What is your go to upgrade? Post on the forums: forums.spacerex.co/t/the-top-6-updates-for-a-synology-nas-video/383?u=will

Just got the Synology 1522+. This video was perfect for answering my upgrade questions for Synology in general, and especially for this unit. Nice to know that I dont have to go crazy on RAM! Thanks for the video!

As an enthusiast photographer, I’ve been using a Drobo DAS for over six years (actually, it’s still connected) and, thankfully, it has worked flawlessly throughout. I’ve been considering a NAS conversion for almost as long and…finally, I have just acquired a Synology DS1522+ in the last month, in no small part because of Drobo’s business problems and unknown future support. It does feel like there’s a lot to learn (which is a good thing too) but I have to thank you, Will, for all your videos as you’ve contributed heavily to my limited NAS understanding so far. As I have a Mac Studio, two 10GbE ports on my switch and CAT 6 cable running, that 10GbE upgrade will be next. Best of luck in your new business.

important note is, when using larger capacity SSD cache, it does reserve a notable amount of RAM, so for ex. I'm running one 1TB NVME SSD as read cache, but also upgraded RAM from 4 to 8GB because that 1TB of SSD cache itself uses about 400MB of RAM, and it works great as a combination :)

No kidding - SpaceRex is probably my #1 KZfaq channel. I try to buy with your affiliate links whenever I can just so you take over the world. Thank you for all that you do! The installation of my Synology NAS and corresponding workflow is priceless for my business. Much appreciated!

Thanks for this great video. I took your advice and connected over a wire. Transfer speeds went from an average of 300mbps to 900mbps. Such a significant improvement! 👍🏻

Glad you’re full time into this! Good stuff man you’ve helped my work and I a lot

Dude your content is so clear and concise. Incredibly helpful! If I, or anyone I know, ever needs a consultant, you'll be the first call! Thank for this great info!

Congrats on this channel helping you to a sweet full time consulting gig. Appreciate all the great information you have shared over the years.

Nice to hear you do this full time now. You helped us Build a 1821+ back in the Days with a 10gbe hardwire connection for Videoproduction. Greetings from Germany! :)

Thank you very much for all the awesome content. Easy to understand stuff - lots of NAS instructional / tutorials are cumbersome, too long and not suited for beginners. I'm a photographer and have a s-lod of old SATAs with images and I need to pull the trigger on a NAS as soon as possible to avert possible disaster and also to get organized. I appreciate you, mate!

alright how's it goin, neal?

I have a weird issue with the smb share on my ds1821+. I have my video edit folder organised by newest created up top. When I am saving video edits to the folder it will just randomly drop out a year of edits and show the newest file as a year ago or whatever it is. Seems to drop out to the same point each time. If I open up an afp connection it always shows the correct order and it seems to force the smb connection into line also. Any ideas how to fix this issue? I think it started doing it since DSM 7 upgrade..

Great video and guidance, much appreciated

Glad to see I had already covered your #1 upgrade and use Hyperbackup :)

Thanks - this was a good sanity check or me since I just purchased a Synology 4-Bay DiskStation DS923+. Went with the 10GBe card which is now down to $110, and your recommended NVME drive. Good advice on the read only. I got the external drive on my wish list. Your video gave me confidence to not upgrade memory since it comes with 4Gb. What I found useful is the size information of the cache partition you recommended which makes total sense now. In the past I would max it out thinking more is better. Lastly I have a smart UPS to plug it into. Thanks for also suggesting the USB into it also. Great video, clear and concise.

A couple points to add: DSM 7.2 has a SSD Advisor in Storage Manager that you can use to decide wihether an SSD each is useful. It runs for a week to analyze your usage. I recommend using this before running out to buy a SSD cache. Great points about wifi versus wired. The problem with wifi its is stability and reliability. Wifi is subject to signal (other devices, APs) and physical (walls) interference, particularly in crowded places like apartments or office buildings. This is the biggest argument for a wired connection. A NAS needs to be always available. With ethernet it ALWAYS works and at a predictable speed. If you are using your NAS as a media server, this is particularly important.

Great video, clear, simple, honest. You killed it. Thank you for taking the time to educate us.

