Synology Compatible NVMe Drives

[zombiephysicist]

Is this right, that the largest official NVMe sticks sold by Synology are still only 800GB? That's just nuts. I bought that way back in 2021 for my 1821, and it was tediously old and small for that time. It's now just a joke. Their re-labeling 'official drive' gambit has now entered clown world in being 10x behind on capacity.

Anyway, I digress.

Have any of you found NVMe sticks that are compatible and that you trust to work as cache or as actual pool drives that have greater capacity? Ideally I was hoping to find a couple of 8TB sticks.

My understanding is on 2022 and newer models "non compatible" drives can only be used as cache (which from a wear-tear pounding vantage makes less sense, but then again, clown world), which is a shame, but I actually need it for a cache, and I'm worried about getting robust NVMe sticks that can take that pounding. And I must give Synology credit, their 800GB sticks have been working for almost 3 years, touch wood, without incident and have sped up our large database of tiny 'file' accesses a good bit.

I'm thinking of adding the some cache to my 2423+ (we have a lot of little file access and the cache has proven useful on the 1821) via one of these cards:

M2D20 | Synology Inc.

Dual-slot M.2 SSD adapter card for cache acceleration

www.synology.com

E10M20-T1 | Synology Inc.

M.2 SSD & 10GbE combo adapter card for performance acceleration

www.synology.com

There has got to be something more spacious than the now laughably ancient 800GB Synology NVMe sticks? I guess I'm looking for some 'enterprise grade' NVMe sticks that can take a bit of a pounding and have a fair bit of reserve storage set aside.


I did find this thread:

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

View: https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/16tnfrr/the_synology_nvme_megathread/


They listed success with Crucial P3 Plus series and Samsung 980 Pro

 

[EAZ1964]

No clue on cache nvme, but did you consider using 2.5" SATA SSD as a storage? with 4 of these in eg Raid10 the performance should be fine without a cache.

 

[zombiephysicist]

No clue on cache nvme, but did you consider using 2.5" SATA SSD as a storage? with 4 of these in eg Raid10 the performance should be fine without a cache.

It's an excellent idea. There are more options and some that are clearly enterprise grade. The throughput will be a touch slow though. At least I think so. At say 500MB/sec, you combine 2 for read, and 2 for write, so you get around 1GB/sec each way. Although perhaps you can combine all 4 into some combined read write cache? But with NVMe it forces you to pin one drive only to reads. And one drive only to writes. So not sure how that would work out.

Anyway, I think the NVMe drives do from 3.5GB/sec to maybe over 5 depending on the throughput of the PCI card used?

Which brings up an interesting point. I was thinking of getting the Synology E10M20-T1 combo card with 2 NVMe slots & the 10Gbe ethernet port which uses a 3x8pci slot (and likely not using the 10gbe port but having it just in case I ever need a 2nd 10Gbe port). But perhaps getting the M2D20 card that just has 2 NVMe slots dedicating the full 3x8pci bandwidth would yield better throughput? Has anyone tried to see if there is any difference in performance if youre not using the 10Gbit ethernet port?

 

[EAZ1964]

Not sure what your cache hit rate is. A cache is useful if the file is in the cache, all other things are read from HDD and considerably slower. So if hit rate is low, SATA SSD may be faster than cache+HDD.

 

[zombiephysicist]

Not sure what your cache hit rate is. A cache is useful if the file is in the cache, all other things are read from HDD and considerably slower. So if hit rate is low, SATA SSD may be faster than cache+HDD.

Our cache rate is decently high. The lowest it gets is around 85%. Most of the time it's over 95%. However, with the 2423 we are building a larger database, so we will need a bit bigger cache to achieve the same thing. But for our use, you can see the screen shot below, it does pretty well. Right now the old 1821 feels a good bit snappier than the new 2423 because of caching.

That said, at some point I hope at some point Synology starts offering NVMe U.2/U.3/EDSFF based NASs. They are sooo much faster, and there are now drives having 15, 30, 64 and even 256TB capacities in ultra fast SSD formats. It's kind of sad that Synology has no offering in this space. Hopefully the 2423+ gets us through a few years and Synology will offer something in this space too. That would basically obviate the need for caching.

 

[EAZ1964]

That is indeed a very good hit rate, can image it is the perfect tool for your application.
And yes, it is a pity that synology still does not offer NVMe based NAS systems.

 

[zombiephysicist]

I'm leaning to getting the 4TB Samsun 990 Pro drives.

Does anyone know if the Samsung 990 Pro with heat sink will fit into either of the Synology E10M20-T1 combo card the M2D20 card, or should I get it without a heat sink. It kind of looks like the 'cover' for each of those is it's own heat sink.

 

[zombiephysicist]

I'm leaning to getting the 4TB Samsun 990 Pro drives.

Does anyone know if the Samsung 990 Pro with heat sink will fit into either of the Synology E10M20-T1 combo card the M2D20 card, or should I get it without a heat sink. It kind of looks like the 'cover' for each of those is it's own heat sink.

Answering my own question, seems like you get it without the heat sink as the Synology cards come with their own heat sink for you to use:

 

[zombiephysicist]

Well since no one had any suggestions, I went out on a limb and ordered the Samsung 990 Pro. Two 4TB sticks should be more than enough. I got the E10M20-T1 card too. Will test. Fingers crossed. Will report back.
[automerge]1708395016[/automerge]
In the mean time, look at the hardware coming out of QNAP with E1.S support. Crazy how far behind in hardware Synology has become:

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

View: https://twitter.com/storagereview/status/1759760199429001510?s=61&t=SywDLa6ChRjUIbpzDj1rxA

 

[dimfil]

WD SN700 disks worked OK for me as storage pool.
You have to use the well known script through. Nothings of 3rd party is compatible for storage pools out of the box ..