Date: June 3, 2020

Synology NAS is my top choice of NAS. I have four NAS at home. i.e. DS214, DS419slim, DS916+ & DS918+.

Don’t ask me why I have so many? Because some are stupid reason.

1. I thought all Synology products are equal. Without doing any research, I went and buy DS214 and it turn out to be a 2-bay only, 2014 model. I bought it back in 2017 I think. So, I was so confident about the performance of my Synology DS412 (long time ago) and I thought buying anything under the brand is good. But not so true.
2. I made another mistake again, when I see a smaller and slimmer version. i.e. DS419slim. I think it is cool. And since it is 2019 model, I thought it is fast. But it turn out to be a basic or entry level of Synoloogy 4-bay NAS. It comes with I think only 1GB of RAM and the system is so slow.
3. So, to store my precious photos, I have decided to upgrade my DS214 to DS918+. And I can see huge performance difference.

My old DS916+ will remain to be the backup NAS for my Photo NAS. Yeap, I am very kiasu. I backup everyday from my DS918+ to my DS916+ on the photo folders. I have around 650GB of Photo Library (without RAW files) plus countless RAW files.

Upgrading the NAS is very easy. You need to upgrade one disk by one disk. So, while the NAS is running, you unplug one disk (old 6TB) out from the Synology NAS and you plug in a new hard disk, i.e. 9TB (yes, hot swap. ). Yeap, no need to shut down the NAS. Just do it while the power is on. Then, the NAS will complaint and says that your storage volume is degrading. Once you plug in the new hard disk, the lights turn on. All you need to do is configure your storage by “Repairing” it.

So the process is very simple. But the waiting is not. It takes so long to repair the disk. Some time 1-day some time 3-6 days. Depending on your hard disk size and opeartions you are doing.

So, there is a way to speed things up. Just go to the Configuration, and change the RAID Resync Speed Limits to “Run RAID resync faster”.

So, what it does is… it raised the Min speed limit from 10MB/s to 300MB/s. And I can see the speed actually much faster once I did this.

The “Lower the impact on overall system performance (recommended)” tick is actually 10MB/s for the minimum.

I didn’t bother to set the Max to higher because I think repairing task needs to be done deligately. You can’t rush it. So, I am ok with the Max speed at 600MB/s.

The same goes to EXPANDING the storage. Expanding means, you add an additional disk onto the exiting disks. For example, I have 2x 6TB now, and I am adding another 1x6TB into the storage. So, I am expanding the storage.

This one is even slower. For your info, this has been running for 3 days. And it is at 80% before I swith it to “faster” mode. After I switched, it came to 94% within 30min from 80%. This is very good speed.

Of course, before you change the speed, make sure you Eject the NAS drive from your iMac, Macbook, etc etc. You should not be running any processes or tasks or jobs while you are expanding or repairing. So, all the Antivirus scanning, Indexing, File copying, backups needed to be stop.

So, I am happy now. Since the speed of repairing or expanding is much faster. Can be completed in half a day.