I would get the UPS first. For business we got a second Synology for backup off site instead of a big USB drive. I have installed 2 1TB SSD caches in raid 1. It is overkill. I have never seen more than 256K of cache being used so 2x256K is the maximum one should get. The weak spot of the Synology is that it doesn't have redundant power supplies and CPUs. That is why a second storage is required because if the local Synology fails, the big 16 TB USB drive can keep you going in the short term. We, the company, have a NetApp. I personally use an old Drobo 5N, at home, which is slow and crude compared to the Synology but it has been extremely reliable. My personal Synology is off site and the company and I access it through a company VPN. It is less hassle than a OneDrive.

I just bought an 18TB external to do my back ups. Such piece of mind to have this on hand. I'm also adding a 10GbE to my NAS right now too. I just upgraded from a DS418Play to a DS923+ with three 16TB Seagate Ironwolf drives. Mainly for the 10GbE access since I do a lot of video storage and editing.

Thanks for this. What about upgrading from HDD to SSD? Or is it sufficient to to have SSD cache. Video editing workflow, not direct to NAS.

Again, a great, clear analysis. Keep it up, SpaceRex!

Excellent video as always. I'd love to see a tutorial about setting up the auto-shutdown from a UPS. Thanks.

The first thing I did when I got my 920 was to add an external backup drive! Glad that was on the top of your list as well. As always, great content!!

I have about 60 tb of music I've collected over the years. Astonishingly, I've never had a hard drive ever fail on me, so I'd never really thought about backing everything up until recently. I saw a video of a video editor backing his work up to a NAS, which I had never even heard of. After a ton of research, and some saving, I just got a Synology 923+ and 4 x 15 tb Western Digitals. It took me all night to figure out how to start syncing files from all my externals, but Ive got the hang of it now. Glad to hear I probably won't need to upgrade my ram. I think the 923+ is sufficient for my needs. Instead, I think I'll start saving to buy a whole other backup until cloud storage doesn't cost as much as a car.

Setting the SSD to be a second volume and running docker containers directly off of it was a far better use case than a cache. The amount of command line inputs to get it working was minimal

Perfekt! Es mir diesmal große Freude gemacht das Video anzuschauen- nicht nur weil es sehr ausführlich und gut war. Weil du diesmal und hoffentlich auch in Zukunft Zeit beim sprechen genommen hast ! 👍👍👍👍👍

Hello from Sydney, Australia. Just wanted to tell you that your videos have saved my bacon. Very professional and useful. A little mesmerizing too!

@spacerexwill what is your opinion on getting an expansion unit for my DS1621xs+? The expansion unit port is eSATA unlike the RS models where they’ve a proprietary high speed connector. I use VMs and Surv Station with 4 x 4K cams atm with maybe 2 more being added so it might have a mix of HDD and SSD.

Your first suggestion is perfect. I bought a USB 3.0 tool less enclosure and put an extra 16tb NAS hard drive in it.

Hey, So I'm running a DS220+ with 2 4TB drives mirroring for redundancy and I realized I'm running out of storage. Would you recommend swapping the drives for bigger drives? Or switch the raid so I have 8TB, and buy the external hard drive to back up? Appreciate all you do man, love your channel since I got my NAS.

Great tips and I agree with you! Thanks.

I love your videos! They are helping me understand and research a NAS before buying. I do video editing for my son's hockey team. My son wants to start also editing video's also. Would putting the files on a NAS be the correct course of action? We would not be accessing the files at the same time. Thanks

I’m still learning so I have many questions. I’m not sure if I have understood the 10Gbe upgrade to the DS 923+ comspletely. My Mac Studio is fitted with a 10Gbe connection if I upgrade my DS 923+ with the 10Gbe upgrade, can I connect with my Mac studio with a cable to have 10 Gbe between my Mac Studio my DS 923+?

Answered all my noob questions. Thanks.

Very helpful! I've got a 1522+ on order, my first Synology NAS. I'm upgrading from an old tower running UnRAID Server. Two questions: 1) Do any m.2 NVME SSDs work other than Synology's own? They're the only ones listed on the HCL. 2) What's the best way to transfer files from my old UnRAID server to the NAS? Map a drive to the server in DSM? I want to keep my laptop out of the transfer process, as it's on wifi.

Hey, I’m thinking of getting a NAS to back up our iPhones and computers. Question, can my son remotely backup his MacBook Pro while at College to a NAS at our home? Also, can he backup his iPhone as well? Thanks and love the videos!

