Table of Contents Show
Synology is a pioneer in NAS devices which are great for any scale business or personal data distribution model. You might have mastered the recipe of RAID configuration and gotten a decent amount of performance from your setup. But the system you adopted might not be performance-optimized to utilize the full potential of the network speed. Populating your setup with SSDs is not so cost-friendly option out there, and the most feasible solution is here in the form of an exclusive line of Synology Cache Cards.
What are cache cards?
With Synology Cache Cards in place, users can experience high-speed bandwidth with ultra-low latency and seamless buffering and accessing experience. These cards are beefed up with sets of PCIe M.2 SSD, and the cellular storage architecture provides a great benefit in delivering high-performance I/O over the network. It enhances the cache storage and gradually decreases the load on HDDs.
Also Buy: Best Synology Hard Drive. and Best Synology Docker Container
Synology M.2 Adapter Card M2D18
Pairing your Synology NAS with M2D18 Adapter Card will surely amaze you with noticeable network performance improvisation. With this extension, you can eliminate all bottlenecks and upgrade your system network to 10Gbe. This cache adapter is engineered with high-quality heat dissipation sinks for the main PCB and M.2 SSDs. You will end up spending around $149 for this 7.16-inch long PCIe adapter that perfectly fits most of the NAS. It serves the purpose of photo indexing, file searching & ramping up virtualization environments. If you are seeking to tweak your NAS with a hardware solution, then Synology M.2 Adapter Card M2D18 is a great pocket-friendly option to address the network delivery speed rate.
Synology M.2 Adapter Card (M2D20)
Taiwan made M2D20 card is designed to deliver raw performance to supercharge your I/O performance with multi-queue capability that ensures high bandwidth on multi-threaded data transfer. Compared to its budget sibling, the M2D20 Adapter Card is $20 costlier than M2D18. The adapter is only Synology SSD compliant and only entertains SNV3500-400G and SNV3400-400G M.2 SSD models. Synology provides a whopping 5-year warranty on this card, which justifies its pricing. If you are thinking of upgrading your NAS for $200, then M2D20 might be your best option.
Sonnet Fusion SSD M.2 4×4 PCIe Card
We also decided to provide you with an alternative to Synology, which will widen your analysis spectrum and help you find the cache card that best serves your purpose. The cache adapter from Sonnet Fusion SSD M.2 4×4 PCIe Card will be meeting your demand of supporting 4 M.2 SSDs, which can collectively have 32 GB of network caching power. It will help you eliminate all possible bottlenecks hindering your network I/O bandwidth. Accelerating up to 12000 MB/s, Sonnet Fusion can be paired with Sonnets Echo Express III-D, Echo Express III-R, xMac Mini Server, xMac Pro Server and thunderbolt expansion systems. The 16 lane PCIe, 3.0 sonnet fusion cache card gives you great performance without not heat concerning issues.
Synology 10Gb Ethernet and M.2 Adapter Card E10M20
The medium and large-scale business operations require a lag-free seamless data delivery architecture where Synology E10M20 can surely be the perfect choice of cache card. This is an M.2 SSD & 10GbE combo adapter card which is operating at an eight-lane PCIe 3.0 bus configuration & this card is capable of delivering 10 Gbps data transfer rates running on full-duplex mode. 9 Kb jumbo frame will offer you a great advantage over network performance acceleration. It is a pro-level card that can serve medium and large-scale organizations with TSO, LSO, RSS, GRO & GSO functionalities.
Awareness regarding network cache is very much required for serving nodes with extensive data bandwidth. Therefore we present you a comparison of the two most highly demanded Network Adapter Cache Card, namely Synology M2D20 vs M2D18:
Synology M2D20 vs M2D18:
Synology has released a very interesting line of segments, among which we will be comparing M2D18 & M2D20. Both siblings are best at what they are intended to do. Both cards come with an eight-lane PCIe bus, though the versions are different; on M2D18, it is 2.0, and on M2D20, it is 3.0. Card dimensions are almost the same. The lower end card comes with a three-year warranty, while with M2D20, Synology offers a five-year warranty. M2D20 can be operated with a PCIe NVMe storage interface, and if you want to have SATA support, too, you can go with M2D18. Form factor is a considerable attribute, with 18 series you get 2280 / 2260 / 2242 & 22110 / 2280 for M2D20 respectively. Both offerings from Synology are a good choice and can be best for medium and large level enterprise data network serving.
From the indepth analysis we can derive that NAS optimization can be a daunting task, but with in-depth research like this, you can select a network caching card that best fits your requirement and budget. Consider all the options thoroughly before making a purchase and calculating the M.2 SSD price, which you will have to add in the later phase. Happy networking to all of the readers. Stay tuned for more such interesting updates.
