Synology NAS - internal benchmarking?

sphinx99

[H]ard|Gawd
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Dec 23, 2006
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I received and have been setting up a new DS1821+. I have it populated with the two-port 10GbE (10gBase-T) card and eight Exos X16 16TB SATA drives so this should be about as good as it gets before moving to solid state. Currently experimenting with RAID6 vs. SHR. I don't have a good setup for raw 10GbE transfers yet (much less teaming) and was wondering if there are any tools or suggestions on how to setup an internal-to-the-NAS benchmark so I can get a sense of raw throughput without worrying just yet about my network-side constraints. If there is a way to ssh in and do a dd-like test that may work? Or, if anyone has data on RAID6 vs SHR performance that you can share. It'll take forever otherwise to build volumes, let them do their integrity checks, then benchmark. This model is new, with a Ryzen processor with an embedded chipset and I don't understand what kind of internal throughput it's capable of.

FWIW use case primarily is read/write of large uncompressed video, two clients max, so I'm mainly interested in a setup that maximizes raw sequential read and write throughput.

PS. I do have a pair of M.2 cache drives attached as well but want to get a baseline on internal throughput before understanding how the cache factors in. I don't expect cache to help a great deal here, aside from maybe some side storage of small files / Plex-type use, so I put in two Evo 970 500GB drives because they were cheap. I imagine these are terrible for the application.
 
Enable SSH under the control center. Then you can run pretty much any linux tool you want. SH2 with equal sized drives basically is RAID6 already. The setup that will maximize that type of throughput is going to striped or a mirrored stripe.
 
sphinx99
until you start replacing 4 disks SHR2 and RAID6 performance would be the same as there will be only 1 slice in SHR2

i say 4 disks as you need to replace 4 disks before you start gaining space in SHR2 (so if you replaced your 16GB disks with 24TB disks you need to replace and rebuild 4 of them before you gain the space of the 24TB disks), tests have shown SHR2 is slower than RAID6 but we are talking about insignificant performance diferance

in RAID 6 its fixed length for the whole pool (all disks must be equal size) you have to replace and rebuild all 8 disks before you can expand the pool (once the 8th disks is replaced you can expand the pool to use all space available)

if you value your data use read only cache but leave the default random i/o caching option (no need to cache sequential reads as HDDs are good at doing that and you have 8 disks) using m.2 for Write cache run the risk of total loss of the pool if the write cache fails (even though its in RAID1 for Write cache does not mean its protected as it tends to crash/hang the synogly unit when 1 or both nvme ssds lock up)
 
sphinx99
until you start replacing 4 disks SHR2 and RAID6 performance would be the same as there will be only 1 slice in SHR2
Thank you for the reply and the advice.

I've setup a RAID-6 and externally am able to pull about 400MB/sec via a single 10gBase-T port to my Windows PC with the same. Using Ubiquity switches in the middle. Today I'll be trying to isolate if there is a bandwidth limitation within the network (ixperf) or within the NAS (putty via ssh, then use dd?) I figured I'd start with RAID-6 since going in with 16TB drives it seems fairly unlikely that I'm going to do partial drive upgrades anytime soon. At this point, with this much storage and investment, by the time the 1821+ holds me back, I'll be entertaining an altogether-new system.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a good way to pause the initial volume integrity check which at this size clearly is going to take a few days. I imagine it's best to avoid performance benchmarking until the volume has been fully checked out.

Thanks for the good tip on the NVMe & write cache. I don't think there's a great deal of write cache value for my purpose and will try to avoid using them as such. I did have an issue early on where the NAS went a bit bonkers trying to enable SSD cache while the volumes were still doing their integrity / parity check, and I ended up having to reset and start over. So, I am going to have to wait for the volumes to stabilize before enabling cache.
 
