make some that have two ports they make some that have 24 ports really whatever you need you can buy but they can get quite pricey you should also really look at 2.5 gig equipment maybe you connect your Nas via 10 gig to the switch but then a couple of clients who don't really need that much performance get 2.5 gig little adapters that are pretty cheap and just an overall better experience in a lot of cases and being way cheaper that is not a bad look especially if you've only got like four or five hard drives in there you're really not leaving that much performance on the table by going 2.5 gig instead of 10 gig especially for the majority of workflows because 2.5 gig gives you about 300 megabytes per second which is actually pretty close to the max speed maybe you can get four or 500 megabytes per second from four drives in a radio 5 array assuming they're somewhat full so that is by far the first upgrade I would make but is very expensive and it might not be necessary for you so one if you're not wired skip over that you don't need it it's not gonna do anything I don't care if your Wi-Fi router says it has nine gigabit of throughput you're not getting that over Wi-Fi you're not going to be saturating in one good connection in any real use case scenario with Wi-Fi it's just not going to happen even if your Wi-Fi router has 2.5 gig in you're just not going to be saturating it when you're actually using it you might saturate when you're two feet from the router but if you're too free from the router plug in or the other thing is if you're just not copying massive files if you are not using a Nas for copying large files maybe you just use it for photos and things like that then it might not be worth it to you if you never are sitting there waiting for a copy to go through and you're like oh man this is slow if you've never felt that you may honestly not notice the upgrade especially for people just working with a lot of Word documents you probably will not all right so that is still the first upgrade but it's got those caveats where it might not be worth it to you and a lot of older Nas devices can't even go 10 gig the next place I would upgrade is an nvme SSD for caching and you do not need two of these you really should just buy one of them and buy the smallest nvme drive you can as long as it's at least like 100 gigs so the reason you want a nvme caching Drive is you want to set up a read-only nvme caching SSD caching for your volume and it does not need to be big realistically for the vast majority of users 50 gigs is going to be what's actually being used a lot if that you really want to go in and have it cash like the most commonly used files for VMS and databases and everything like that and so by having any cash at all it's actually going to have a pretty good upgrade and so people who go with two one terabyte drives in read-only you really are not going to get that much more performance out of it versus somebody who has a 100 Gig one in all honesty you get the point of diminishing your returns very quickly and so that's going to be the next upgrade I would make and where this is really going to shine for people is people running Docker containers people having a fairly busy office file server the more things going on on the nas the more connections to it the more it's going to help because it allows for reads to not have to go to the hard drives every single time especially for virtual machines and Docker containers and busy files they get on the SSD and then they don't have to be read from disk and so that is keeping your disk from being used and so they can do other things and so that's where it's really useful now DSM 7.2 brings about compatibility for a lot of units to actually use nvme drives as a volume if you're running Docker containers and you want to spend the money on a Synology one it's not a terrible idea to essentially have that container or the virtual machine run actually off of an nvme only volume you can also set up a snapshot that snapshots the data from the nvme volume if you've only got one drive to your actual hard drive volume as a constant backup and so that way you can get that really great performance for those containers that need it but not have to spend money on a lot of them so that's actually a very useful upgrade it's like that I would go in between the two and if you know you're running Docker containers I would probably start with having just the volume if your unit supports that now a read write Cache can be very useful but can also be somewhat risky so I would only recommend having a read write cache if you have a UPS and also the nvme drives have power loss protection so you want to have both those two things technically either one of them will work but I'm a big fan especially if it's for business or anything like that have it both of those if you want to have a read write cache because genuinely I have had very rarely but I have seen it where a read write cache and a bad power outage made a volume read only so next up is RAM and RAM is actually the thing that most people upgrade instantly and is not necessary in a lot of cases so if your Nas already has four gigs of RAM it's probably not necessary to upgrade now the obvious breaks in this is if you're running a lot of Docker containers or if you're running a lot of virtual machines both of those take up a lot of ram but other than that no Synology applications are very very efficient and do not require a lot of ram then if you do want to upgrade your RAM eight gigs really is a ton of RAM for every single technology application if you're running a lot of surveillance cameras that is one of those times where I have seen Ram start becoming an issue or if you've got a massive file server upgrading the ram as well can be good but for most people Ram is not super crucial if you have only two gigs it can be worth it to upgrade to four four tends to be a bit of The Sweet Spot for DSM but eight like this unit has is really more than enough to run pretty much everything in there with Headroom now if you're running a lot of virtual machines especially like a Windows Virtual Machine upgrade the thing to 32 gigs upgrade it fully because genuinely virtual machines especially Windows Virtual machines need a lot of ram you can run an Ubuntu virtual machine with one giga Ram totally fine but Windows minimum is probably four gigs if you're being really tight and it's not gonna be your experience ideally eight gigs for Windows and probably 16 gigs or 12 gigs if you can just because Windows needs Ram so those are the main three upgrades a lot of people have and finally the next one I would absolutely do for all businesses if you're running a Synology as your business and you really cannot have down time buy a UPS a smart UPS they're heavy so this right here is my UPS and what it has it has a USB port in the back right here that can plug into the nas so then if the power goes out and the UPS is about to die the UPS can tell us analogy hey you should go ahead and shut down I don't have that much battery left for most users I actually set up where if the power's not come back on after like two or three minutes go ahead and shut down if your power is out you're probably not doing much on the Nas and UPS is do sometimes lie and say hey I've got another five minutes run time and then all of a sudden they just die especially as they get older in life but a UPS is a really important upgrade for businesses specifically one that can automatically shut down the nas for people who have had volumes going to read only mode the only times I've ever really seen that stems from a power outage almost always where the nas volume got somehow corrupted and had to go into read-only mode they didn't lose their files they just did not have access to them and that is whenever the the power goes out unexpectedly at the worst possible time so that is a great upgrade for businesses and for home users who are using it very heavily definitely go for that all right and so that's going to be it for this these are all the different ways you can upgrade and ask and really when you should upgrade what because it's pretty easy to spend money unnecessarily when there are much better options to start upgrading with go and leave any other questions you got for me in the comments below and check out my forums.spacerex.com it is opening up and so you have any more complex questions make a post on there we can talk about them I've been really enjoying those and so shout out to that also if you want to hire me I do this professionally now I quit my job and I basically am a professional I.T consultant so let me know if you have any questions on that and have a good one bye thank you foreign

Channel: SpaceRex

Views: 39,701

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Id: _VuNjXwCjlA

Length: 16min 25sec (985 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 12 2023