Thank you for this. I'm a home user and just looking for the fastest photo experience possible on the 1522+ (upgrading from an old DSplay - which can buffer as it only has 1 gig of ram). Would the addition of the M2 Nve read cache help with that or is the 8 gig of ram enough. Most of the use is photo/video across 5-10 family users (basically their cell phone backup and other content). Thanks!

Nice to see Rex. Agree to with the priorities here. Wired 100%

I have a DS1522+ and actually went with the 10 gigabit upgrade and a RAM upgrade (Kingston RAM I could get quite cheaply so I went for it, no way I'm buying Synology RAM which is ridiculously expensive). Of course, I also have a UPS although power outages in the Netherlands are extremely rare. There's one thing I'm still thinking about, NVMe SSD caching. I don't think it would benefit me. I'm using my NAS for media storage and playback (no transcoding needed over here), the NAS is running SABnzbd, Radarr and Sonarr as docker images. As I'm the only user NVMe caching would be useless, am I right? The Synology SSD Advisor recommends a small cache SSD but as I said, I doubt if I'd really see any true benefits.

Bruh, it’s hard to take you seriously when you don’t even have any LED lights behind you💁🏼

Can I upgrade all my drives in the main unit without loosing the dsm OS install? I have a rx418 or something like that with 4 disks that will remain during this.

Hi Neal, could you share details about compatible 3rd party RAM and m.2 NVME disk for read / write caching. Synology parts are way too expensive. I'm have a DS923+ Synology nas.

I am still learning about my ds1019+. I've had it for several years now. Security and features is not very intuitive. Even for someone who enjoys this stuff as a hobby. As a truck driver I'm always looking for more ways to use it while on the road.

Thx for the video

I'm looking into 100TB sinology but for next generation sequencing data, I assume for backup I would need a second 100TB sinology drive? Can you have the backup within the same unit, for example if I had a 12 bay model?

QUESTION: I am running four Docker containers on a DS720+ as part of our dairy farm operations. They are an accounting system, plus three Zabbix containers (mysql, zabbix-server, and zabbix-web). I noticed that Zabbix does a huge amount of continuous writing to the disks but hardly any reading. So, I was wondering if I would benefit from a R/W cache? Note that I have a smart UPS for for each NAS as well as for all my Cisco switches. I also have an industrial 30,000 Watt generator that cuts in within 3 seconds of a power outage, so the UPS is just there to smoothly make the transition. The bottom line is that my network never goes down due to any power issues.

Thanks for sharing all those tips. Your channel is really great. Looking at your videos there is one answer I can’t find. In buying a NAS what is the benefit of having 10 or 8 drives or 6 over a 4 bays NAS?

Thank you for the video

So even if I am using a 1522+ as a remote offsite backup, for my 1821+ (at home), its best to have a single disk usb attached for more redundancy? Appreciate all of your networking videos and Synology videos. Keep up the great work. Congrats on quitting your job and becoming a consultant!!

Thank you for emphasizing the importance of "wired" against wifi. Not only wifi is not as fast as advertised by it is much more vulnerable to interference.

Im new and I am going to set up the synology 923+. Ive been watching videos and have not seen any info about the NVMe. I don't know what it is or where it goes. could you direct me to the basics for that?

Excellent video as usual, but it is still unclear how to use the NVMes, particularly with the VMM, and/or by creating a volume on the NVMe. My DS1821 is still on 7.1 (7.2 is not yet official); and I believe that you should dedicate a video to the NVMes ! Thank you

Good videos @spacerex , keep’em coming! Any good video on explaining how to upgrade storage in future..? Eg, I get a ds923+ for example, stock 4x 8GB for example.. when I am close to reach the 8GB storage limit how does it work to get bigger drives (as they would be cheaper in future one hopes), I could then upgrade to say.. 16TB’s. Thanks in advance!

I'm surprised the UPS is at the end not "Number 0, get a UPS when you get a NAS, do not pass Go." That's my philosophy after having a RAID/NAS get corrupted from a power outage. My take is that every RAID/NAS must have a smart UPS from the start. Even as a "home" user, I'd rather have a UPS than have to try to recover everything from a backup.

If I have an 8 bay drive but only use 4 of them - Can I use the other bays for back up drives or would that be stupid?

Clearly I’m missing something here. Why the need for the external backup hard drive when I will have a Raid 5 set up on the DS423+. Thanks

Wanting to upgrade a network card for my DS1517+. I need a card that will do 2.5Gb. Is the (E10G22-T1-Mini) compatible with my DS1517+? Thanks.