Thanks for the good tip on the NVMe & write cache. I don't think there's a great deal of write cache value for my purpose and will try to avoid using them as such. I did have an issue early on where the NAS went a bit bonkers trying to enable SSD cache while the volumes were still doing their integrity / parity check, and I ended up having to reset and start over. So, I am going to have to wait for the volumes to stabilize before enabling cache.
and with read only cache you don't need to use RAID1 both can be automatic independant read cache (if i last remember)
 
I wanted to post something of a capsule review of the experience of using a Synology NAS in place of hand-build and configured home servers. The DS1821+ represents the the 7th version of home storage server I've had over the last ~15+ years and is the first appliance so that's my perspective. I am using a DS1821+ populated with Exos X16 16TB drives and they are setup in an 8-disk RAID-6. I installed the dual-port 10GbE card (only one port in use) and added a 16GB ECC DIMM in addition to the 4GB that came with the device, for 20GB total. Hardware maintenance is stupid simple. Cover on the bottom for RAM. Hot-swap bays for the 8 drives... kind of plastic-y but they seem adequate. For awareness, this is the first to use the Ryzen V1500B which is (I believe) a quad-core x86-64 SOC at 2.2GHz with decent I/O, full support for ECC etc. Much faster than the Atoms, but lacks a GPU and therefore any significant HW transcode capability.

In terms of ease of use, my oh my. Kind of amazing how glitch-free and stable the appliance is right out of the box. Deploying packages like Plex is kind of brainless and the OS has a reasonably good security model to partition app access to data. Near as I can tell the Ryzen SOC on this unit seems to do fairly well but it is nowhere near say the power-hungry 4930k I was using before. In terms of performance, I'm able to sustain a solid and comfortable ~800MB/sec read/write to the volume over SMB from my Windows 10 PC. I don't know if I'm appliance limited (drives, CPU, RAID configuration & storage controllers, etc.) or network bandwidth limited; I have a desktop PC with a dual-port 10GbE card so I suppose I could team on both ends, but don't want to futz with it for now.

Building the volume only takes minutes but the consistency checks for an 8-disk 16TB RAID6 was kind of nuts... about 5 days and definitely affected performance. Since it completed, the appliance is responsive and fast on a fraction of the power budget of my previous PC... and it's small enough to put on a closet shelf.

Plex has been a little iffy at least in its current version; every ~3-4 days I have to stop and restart the service. That is the only negative I've seen so far. Synology offers a bunch of applications (email, chat and office productivity tools, media management and broadcast, etc.) but outside their Photo package I've not tried much of it. The Photo app actually fulfills a niche need for me - it presents on-NAS photos via web browser and allows users to tag people and add comments. This has been super useful for sharing old film/slide scans with extended family, all over the world, and let my parents and their siblings annotate these photos with some precious context. A nice value add.

The appliance cost about $1,000, the 10GbE dual-porter another ~ $230 and the RAM ~$130, so about $1,360 not counting the drives. For this price, absolutely no doubt I could build a far more performant system but the premium isn't crazy e.g. isn't 2x or 3x. I'm fairly certain I would -not- be able to beat the form factor though, and if I needed eight front-facing hot-swap bays, then all bets are off on cost.

Synology as a version of RAID called SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) that allows replacing drives with larger capacity drives (or adding new drives of larger capacity) down the road, at the expense of a performance hit. I futzed with it several times but eventually decided on traditional RAID 6. My reasoning was that I'm already using 16TB drives... if down the road I start to run short, there aren't going to be massively larger drives to swap to, and if there were, then I would rethink the architecture of the system altogether.

I definitely see the "Apple of storage appliances" moniker and think it's relatively accurate. Both the pros (excellent software, absolutely reliable, well thought out) and cons (walled garden SW; insistence on using Synology HW for upgrades etc.)

This was intended to be a "set it and forget it" system that gets me through at least a couple of years while getting rid of one big power-hungry box in a home where we're short on space and high on electric bills, so by that metric I am completely satisfied.
 
For comparison I will post my recent experience w/purchasing a Synology RAID. I purchased the DS1621+ 6-Bay. It's loaded with six Seagate IronWolf Pro 4TB. I know the risks of using RAID 0, but I decided to roll with that, as I wanted max performance and guessed that it would be fastest to prepare the system (parity check or whatever it's called took 5 hours).

I will be attaching a local backup drive to the unit's 3.1 USB drive and scheduling 2x daily backups, as well as providing one other local backup + one cloud backup.

I did not purchase the optional cache option as from reviews that I read there was negligible improvement.

