Cheap backup with no whistles!

[Trexx]

I personally would get a 2nd HDD if budget would allow and then mirror your existing drive. It will help in case of drive failure, and also will improve your performance on read as you will have doubled your IOPs vs. the single drive.

The memory bump can come in handy if you are running quite a few applications on the QNAP.
The SSD cache will give some benefit, but currently is only supported for READ caching (until QTS 4.2 is released) so depends on your use case/data access patterns/etc.

 

[sfx2000]

I personally would get a 2nd HDD if budget would allow and then mirror your existing drive. It will help in case of drive failure, and also will improve your performance on read as you will have doubled your IOPs vs. the single drive.

The memory bump can come in handy if you are running quite a few applications on the QNAP.

Completely agree on the memory bump, I would max it out at the full 8GB - and will let you do more with the Apps in the QNAP App Store - like running the Virtualization Station or doing any kind of transcoding...

It can take 2 SODIMM's - DDR3L up to 8GB in matched pairs - shouldn't cost over $60 at the most... buy good memory, Crucial works well...

 

[sfx2000]

The SSD is a small 180GB Intel 520. Remember, I am currently using only one 4TB HDD in the TS-251 unit and have a spare slot.

See my other post regarding RAM - yes, bump it to the max - you can find 8GB kits pretty reasonable these days...

If the SSD is a spare, drop it in and play with it... just keep in mind, if it's older, the Intel 520's will self-brick at end-of-life, so check the drive's SMART stats...

 

[Deleted member 40788]

Okay, I'll try the SSD for caching and just play with it until I get another HDD drive.

I'm assuming this Crucial 8GB Kit (4GBx2) CT2KIT51264BF160B will work?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005LDLVAO/?tag=snbforums-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/R14W9D8103/?tag=snbforums-20
Thanks guys!

 

[sfx2000]

As long as it's DDR3L 1600 (PC3-12800) you should be ok - if you're going for 8GB, then you want two matched 4GB SO-DIMM's..

newer Mac's use the same memory part (MacBook Pro mid-2012, Mac Mini 2012), so you can use that as a reference when shopping on the Amazon..

 

[kamina]

Ok update on my QNAP TS-251. I did a quick search on SSD caching and see there is somewhat of a performance boost, but will it make since to use my spare SSD for cache or just create another volume for music/video so it can be read faster? The SSD is a small 180GB Intel 520. Remember, I am currently using only one 4TB HDD in the TS-251 unit and have a spare slot.

The other option I was looking at was memory and bumping the pre-installed 1GB to 4GB and what the real benefit would be besides installing VM's.

http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=110935#p484415
http://www.snbforums.com/threads/nas-performance-using-ssd-caching.15921/

I'm still not fully convinced, would need quite a lot of systematic testing to see where those benefits hold and where not. I got a TS-453S with 3 fairly slow 2.5" M9T drives and thought I'd use an extra 500GB SSD I have as Cache. I was surprised to notice that old Pictures (old because the files are quite a lot smaller) where moving to and from the NAS at close to Wire speed. I tested on my old slower NAS (Synology 211j) and there transfer speeds dropped 70% from max when working with the same directory.

I don't know if I actually have the patience to test this enough, one use case where I figure the cache could really help would be with VM's, but I'm not sure how much they are even used there since it's a big img file and by default big files are not cached.