Recommended Hardware DS918+?

[wessu]

I'm interested in building a NAS running DSM 7 and I'm leaning towards DS918+ setup

I would like a silent, low power setup. I am mainly interested in Photos app. I was trying to find a recommended hardware for the build online but it was hard to find. As I understand it, 11th and 12th gen Intel chips have limitations so I will need to look for 10th gen or even 9th gen to get most of the features working? the prices for 10th gen and 12th gen are almost the same on Amazon so it is a bummer to have to move to older hardware. Also, there will be more heat / power usage from older chips. I have an AMD system that I built before but it looks Intel has better compatibility. Is there a recommended CPU / motherboard for home use setup? I tried to look online for custom builds but I could not find much.

 

[flyride]

The AsRock J-series ITX motherboards are very close in spec to the DS9xx+ products.

[wessu]

I looked into that but it does not have NVME support and my understanding is that having NVME helps with caching, which will make things faster? The J motherboard series has a model with M.2 but it is only for WiFi/BT and not for NVME.

[IG-88]

 

 

2 hours ago, wessu said:

the prices for 10th gen and 12th gen are almost the same on Amazon so it is a bummer to have to move to older hardware.

the loss in compute power will not be recognizable irl in a nas, the only downside might be the missing bios updates

you can also look for used parts on other platforms, cpu and board are not "aging" like gpu's that might have been used in crypto farming

 

2 hours ago, wessu said:

Also, there will be more heat / power usage from older chips

beside using U types you could also simply lower the cpu frequency and voltage to achieve lower consumption

2 hours ago, wessu said:

have an AMD system that I built before but it looks Intel has better compatibility.

no problems with amd beside you can't use intel qsv hardware transcoding, if you want to user vmm (vm's) then you would need to use DS1621+ as base

also look here about limits like max. usable cpu cores, in this case the photo app would only be able to rely on pure cpu power

 

2 hours ago, wessu said:

Is there a recommended CPU / motherboard for home use setup? I tried to look online for custom builds but I could not find much.

look for pcie 3.0, more pcie slots then one or two (no mini-itx) and two m.2 nvme or use one and plan a pcie m.2 card, the cache with one nvme is just read cache and that has low effect in home enviroments, so use two nvme's for read/write cache (but to make use of that you would need to use 10G or at least 5G network - one of the reasons i suggest having enough pcie slots)

1 4x slot for nvme

1 4x slot for 10G nic

1 or 2  x 2x/4x slot for added ahci controller (more sata ports, use a pcie 3.0 chip like JMB585 or ASM1166)

forget about compact like using min-itx, to many limits

 

maybe there will be a new 922+ or 923+ with elkhard lake and newer i915 driver from synology, that would also open i915 support for 11th/12th gen i3/i5/i7 (they would need to use a newer i915 driver)

atm  a 10th gen might be the safest choice if you want to use the intel qsv in the photo app as there is a i915 patch to support this

https://xpenology.com/forum/topic/59909-i915ko-backported-driver-for-intel-10th-gen-ds918-ver-701-up3/

 

[flyride]

5 hours ago, wessu said:

I looked into that but it does not have NVME support and my understanding is that having NVME helps with caching, which will make things faster? The J motherboard series has a model with M.2 but it is only for WiFi/BT and not for NVME.

 

You said that you want silent, low power and cheap.

SSD caching is overrated, but it's your system.  Do some searches around here and elsewhere to see exactly how much value caching has.

 

I actually have a J4105-ITX and have a PCIe to NVMe adapter in mine (there is a single PCIe 2.0 x1 slot) so that I can run NVMe cache.  It's purely for testing purposes; it does absolutely nothing for performance, particularly considering my practical purpose for this system, which is data archive only.

[wessu]

On 5/20/2022 at 5:34 PM, flyride said:

 

You said that you want silent, low power and cheap.

SSD caching is overrated, but it's your system.  Do some searches around here and elsewhere to see exactly how much value caching has.

 

I actually have a J4105-ITX and have a PCIe to NVMe adapter in mine (there is a single PCIe 2.0 x1 slot) so that I can run NVMe cache.  It's purely for testing purposes; it does absolutely nothing for performance, particularly considering my practical purpose for this system, which is data archive only.

 

I didn't know this before. I went online and read about it and for the things I need, NVME does not help me a lot. That will change my system parts selection. Thank you for sharing this.