Just got delivery of the DS923+ so now figuring out the drives and other add-ons to order. I was curious if I could first put in an SSD like a Crucial MX500 and start up the NAS, and finish installation of DSM. And once that’s done, add the rest of the drives (had 3x Seagate Ironwolf Pro 18TB in mind) as a separate volume. Would this work? (more importantly, would this help?) Would love any other suggestions for things I can add to the NAS.

  • anonymkEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    I did it the same way on my ds220+ and it worked without any problems.

    • @tirestarterOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      That’s great to hear, thank you! Now I’m wondering if I should do 2 SSD and 2 HDD or 1 SSD and 3 HDD like I originally thought.

      • anonymkEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        Maybe I’ve misunderstood the initial question. I’ve put in a ssd, set up DSM, put all files on it and installed a second ssd for raid1 later.

        • @tirestarterOPEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          Oh I understand. I’m trying to do something different. I want to install just one SSD, do the initial set up so DSM (and any future apps) would live on it. Then in the other 3 bays I’d add the HDDs as a second volume. A potential downside to doing this would be that if the SSD fails, the NAS would fail entirely. But I don’t know enough about DSM to know if that’s the case.

            • @tirestarterOPEnglish
              1•1 year ago

              Thank you for this. That’s helpful to know that if the SSD fails, the NAS wouldn’t stop. More interested in trying this out now 🤞

              • @[email protected]English
                1•1 year ago

                You’re welcome.

                I’m not sure if you’ll get a speed benefit or not since there is no way to prioritize the SSD.

                • @tirestarterOPEnglish
                  0•1 year ago

                  My hope is that if I initialize NAS with just the SSD first, it’d have the smallest drive number, so DSM would just start off that. And maybe get some more performance if other apps/containers also ran off the SSD.

                  • @[email protected]English
                    1•1 year ago

                    In my experience restart are infrequent. DSM runs plenty fast.

                    When I have a container that performs frequent small read/writes, i.e. lemmy and pictrs, I put those directories on a USB connected SSD. That greatly increased the performance of the containers I moved to that solution.

                    My other biggest performance boost was caching my main volume with two NVME SSDs.