I'm still learning about it's software features, but happy so far. Here are my speeds:
ae10f59e164d6e6dbb55bcf29b7a490cbe26006c.jpg


Few other salient notes:
-System is serving 2 PCs and 1 Mac...but just me. 24TB is fine for foreseeable future.
-I teamed it with Netgear XS508M switch and ASUS XG-C100C 10G Network Adapters.
-Total investment for 10GIG Switch, NIC cards, RAID and drives: $2,500.
 
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I wanted to post something of a capsule review of the experience of using a Synology NAS in place of hand-build and configured home servers. The DS1821+ represents the the 7th version of home storage server I've had over the last ~15+ years and is the first appliance so that's my perspective. I am using a DS1821+ populated with Exos X16 16TB drives and they are setup in an 8-disk RAID-6. I installed the dual-port 10GbE card (only one port in use) and added a 16GB ECC DIMM in addition to the 4GB that came with the device, for 20GB total. Hardware maintenance is stupid simple. Cover on the bottom for RAM. Hot-swap bays for the 8 drives... kind of plastic-y but they seem adequate. For awareness, this is the first to use the Ryzen V1500B which is (I believe) a quad-core x86-64 SOC at 2.2GHz with decent I/O, full support for ECC etc. Much faster than the Atoms, but lacks a GPU and therefore any significant HW transcode capability.

In terms of ease of use, my oh my. Kind of amazing how glitch-free and stable the appliance is right out of the box. Deploying packages like Plex is kind of brainless and the OS has a reasonably good security model to partition app access to data. Near as I can tell the Ryzen SOC on this unit seems to do fairly well but it is nowhere near say the power-hungry 4930k I was using before. In terms of performance, I'm able to sustain a solid and comfortable ~800MB/sec read/write to the volume over SMB from my Windows 10 PC. I don't know if I'm appliance limited (drives, CPU, RAID configuration & storage controllers, etc.) or network bandwidth limited; I have a desktop PC with a dual-port 10GbE card so I suppose I could team on both ends, but don't want to futz with it for now.

Building the volume only takes minutes but the consistency checks for an 8-disk 16TB RAID6 was kind of nuts... about 5 days and definitely affected performance. Since it completed, the appliance is responsive and fast on a fraction of the power budget of my previous PC... and it's small enough to put on a closet shelf.

Plex has been a little iffy at least in its current version; every ~3-4 days I have to stop and restart the service. That is the only negative I've seen so far. Synology offers a bunch of applications (email, chat and office productivity tools, media management and broadcast, etc.) but outside their Photo package I've not tried much of it. The Photo app actually fulfills a niche need for me - it presents on-NAS photos via web browser and allows users to tag people and add comments. This has been super useful for sharing old film/slide scans with extended family, all over the world, and let my parents and their siblings annotate these photos with some precious context. A nice value add.

The appliance cost about $1,000, the 10GbE dual-porter another ~ $230 and the RAM ~$130, so about $1,360 not counting the drives. For this price, absolutely no doubt I could build a far more performant system but the premium isn't crazy e.g. isn't 2x or 3x. I'm fairly certain I would -not- be able to beat the form factor though, and if I needed eight front-facing hot-swap bays, then all bets are off on cost.

Synology as a version of RAID called SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) that allows replacing drives with larger capacity drives (or adding new drives of larger capacity) down the road, at the expense of a performance hit. I futzed with it several times but eventually decided on traditional RAID 6. My reasoning was that I'm already using 16TB drives... if down the road I start to run short, there aren't going to be massively larger drives to swap to, and if there were, then I would rethink the architecture of the system altogether.

I definitely see the "Apple of storage appliances" moniker and think it's relatively accurate. Both the pros (excellent software, absolutely reliable, well thought out) and cons (walled garden SW; insistence on using Synology HW for upgrades etc.)

This was intended to be a "set it and forget it" system that gets me through at least a couple of years while getting rid of one big power-hungry box in a home where we're short on space and high on electric bills, so by that metric I am completely satisfied.

FWIW, I'm running an Intel based 1019+ and in the year I've had it, I've only had to restart the Plex service one time. Plex might not be fully baked with the Ryzen SOC yet?
 
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