TS-509 with 4GB RAM

[Dennis Wood]

In keeping with our rather exhaustive exploration of NAS performance, we've updated our two TS509 units to 4GB of RAM. A 4GB kit (2 x 2GB SO-DIMM 667 DDR2) did the trick. The RAM is from Kingston, part number KVR667D2S5K2/4G with a cost of about $80 (CAD) for the kit (2 sticks). These are SO-DIMM sticks which are typically used in laptops. To install in the TS509 takes about 2 minutes by removing the case cover, removing the 1 GB S0-DIMM and replacing with the two 2GB SO-DIMMS.

This may be voiding the warranty btw, so go at your own risk. The vast majority of failures in computer hardware occur relatively quickly, so after 30 days the odds are pretty slim of a warranty issue anyway.

More testing to come, but basically a 2.5GB file write to the NAS from a Vista RAID0 workstation ran at 101MB/s. More testing to come, but basically any single files up to about 3.5GB (or a file set under 3.5GB) should write at this speed. The test workstation is now running an Adaptec 3405 PCIe RAID controller card with 4 x 500GB WD drives attached. More tests on that coming too.

Cheers,

[Dennis Wood]

As expected, write speeds with a single 2.5GB test file have improved to 78 MB/s (4GB RAM), over the previous benchmark of 42 MB/s (1GB RAM), and read speeds remain similar. This makes sense as the 2.5GB file is fed into the NAS unit's 4GB cache. When re-reading or re-writing a cached file, performance is close to 100 MB/s. Increasing the NAS RAM will do little to improve read performance unless the file being read is already cached at either end.

This is where IOZONE is departing from measured performance...it models a much lower speed than actually measured. I can't find a single benchmarking program that does...they're either considerably over, or considerably under the measured results.

[Dennis Wood]

A bit more tuning with the result that using the Vista SP1 workstation with the Adaptec 3405, we're measuring 74MB/s writes and 91MB/s reads from the TS509. This is using our standard 4.8GB file set with a mixed set of files from 1.8GB to 75k or so.

An interesting downside of more RAM in the NAS is that if you write a large file set, and then request (read) a large file set immediately after, the read performance suffers while the previously cached files are written to disk.

Another improvement of note is the rate at which our ffmpeg encoding test over the LAN is sending data. A single 500MB HD file is split into two streams and these are written simultaneously to the NAS. The two streams are being written at a total of 65MB/s and read at 75MB/s.

[spikehome]

Nice.

Was not sure for buying the qnap ts509 or synology or readynas pro.
Synlogy is off because the speed.
qnap dont support iscsi but read at the qnap forum that it wil come.
readynas pro to expensive (yet).
so qnap with 4gb ram

[Don]

Great update. Thanks.

I have a question about the swap file. Does the size of the swap file need to be changed since you now have 4x the amount of memory?

Don

[Dennis Wood]

Once the RAM is installed, the NAS reports it in the system overview admin page....and that's it! There's nothing to configure on the unit.

[spikehome]

@Dennis Wood

Ordered this weekend a qnap-ts509 with the 4gb ram and 5x500gb disks.
One question: did you make the test with load balanced nics?
Or just with one nic?
(i hope my nas is here tomorrow)

[Don]

Dennis,

I just installed two Kingston 2gb memory SODIMMS. When I go into web admin interface and go to System Logs -> System Information my systems shows Total Memory 3541.7 MB. Is this what yours shows? I assume it's because devices are mapped into this address space.

don

[faaip05]

So something must have went wrong with mine, it installed and booted just fine, then I go to see how much ram it is showing and I see:

Total Memory: 3033.7 MB

Also, the speeds (both read and write) are wayyyy slower then they were before. I am getting 14MB/s now, before I was in the 50-70MB/s range.

Any idea?

Current firmware version: 2.0.3 Build 1016T

[Don]

Don't know about the speed but it sounds like you have a 1gb and a 2gb installed. What is you network connection speed?