Synology DSM 5.2 on 1815+ Enabling R/W SSD Cache

I’ve been deploying a few Synology units lately. They’re well featured, easy to use, reliable and very well priced. For small scale spot SMB storage, they certainly are hard to beat.

Up until now, I hadn’t had the need or requirement for any significant performance profiles, with just the SHR RAID and NL-SAS disks performing adequately. That changed for this case, and I needed to ensure that the user experience for the workloads performed really well.

The inventory was a 1815+, 4 x WD RED 3TB, 4GB RAM upgrade and a pair of Intel 300GB S3500 (a second unit used 2 x Samsung 256GB 850 PRO due to some supply issues).

In any case the unit was powered up and configured in minutes and the latest DSM loaded (5565). Always use 5.2 for deployments using SSD cache, due to the vastly improved memory footprint).

A SHR Volume with single disk fault-tolerance was created. Next came time to setup the Read/Write Cache. Unlike using SSD for Read Cache only, R/W must be provisioned in a RAID 1 mirror.

From the Storage Manager, click on SSD Cache. Notice there’s an item called SSD Cache Advisor. For units already deployed, but without any SSD acache, this will profile the data usage over a period of time and then advise on suitability for Cache and a recommended size. Neat.

Let’s go at it anyway ! Click Create and then it’s simply a matter of following the bouncing ball;

The cache is created and ready for use, all with a tidy, dynamic interface that actually animates in real time with read-cache hits.

I don’t have any performance data as yet, and will post again after the unit has been in production for a little while.

You have to hand it to the Synology crew. They are packing high end features into their kit whilst maintaining the ease of use and fluent UI they have become renowned for.