You will see lots of videos and tutorials about how you upgrade your synology NAS to 16GB, by not only upgrading DIMM in the “user upgradable DIMM slot”, but by also changing the DIMM “inside” the array.
They say that this upgrade will take around 15 minutes, which if you have the right techique would be correct.
What they fail to mention is how difficult it is to get the replacement DIMM in place until you have the technique.
In the end, I used some electrical tape with a “pinch” to hold onto, as you cannot get you fingers through the hole where you insert the DIMM.
Once I tried the electrical tape (which can easily be removed after the correct insertion) it did, in fact, only take a couple of minutes, however prior to this technique I had little to no success for 30 minutes.
I assume that this technique can also be used on other similar Synology DS Series NAS’s.
Use the tape, it will save you time, patience and finger skin!!
But why have 16GB on a NAS?
- It will improve performance, as more recently files will be cached.
- You will be able to run more docker images simultaneously on the NAS.
- You can run larger VM’s.
But the main reason will be. If you like to have lots of Cloud-Sync directories, think Dropbox, where my Documents on my machine are synced to the NAS, not merely available over the network, lots of cache on the NAS will be useful and there will be a one to many replication.
I, for instance, have my DJ Sets (music tracks, cue-points, loops and sample data) synced from my iMac to my NAS, which then sync’s this information to my two laptops (Main and Backup). I use a local “Cloud-Sync” as often the sync will include 10’s or 100’s of GB of information, made up of many many small files. As the syncs are near “real-time” in reality my iMac will load up-to my NAS, whilst at the same time downloading to my 2 laptops, you don’t really want to touch disks for the reads, slowing down the writes. 14GB of cache will seriously help with that!
I would argue that 7% utilisation figure, whilst acurate for the way Linux thinks about RAM, The 14GB of RAM are being utilised approapreatly.