I took the advice of a NAS consultant and used 2x32gb sticks in my Synology 1821+. Have you heard of any issues with a setup like (besides Synology not approving it)?

How do you set up auto shutdown of a Synology NAS from a UPS? Is there an app to install? I have a DS218+ and a APC UPS 1350VA BR1350MS.

I am still trying to figure out the best way to connect to my NAS with thunderbolt 3. I see ATTO has tb3 to 10gb lan but so expensive.

It seems I can't buy CP1500AVRLCD3 in my area. However they sell CP1500PFCLCD. What is the major difference between these two models?

Do dedicated gaming servers require upgraded ram if they are ran in a dockers? I would like to have multiple dedicated servers up for my friends to join at any time. I was thinking to upgrade the ram.

Thsnk for the perfect tutorial. I am using the DS912+ NAS and wanted to connnect a new Seagate 16TB external drive (the one you used in your tutorial ). My problem is that my NAS doesn‘t recognize the external drive ? What might be the reason? Kind regards, Juergen

i bought the 16tb external hard drive to do the backup but on my DS1520 + it only has one ubs port and i am using that for the ups electric backup... How do i connect both with only the one ubs port on the DS1520+?

What upgrade would you recommend for a 2015 Synology DS1815+ apart from the drives?

My 1st upgrade always is a UPS that also powers the modem, router and switch

How will the NVMe SSD upgrade affect Synology Photos? Will it help with that in any way?

Can I upgrade my Synology DS 923+ med M2 Samsung 980 pro ssd’s with and without heat sinks to use for caching?

Hi, Are there 3rd party nvme and ram that you recommend rather than synology brand?

First of all, congratulations on your channel, it's fantastic and although I'm a computer guy (Z servers), it has allowed me to quickly learn how to use all the features of my synology NAS server, thanks a lot @SpaceRexWill A silly question, for a similar price and terabytes, would you choose a 2.5 or 3.5 external HDD?

I recently bought a Synology DS223 with just one 4TB Ironwolf HDD. I did not bought a 4-bay, first because it’s a bit out of my budget, but also because I don’t have that much data (I currently “only” have 400GB of photos. The thing is I’m not saving my data with redundancy. So, I probably should buy a second HDD. My question is: as one of the disks storage will basically be lost, is it possible to add for example an 8TB (with the exact same characteristics except the capacity), or should I buy a second 4TB model to be the exact same as the first one? Note that that it is for home use only, and the only thing I might share would be photos with family. Thanks for your help.

I have a Synology NAS CS-407....could I upgrade with SSD or is it better to buy something more uptodate

I want to build a 100TB SSD or NVMe NAS and I want to clone/ sync/ and merge them across multiple different time zones to protect again fire hazards, please reach out

Thanks!

Great and very important important video for newbies like me!!! Thanks a lot You recommend a lot for virtual machines. What about huge Lightroom libraries wir over 100k pictures with 100mb RAW files? What upgrade of the last three make most sense and what does not/ or does not have that big impact to the performance

is NVME caching worth it for me? i run a few docker containers (plex, radarr, sonarr, SAB, audiobookshelf, portainer, Tautulli) all in all my media library is 20 Tb.

Thx man, answered so many of my questions....have a 1522+ too...55TB usable storage but only using 2TB. A few questions though....Is there a Fiber SFP+ option to upgrade, i know 10g Ether can get really hot. Running to a Dream machine but then fiber to my desktop. Would love to run direct fiber to it. Also no mention of the bonding....

regarding NVMe, is DRAMless variant safe enough for home use? or is DRAM cache NVMe required? Thanks

2:02 "backup every single night" meaning to say the external hard drive will attached to synology usb port without removing it? or should I do backup once or twice a month,remove the external harddrive and store it elsewhere(deposit box,someone's trusted home,office etc)

What kind of random reads can i expect with a DS1821+ fully build out in raid 6, 8 drives X20 exos. 2x 1TB m.2 R/W cache, 32gb ecc ram. Can it even reach 2gbps in sequential?

So, if your computer is connected to your NAS via Ethernet, does that mean you’ll be restricted to using WiFi to connect to your router? I think my motherboard only has a single 2.5 gbps port.

