1. How about a new product: a USB3 port to 5GB Ethernet adaptor to get money from those of us with Synology NAS’s without a PCIE slot?
2. Seeing that M2 drive slots are not giving the normal home user’s much benefit as R/W CACHE’s……. How about letting us use those 3Rd party M2’s as data volumes? Would be especially useful For us 720+ users to may want to upgrade our SHR from HDD to SSD’s under V7? (Where you cannot use mixed drives due to recent Synology rule changes! You Broke it—You Fix It!)
1. How about a new product: a USB3 port to 5GB Ethernet adaptor to get money from those of us with Synology NAS’s without a PCIE slot?
2. Seeing that M2 drive slots are not giving the normal home user’s much benefit as R/W CACHE’s……. How about letting us use those 3Rd party M2’s as data volumes? Would be especially useful For us 720+ users to may want to upgrade our SHR to SSD’s under V7? (Where you cannot use mixed drives due to recent Synology rule changes! You Broke it—You Fix It!)
I have used that method on my DS920+ with 2x 1Tb NVMe Samsung 970 Evo plus SSDs.
I config a 2x drive SHR volume.
Has run for months without issue under DSM v7.1 running 1x VDSM under VMM and several Docker containers.
I read all of the warnings listed by other redditors there and incorporated some of their suggested additions into my config.
I think the biggest thing to "worry about" is drive temperature which of course affects reliability, so keep an eye on it and don't expect miracles.
BUT if you adopt a cautious approach, provide adequate airflow/cooling and keep an eye on the temperature (you may consider lowering the threshold temp for alert notifications and/or setup push notifications using another Docker container notification tool!) you will find it is waaaaaaay faster than spinning drives and makes a really big difference for Docker containers / VMs.
I wouldn't be pushing it too hard eg running a production business database on such a volume for instance - on your head be it if you are foolish enough to do that.
One thing to note - now that I have updated to DSM v7.2, there is a persistent warning banner message in Storage Manager in DSM saying:
"System detected that one or more drives are not supported by the current DSM version. We recommend inserting the drives back into the original device to continue using them."
Funny - because the original device they came in was the OEM plastic shell & cardboard box...
Also in Storage Manager, under HDD/SSD view, the Drive status says:
"Not supported by the current DSM version. This drive contains settings not supported by the current system. To use this drive, click Action > Reset Drive to format its existing settings."
It seems that DSM v7.2 on THIS model chassis is hardcoded to detect these Drive ID slots as "cache only" and when it finds something else, well it's clearly unhappy about my life choices...
The Storage pool and relevant Volume # that I setup are all quite happy/healthy status on my device as are the SMART attributes on each NVMe drive.
TBH I thought that the physical dimensions of a DS920+ vs DS923+ was about as close to identical as you could get.
So, I expect that the heat generation and dissipation characteristics of doing the same thing with the same model NVMe drives and the same workload should produce the same heat load to be dissipated and therefore the same RISK.
Don't see why running a SHR pool is allowed on a DS923+ and not on a DS920+ BUT I guess they have sales targets to meet on NAS units so that's probably all the explanation we need on why...
-- post merged: --
I found my notes from when I did the steps as set out on that reddit post, these are a couple of the extra bits I did.
Someone noted you should do this to tell DSM it’s an SSD drive (non rotational):
FYI, before you run mkfs.btrfs -f /dev/md4, run echo 0 > /sys/block/md4/queue/rotational so that that mkfs.btrfs see that the new raid is a SSD and optimizes the filesystem for an SSD.
Note that in my case, on the DS920+, the md = md3 (check and confirm your own one of course first).
Also, when I ran the mkfs.btrfs command, there was a prompt to the effect that the metadata was only going to be “single” ie not duplicated across drives. That seems like an issue to me if the ONE that HAS the metadata is the one that dies, and since the command helpfully gave me the option to use, I did so:
10 GBE native would be a good thing, but like other vendors, it is a money game so they restrict it to more costly models and you have to buy the pci-e network adapter too. Lifting the HDD/SSD restrictions would also be more customer friendly, but that is a money game as well.
Cool NAS hardware. If it came with DSM It would be a day 0 purchase. But sadly, I don't think we will see anything similar from Synology (for home consumers) for a very long time..
1) Make all Plus units have 2.5GbE builtin. Keep the optional adaptor/PCI slot for 10GbE+. Value units remain Gigabit.
2) More than 2 NVMe slots on 8 bay units (4 would be nice).
3) 'Proper' tiered RW storage volumes for hot/cold data - appears as one volume, system manages data migration from hot to cold in quiet times. Optional manual override of data placement. If it can do three tiers NVME/SATA SSD/HDD, even better.
4) Faster connectivity for expansion bays - I don't mind if it is proprietary, but in a world where storage formats exist over Ethernet, why stick with eSATA? Thunderbolt or Fibre connect are better options.
5) Talking of Thunderbolt, a port for DAS use would add a fair amount of flexibility. Heck, even if it was just USB3/4.
6) better CPUs - even a two generation old Ryzen3 would smash the current line for processing and only use 35W.
And finally:
7) An NVMe Flashstation. otherwise I'll be buying the ASUS Flashstor.
So basically your after an Asustor Lockerstor 4 Gen 2, but with a Synology logo
2.5-Gigabit Ethernet ports
USB 3.2 Gen2 ports – 10Gbps speed (can be use with expansion unit)
PCIe slot for 10GbE
Four M.2 slots for caching or storage or both.
Why 2.5gbe for plus series and above, most other manufacturers have gone 2.5 across their entire range, just Synology penny pinching sticking with 1gbe these days.
So basically your after an Asustor Lockerstor 4 Gen 2, but with a Synology logo
2.5-Gigabit Ethernet ports
USB 3.2 Gen2 ports – 10Gbps speed (can be use with expansion unit)
PCIe slot for 10GbE
Four M.2 slots for caching or storage or both.
Why 2.5gbe for plus series and above, most other manufacturers have gone 2.5 across their entire range, just Synology penny pinching sticking with 1gbe these days.
Actually the Asus Lockerstor 6 would be almost perfect, except for the Celeron powering it. IMO they are fugly too, especially compared to the Drivestor models.
I miss the CPU upgradability of my old ReadyNAS Pro 6.... those were the days. Given the longevity of AMD's AM4 socket, it could be done easily. but it won't, for warranty reasons alone.
