Hello everyone,I bought – some time ago, new storage for my home lab. I mentioned it, but while I got it going quickly I have been very slow at getting the SSD’s I had bought into action. I had some time recently and it was a little different so I thought I would document and share.Lets get started. Before you startSomethings to think about before we get started. Make sure the SSD is on the. You need to use two SSD of the same size, brand, and model.
You need to add additional memory – I added 2048 GB. With that I have a total of 4 GB of system memory and that will allow me to use up to about 223 GB of cache. Some nice background on Cache in Synology including some test results can be found in. It was this technical white paper that showed me clearly that Read write cache is the way to go.
How it Works: Intel SSD Caching Written on June 29, 2012 by Matt Bach. Share: Always look at the date when you read a hardware article. Some of the content in this article is most likely out of date, as it was written on June 29, 2012. For newer information, see our more recent articles.
FYI I am using in this a which I am very happy with.HardwareCheck out this picture after unpacking (as always you can click on the pictures or screenshots to see a bigger image).BTW, the SSD I purchased was Intel SSD 530 Series 240 GB dries. I shopped between the Synology SSD compatibility list and Amazon until I found something reasonable priced.Something not in the picture is the little bag of screws that came with the NAS as well as screwdrivers – which you can see below.You need to screw the SSD into the two trays. There is only one way to do that which will end up with the connectors in the right place. It worked better for me to remove one of the connector rails.As I mentioned above the connector on the right side of the enclosure seen above is not connected.
So you will have two leftovers as seen below when you are done. Notice above how much of the drive connector is visible?These should be familiar to you as they are part of the very interesting way to secure the hard disks into the enclosure.Now that the two enclosures have the SSD installed you should insert them into the NAS. Once installed, above the new drives you should see a brief green light. Working in the UI – do we see the SSD?We need to make sure the drives are seen properly. You should have the Storage Manager on your Synology desktop. Open it up and change to the HDD/SSD view.
BTW, if you don’t see the Storage Manager you can add that to your desktop from the apps using the icon in the top left corner.We can see at the bottom of the list of drives our two new SSD. And both are reported properly in terms of size too. So now we move on to working with our cache.
Creating a CacheNow in the same interface we change to the SSD Cache view.It is telling us there is no SSD cache. Surprise. Use the Create button to start. It will open a wizard.
I think it is best to use the Read-write cache if you can. Now we can select our disks, as you can see I did above. We also need to select what mount point for the SSD cache. You can see above Volume 1 which is what I am attaching this SSD Cache too. I am a new person to Synology and I used Volume 1 for both CIFS and NFS which may have been a poor decision. I think maybe two volumes – one for CIFS and one for NFS may have been better as I could have attached the cache to only the NFS share which is where I have my VMs and what I need cached. But then I would have had to manage space and not sure if I want to do that.
In the next screen we see what the Cache size is going to be. There is a formula that includes memory and I think RAID as well and it ends up in providing you with the max cache size.
In my case it is 223 GB. Now we have to confirm that we know the SSD are going to be erased.
After we agree things happen. We end up needing to log in again. Not sure if that is because I took so long doing this and it was a time log out or something to do with the creation of the Cache. But once I logged in again and return to the SSD Cache I see our new cache. If you use the drop down arrow to expand what we see above you get the info below. We see a lot of good info on the Cache.
The important things are capacity and hit ratio. But also interesting to see how much RAM this cache uses. If you use the File Access Statistics button you will see below what you get. This will be way more interesting in the future I suspect.ConclusionYou should now have SSD installed, with a Cache created, and attached to a volume.
You may have it attached to an iSCSI LUN or you may have it attached to a different volume then I did.Questions or comment, just let me know.Michael END. Search for: Follow Blog via EmailEnter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.Join 2,185 other followersFollow Recent Posts.Archives.Categories.Meta.Search for: Recent Posts.Archives.Categories.Meta.