Should You Use SSDs For Your NAS?

In this video I will be covering the differences between hard drives and SSDs and helping you decide which one is best for your NAS setup.

#nas #ssd #hdd #synology

TOC
00:00 Introduction
01:19 Random reads and writes
05:24 Storage size and price
07:56 Longevity
10:05 Power draw and noise
10:43 Installing SSDs in your Synology NAS
11:11 NVMe SSDs
14:43 Conclusion

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[synologyonline]

As a Synology Service Center. We don't recommend Sata SSD's at all. Unless the SSD is rated for a NAS. Or a Video Surveillance drive. Or if used as a Cache drive. Mainly the reason why we don't recommend them here is the controller chips on them. They die fast. The controller chip. Be it Phison, USBEST, SMI, or Samsung. They can only handle so many 100's of thousands read writes before they start to break down. And can die suddenly. Not the ram on the SSD's that dies. Its the controller chip that has to pass all those ram chips info to you. Usually its slower as it dies. But can be overnight dead. Now you might think read writes are only from what you send and receive from the NAS. But no. Internally in many certain raid configurations. The drives are also passing data between themselves. Like internal integrity checks, SMART data updates, parallel data movements and whole lot more you don't interact with. On mechanical drives. There is no main central controller to pass through. There is, but its not like a SSD controller. And with mechanical you kinda get a warning of it breaking down. At least so you can react asap to change that. Hope this helps too. Great Video here!

[laknicks]

Save yourself and watch at 1.75x speed

[alozborne]

The performance bottleneck for many of the 4 bay and smaller Synology NAS units is the network. Synology really needs to standardize on 10G NICs, or at least 2.5G

[NeilBradleyMS]

Very helpful thank you, I’m now considering Sata ssd’s as I’m approaching near the time to upgrade. 👍

[keithmiller]

Yep, I have switched to all SSDs. I have a Lenovo 1L 7500T with a 4 TB SSD, a 2 TB NVME and and external USB hub (Sabrent) with 4x2TB SSDs. Here in the UK SSDs seem to be about double the price of HDDs. Power consumption and noise were both factors in my choice in switching to all SSDs.😊

[themrgumbatron]

great video. been thinking about swapping out my old 3.5" to 2.5" ssds

[dixienormus]

Perfect video, exactly what I was looking for.

[birch]

Good thing this didn't come out yesterday when I purchased my first setup 😅 Definitely considering this down the road, especially since I'll still have 4 open bays. Thanks for all the info, Will! 🙏

[rachaelpreston]

Power consumption, physical size, and heat is much better with SSDs than HDDs too. I was able to take an old small form factor desktop (Lenovo E73), install a 6-bay Icy Dock enclosure with 2TB SSDs, TrueNAS Scale, and a LSI controller card and have a reasonably inexpensive NAS that is fairly compact and doesn't consume that much power.

[sylvainHZT]

Switched to full SSD's on my DS1019+ 3 years ago, i totally love it ! My NAS is a 14W beast, in a total silence 😜

[droneforfun]

Hi Will, thanks a lot. Perhaps some videos comparing performance differences in different applications for future videos! For example ds photos browsingetc etc. Keep it up, great videos! /from sweden🎉

[shadowrd]

Thank you for posting this video 📹. You have a new subscriber. Keep up the great work. This was a very informative video 🎥.

[ThomasOatman]

I re-created my DS1621 a few months ago.
I added 2 SSDs in SHR as the system volume.
So all apps are installed here. The Syn Drive database. The Plex database and temp files. Photos DB. Etc etc


It is blazing fast compared to before 👍🏻😁🤓
And much quieter.

[lukewatson]

Informative, as always, Thank you for the content. Regarding using m.2 ssds for caching, would you suggest it if users are caching large files (4-10gb / each) and the files are not always the same? Example: Users watching video lectures stored on the NAS, but every user is watching a different lecture simultaneously? I'm not sure if this makes sense, but any advice would always be appreciated. Thanks again. Keep up the good work!

[cinemaipswich]

I have just built a TrueNAS Scale server with a new XL case and PSU, second hand Xeon, Supermicro MB, and 128 GB ECC RAM. The 8x 4TB Red drives are still half the price of the latest SATA HDD's. When I need an extra pool in a year or two, they will probably be the same price by then. When it comes to NVMe's, I'm looking at the "now older" PCIe Gen 3's. They are very cheap for things like ZIL, L2ARC, DeDup, and all those other Pool add-on's.

[TheThinkersBible]

Incredible information. Great to know how far SSD technology has come. And drives, to be honest. Do the Synology drives allow hot swap of SSDs too?

[FerTechCH]

Synology is shooting themselves on their foot by prohibiting to use other drives than theirs. They are also not adding the 18-20-22 TB spinning drives to the compatibility list to push for their own Toshiba Synology branded drives.
Also, they are including quite old processors to their NAS models instead of using modern ones with better performance to run containers and other things.

[theshuff]

Great video !
I'm currently planning to upgrade my 8x2TB raid 5 array with ssd. By the past, i was worried about price and endurance. That's not th case anymore !
Waiting for a good deal and i go on with ssd. The major concern, for me, about my "old" hdd is electrical consumption. Should drop 24/7 electrical consumption from 80 to 30w. that's a huge difference.
Planning to keep hdd only for my backup storage array which is spinned down most of the time ;)

[fabriceneuman]

Will you do a video showing how you choose to install SSDs in one of your NASes? Thanks for your incredible source of info!

[DanieleInaudi]

How would you update an existing NAS / storage pool from HDDs to SSDs?