Storage

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link One thing many people overlook in a storage system is how the actual drives that go into the system play a vital role in determining the overall dependability of the solution. At the same time, business environments also demand more. They require performance and predictability. Why we're introducing our HAT5300 enterprise hard drives Synology can control what components we use in our NAS. We also design and thoroughly test our DiskStation Manager (DSM) operating system and software ecosystem on our devices to ensure they work well together. But how do

Synology introduced an entirely redesigned DiskStation Manager (DSM) in the online event, 2021 AND BEYOND. DSM is the unified operating system powering Synology data management solutions, and version 7.0 brings new technologies for storage, backup, and hybrid cloud. "Unprecedented quantities of data have undergone processing, whether for data analytics, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, telemedicine, or for countless more innovations. All of this is making a huge impact on our lifestyle and the way we do business, forming a "data economy" where owning more data gives you a competitive edge against others," said Philip Wong, Synology founder and Chief Executive

We’ve talked about how we can use SSD cache to reduce latency and accelerate transfer speeds. We’ve also explained the differences between consumer and enterprise SSDs, and why for sustained performance reasons we suggest the latter. Consumer and enterprise SSDs are two broad categories that encompass a wide range of performance profiles. Due to differences in how vendors test and rate their products, buying based off advertised numbers is not enough. In today’s post, we’ll explore how NAND types affect performance significantly, and why this should matter to your next purchasing decision. NAND flash types NAND flash memory data is

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