Why external hdd is needed? I was under impression that if I buy 2bay NAS ( DS223J) stick 2x 4tb hard drives one will be used for all my data other one is for 100% copy of that data (back up) why do you need external back up ? Or em I missing something?

The important point about UPSs is not to hesitate to change the battery. The life time of a battery ranges from 3 to 5 years.

great videos

Any chances we can see how you setup and implement MariaDB in your homelab??

As a NAS noob, I have been watching a lot of videos trying to figure out if a NAS is what I need. I do a lot of photo editing in Lightroom and have a lot of music stored on drives that I never listen to because I currently need to plug an external drive into my laptop and then plug the laptop into my hifi and it is just a hassle and ties me to being in one place in the house. I love the idea of being of being able to access and play music and edit photos stored on the NAS without having to plug anything into my laptop - is this realistic with a NAS? Listening to you talk about needing to plug in an ethernet cable to overcome wifi issues makes me doubt that the system would really be any different to having an HDD or am I missing something? I am worried that I may end up spending a small fortune just to have the same problem that I was trying to overcome in the first place. Any advice would be appreciated. And thanks for creating all these informative videos.

I wish I had known about the compatibility list on the M.2 NvME SSDs. I bought a pair of drives - good Samsung ones - and DSM refuses to recognize them for anything. Ok, it identifies them, and says they're not compatible (and I'm running DSM 7.2-64570 Update 3 on my 1522+)

Im going to take my Synology down to try my intel duel port 10gb nics since finding the Synology branded one thst uses RJ45 ports are near impossible. Sadly i need more then 24tb for my Media side.

I got a ds920+ and did a ram upgrade shortly after just so i did not have to worry about it later. The question i have is about wired and wireless networking with a nas and laptop's. If your laptop is connected via wired and has wireless on at that same time. If i copy from the laptop to the NAS will it automatically uses the wired connection vs it thinking it should use wireless. This i am not clear on. So love your advice.

External harddrive as a backup solution has its limits: If your house burns down - your important data on your external harddrive are gone as well. In my opinion your backup data should be physically apart from your primary NAS. Better choose the cloud or a second NAS on a different location than the primary NAS (I have chosen the latter). Thanks for your great videos anyway!

I just bought a Lenovo thinkserver rd640 and slapped in 4tb drives in all 6 sleds and two cache ssd in the first two. Man this is fun lol

- EXTERNAL DRIVE - CHECK (that I have before buy the Nas, I used on my old server .always have two external that I change every week) -RUN WIRED ETHERNET -CHECK -I HAVE THE DS1522 TOO WITH 8G SÓ MEMORY UPGRADE - CHECK -SMART UPS - CHECK I don't plan to upgrade the other stuff for now at least.

I was struggling for years - my photos app was slow, my docker instance was slow, and had no idea why. 2GB in my machine, and the resources app showed I still had 40% free memory. But when I upgraded by installing an 8gb RAM module.... wow! things were snappy and very fast! RAM upgrade is a must, and a NUMBER ONE first thing to do. Don't wait, just install the most RAM you can.

Any external backups that can handle 70+ TBs? ;)

The first thing to buy after getting a Synolog NAS is atleast one 3.5" hard drive. Without that your NAS only functions as a paper weight.

1:00 Could I use an external SSD instead of an Hard Drive? What would be the differences?

I love that t-rex mate 😂👍🏼

Nice content

I agree with backing up to another drive and UPS basically being required for data security. WIFI6 and newer standards can certainly break gig speeds if they have a fast enough connection to the source material, but do suffer from increased latency. Wired connections are definitely better, but it mainly impacts latency and stability more than actual speed now. There are many newer routers that support faster speed over Wi-Fi than wired as not all support multi-gig switching for wired connections. My WIFI 6 router only supports up to 2.5Gb wired but much more over Wi-Fi (AX11000 standard) it has exceeded 2.5Gb when downloading from multiple sources (LAN and internet) using WIFI. It's also uncommon for consumer routers to support ports over 2.5Gb. Even though we only have 1Gb internet, I still upgraded my home with a 2x10Gbe and 8x 2.5Gbe switch because the NAS running Plex can see more than 2.5Gb on LAN usage, but no other single device would currently benefit from more speed for me. In short, I still agree with recommending wired connections due to the lower latency as that is what most people will "feel" and the latency advantage of wired connections can be very noticeable with internet usage. It's just not the same as absolute speed.