I have a team of three people running Mac Studios. I just bought a Synology DiskStation DS1821+. Do I need the Synology brand NVME or can I just use a 990 Pro? I was thinking of buying two and doing a read/write for video dumping and a read for video editing.
I upgraded the Nic to a dual 10g card. I have a 10gb switch with cat 6 running to each mac studio which supports 10g. I also upgraded the ram.
Bonus questions: do I need to use both ethernet connections on the synology or won’t that do any good in my use case?
About the SSD cache with NVMe drives. A cache is assigned to a volume. When the videos for dumping and editing are on the same volume, you can not have a read/write and read-only cache for the same volume. Note that for a read/write cache you use both modules in a RAID 1 configuration. Best practice is to have a UPS if you have a read/write cache.
SSD cache and large video files: I doubt whether you see any improvement. There is an SSD cache advisor in Storage Manager. You can have it run for 30 days and decide.
Cache size: I often see people buy high capacity NVMe modules from Samsung or another brand. It appears that the cache does not use that capacity and that a lower capacity from Synology are a better value. The Synology’s do not wear out quickly (enterprise grade SSD).
About the network connections: you could bond the two NICs. It would be best to have a switch that supports this but that is not necessary. With 3 users I do not see the benefit.
Last but not least: I understand you want the best possible performance while editing video from the NAS. But understand that software settings like proxies and half res timeline are as important as the hardware, if not more important.
You can use the Samsung 990 PRO NVMe SSD with the Synology DS1821+, although it’s not officially supported. DSM may display compatibility warnings, but the drive will function correctly for read/write cache or as a separate storage volume. For video workflows, NVMe caching can help with metadata and small file access but may offer limited performance gains for large sequential video files. In some cases, creating a dedicated NVMe storage volume is more effective. Since your Mac Studios connect via 10GbE through a switch, using a single 10GbE port on the Synology is sufficient. Dual-port link aggregation is only beneficial for increased aggregate throughput or redundancy in multi-client environments.
