Storage

One of our most important goals in 2019 was “reliability.” To get there, we changed many of our internal development policies and methods. Let’s take a brief look back at what we did, and a sneak peek at what's coming in 2020. DSM We made eight releases1 in 2019, a significantly lower amount than in previous years. It isn’t a sign that we’re slowing down development but instead reflects our new focus on reliability. We adopted a slower update cadence to allow more time for additional rounds of internal testing. Stages a typical DSM update goes through: Automated In-Development Testing

A robust, cost-efficient platform for 3D professionals “Storage used to play a secondary role in high-performance computing (HPC) environments, and yet it has a critical role to play in the field of cloud-based 3D rendering and image processing,” said Dr. Kuo, a researcher in the National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC) in Taiwan. With the rise of 3D trends, high-end CPUs alone can no longer meet the demands of independent artists and production companies. 3D rendering requires more computing power from the GPU, along with massive storage and stronger throughput performance. Though the mission is to become an internationally renowned HPC center

Compatibility makes all the difference System memory is used by practically everything on a device with compute capabilities. For a NAS, it is responsible for not only allowing the processor to run core services, additional packages, or even other operating systems via virtualization but also caching the data that is being accessed. System memory provides a small but extremely fast, temporary storage to buffer incoming and outgoing data to improve performance. Many Synology devices support system memory upgrades. Installing additional memory modules may help your device become snappier and will potentially allow it to support additional users and services. It’s a relatively simple

Performance and price are all-too-obvious pitfalls when purchasing SSDs How much are you willing to spend on SSDs to configure SSD cache on NAS or build all-flash storage arrays? Our statistics show that the average cost per gigabyte is 0.31 USD for Synology users who have installed SSDs in the high-end models (xs/xs+). This indicates that Synology users are price-sensitive, but in the meantime, they’re also pursuing a boost in performance. Try to google “SSD performance” and you will get a bunch of results showing you how to interpret the performance figures from SSD specifications. They’ll tell you that 4K

No more keeping fingers crossed Drive failures can go undetected and may occur anytime, and they will either lead to volume degradation or volume crashes. It’s less of a problem if a hard drive failure results in a degraded volume since you only have to rebuild your RAID array by finding out the damaged drive and replacing it with a new one. However, it’s a bigger threat when it comes to volume crashes. If you don’t have a backup plan or a DR solution in place, it’s very likely that you’re going to experience catastrophic data loss. So, is there

Small steps to big protection for your storage Data scrubbing, as the name suggests, is a process of inspecting volumes and modifying the detected inconsistencies. As times goes by, some data may fall victim to slow degradation that gradually deteriorates data integrity. Worse still, they occur silently without any warning. Take photos as an example. It could be a real disaster if it happens to one of your precious photos capturing the indelible memories. The two images below are the original photo and the corrupt one that suffers from bit rot. Read on to see how data scrubbing prevents your

Eliminating the I/O bottleneck HDD vs. SSD: Why difference matters There’s an ongoing battle between HDDs and SDDs, both of which have their own pros and cons. An HDD is composed of an actuator, read/write arm, spindle, and platters onto which data is stored. When dealing with high traffic of read/write requests (especially for a large number of small-sized files), the platter spins and read/write head keeps moving to search for data scattered on the drive in a non-contiguous manner. That’s when latency kicks in. An SDD, however, has no moving parts and uses flash memory to store data, which

Breaking the performance barrier Considering the data growth in 2020 will reach 44 zettabytes, according to IDC research, businesses are faced with the need to boost data processing performance. From a file server’s standpoint, enhancing IOPS has become more and more important. The utilization of SSD cache would be of great help. However, the output bandwidth must be aligned with higher IOPS or it would become a waste, especially since we’re living in the collaboration era where a storage server should be smoothly serving multiple users at the same time. 10GbE might be the way out. Some enterprises might construct

Is a NAS drive worth it, or is it just another gimmick? Let’s find out. When it comes to choosing hard drives for a NAS device, many users may pinch pennies and make do with lower-cost desktop drives. Some are probably not even aware that desktop drives are not designed for closely nested environments like a NAS. With greater reliability, NAS drives are particularly suitable for a NAS environment. With the heat-resistant and anti-vibration design, a NAS HDD is tailor-made for a NAS server, providing 24/7 operation with higher speeds. A NAS drive solution may be a substantial investment in

Synology 2019 annual event has already come and gone, but there’s plenty to catch up on, with Synology unveiling a variety of new products and sharing market trends for the future. Featuring smart, streamlined, and solid, Synology 2019 invited users to bear witness to how our household- and enterprise-level solutions offer a simple management experience while taking stability to new heights at the same time. Let’s see what the future holds for Synology and what’s in store for our users. The all-inclusive solutions center around storage, off-site backup, networking technology, and cloud services, including DiskStation Manager 7.0 (DSM 7.0) that