Moving from a Synology DS218j to a DS423
20 Mar 2025 • Reviews
My old NAS that I use for backups and store machine learning datasets I seldom use was becoming frustratingly slow. As a result I swapped out my Synology DS218j (with two 4TB WD Red drives), for a new DS423 with a third 4TB WD Red drive. As I am curious on the real world performance impact I sougth out to benchmark the two set-ups:
Brief Test
I mounted the NAS share directly to my filesystem at
/mnt/benchmark (using SMB/CIFS). Using dd, I
tested sequential read and write speeds by transferring a 1GB file to
and from this mount point over a LAN connection.
- Write:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/benchmark/testfile bs=1M count=1024 status=progress - Read:
dd if=/mnt/benchmark/testfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 status=progress
Results
| Metric | Old DS218j (2x4TB) | New DS423 (3x4TB) | Speedup |
|---|---|---|---|
| Write | 31.6 MB/s | 116 MB/s | ~3.7x |
| Read | 47.4 MB/s | 95.3 MB/s | ~2.0x |
Thoughts & Conclusion
That’s pretty awesome, the DS423 is quite a bit faster, especially when writing files – it’s basically hitting the Gigabit Ethernet limit now (125 MB/s). Reads are twice as fast too. Besides the synthetic benchmarks interacting with the NAS feels a lot more fluid now.
Note: I am aware of the fact that adding the third hard-drive and updating the Synology violates ceteris paribus - but from a practical point of view, this doesn’t concern me too much as I was primarily interested in increasing my user experience with my NAS.
Have any feedback?
Please feel free to send me a mail! I would love to hear from you.