Morning all and happy Friday! Quick one as I’m think about adding a NAS to my setup:
What’s the right level of RAM for a NAS? I see lots of them pre-configured with 1GB, but then also see Amazon selling larger modules separately. Is 1GB enough?? Just going to use it to stream ripped CDs and store old digital photo albums.
If you just want to use a NAS as a music store and run a UPnP server, the lowest spec Synology or QNAP is more than enough. With 1GB of RAM it won’t break a sweat.
Chris - thanks!! Wasn’t sure if it was going to be performing more intensive processes in the background
I use a QNAP with only 512Mo of RAM.
I listen to FLAC 24/192 with minimserver on a streamer without problem.
BUT I don’t use ROON on my NAS.
As I only have 1st gen streamers, Roon not really an option - but something to consider in future upgrades. Assume RAM in a NAS is swappable?
If you want to run Roon in future I would consider using a computer such as a Mac Mini, Intel Nuc or similar, and keep the Synology for backup.
Not all NAS has that facility, newer models yes, best check if that is really a concern.
If you feel 1G is enough for you, go for it.
That said, my Syn DS214 has 512m of RAM and as been said already, for music streaming that’s all you need, when playing the RAM use is very low at something like 5 to 10%.
I have a Synology 218+ which came with 2gb. That worked fine for streaming. Upgraded by purchasing additional 4gb of Crucial ram for less than £20. This makes everything smoother & quicker to open when using DSM apps (eg photo managing) but no noticeable difference when streaming. If your NAS has a memory expansion slot then for £20 or so I would add the additional ram.
Just take into account if you replace the RAM, your Synology NAS will complain that it’s not using Synology RAM with DSM 7.0 onwards, it’s that same with non Synology hard disks.
It only issues the warning at boot time and can be ignored.
What i did to my 218+
My DS1817+ runs DSM 7.2.1. I’ve never seen it complain about non Synology disks when booted up. Mine are Seagate IronWolf drives. Ditto my DS1813+ which runs DSM 7.1.1 (7.2 is not available).
Ah I’m running a DS1821+ DSM 7.2.1-69057 Update 3 so maybe it’s only on the newer / larger versions.
I’ll be checking carefully for any such message next time I reboot 
. Mine are on 24/7 as they provide other functions in addition to a music server (Emby DLNA).
Actually haven’t rebooted it in a while, it’s not notifying me about the RAM & non Synology disks now.
Just showing a spare disk and the USB disk that I use to do weekly backups of my Music.
Maybe they had loads of people complaining.
Umm good job I didn’t buy approved RAM, OMG £321 for a 16Gb stick
The standard RAM is absolutely fine for running Asset etc.
We upgraded RAM on our 220 only to allow running virtual machines. Trivial and cheap to do. Now we’ve got an NDX2 (and don’t need the Hi-Res workarounds we had with 272) we only run Asset on NAS.
However we might resurrect some VMs in the near future, since it looks like naim won’t be supporting Tidal Max anytime soon.
As others have indicated 1GB RAM, is entirely adequate for audio streaming. More RAM is typically most helpful for large-scale video/image editing or other data intensive applications.
My NAS is more than happy running Asset serving my music tracks to all my devices.
It’s also happy streaming video to my TV and processing my documents.
My NAS (both qnap and syno) are too old. I can’t change RAM
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