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.
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.
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.
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.