NAS with SSD?

Sensible, beneficial, or just forget and carry on with my Synology and old school disks?

Hi Housey.

Both options have their strengths and weaknesses, so it really depends on what you are looking for.
The SSD is naturally considered as more reliable and durable since it has no mechanical parts. You also get a great speed increase, which however could be limited by the NAS enclosure's capabilities and/or your network speed and thus not really see a great difference. They also consume less power, produce less heat and do not emit any noise (which is really important for many users).
However, SSD's still can't match the HDDs capacity, at least not in terms of cost effectiveness.

Basically my advice is the following - keep going the old fashioned way with the HDDs if you need higher capacity and if it fits your budget better. Or, if you think your NAS enclosure will be able to benefit from the SSDs without bottlenecking their performance and the budget is no under consideration - go and treat yourself with a nice quiet NAS packed with SSDs.

Cheers!
Boogieman_WD

If you're accessing thousands of really small files very often over network, especially if there are multiple users accessing them, then go with SSDs.

Or if you're using them as an iSCSI target for VMs that require great speed, then SSD.

A normal hard drive will max out gigabit already, so unless you've got a 10GB NAS and network, then there's little benefit, besides noise.

Personally, I use WD Red drives in my NAS.

I'd never run a SSD in a NAS, your network connection will be a major bottleneck to it's speed and the cost per MB is way too high. Unless you want to do it for the heck of it, then all power to you.

Thanks for the feedback everyone. This is for use in my home so mainly used for media files (video, music, movies, photos, applications, stuff) and some business backup ups and personal documentation so it's not a heavily used device. I am still running my original Synology DS410J but this device is no longer supported within the DSM upgrade program and it's 85% full so my plan was to go to a 1515+ and add some new drives. I only have a Gigabyte network so frankly SSD would be a waste based on above so will go old school, high capacity HD's.

The device does support 5 drives, so I could use an SSD for Cache purposes perhaps, best of both worlds approach or again wasted effort for no real benefit?

In your typical home setting, you'd see zero difference. I'd sooner fit a new SSD in my PC.

BoatyMcBoatface said:

In your typical home setting, you'd see zero difference. I'd sooner fit a new SSD in my PC.

Click to expand...

Fair enough. I've got 6 in my PC already

Housey said:

Thanks for the feedback everyone. This is for use in my home so mainly used for media files (video, music, movies, photos, applications, stuff) and some business backup ups and personal documentation so it's not a heavily used device. I am still running my original Synology DS410J but this device is no longer supported within the DSM upgrade program and it's 85% full so my plan was to go to a 1515+ and add some new drives. I only have a Gigabyte network so frankly SSD would be a waste based on above so will go old school, high capacity HD's.

The device does support 5 drives, so I could use an SSD for Cache purposes perhaps, best of both worlds approach or again wasted effort for no real benefit?

Click to expand...

I have the Synology 1815+ (wasn't that much more than the 1515+ at the time!). I'd not bother with SSD at the moment, I've just packed it with 3TB Reds until 6TB Red's get cheaper.

No need for faster disks really slower spinny disks are still fine, I copy files to/from the NAS at nice speeds even over the wired network.