When I bought my Synology DS416play, I was concerned about the included 1GB of RAM.
I eventually decided that it probably didn’t matter that much how much RAM it had
When I saw my RAM filling up for no reason, my concerns grew again.
I decided I’d upgrade the RAM with some of the spare laptop memory I have laying around.
Opening the case:
DISCLAIMER: Anything you do inside your Synology NAS is your responsibility. Whether or not your warranty will become void is a risk you are agreeing to take by opening up your unit.
This YouTube video actually helped me with removing the case:
What RAM to use?
The original Synology stick is 1GB DDR3L 1600mHz 1.35v Samsung memory
I grabbed a 4GB stick out of the ‘ol pile, you should too unless you have some cash to spare.
PC3L-12800 = DDR3L 1600mHz –> Check.
This is 4GB PC3L 1Rx8 12800S RAM.
Installation:
Here shows (kind of) the original stick in green.
Here is the board now with the 4GB stick.
Put back together.
I don’t feel like explaining this part. Just don’t mess anything up!
After installation and reassembly, I booted the NAS successfully. Phew.
Check out the 4GB:
Now I have way too much RAM.
12 Comments
lxne · February 25, 2021 at 4:54 am
Thank you for this post.
I upgraded to 4GB about half a year ago.
It was very worth it.
Jackie · April 17, 2020 at 11:52 pm
Great post. Simple and straight forward.
Just wonder if 4gb is big enough? If I go for a 8gb RAM, wasting money and no difference with 4gb performance?
Thanks
Tyler Woods · April 17, 2020 at 11:54 pm
I am totally fine with 4gb but I have servers for a lot of my stuff, if you’re trying to do a lot like docker/VMs and other apps 8gb can only help.
Andre Willey · January 31, 2020 at 5:50 pm
My DS416play had been gradually grinding itself to a halt over the last 12 months (4 x 4TB drives), especially when copying large or multiple files. I had at first put it down to issues in my gigabit network, and been trying to work out what was going on there, but a few days ago I checked in the DSM Resource Monitor and found there was an immense amount of memory swapping going on… so I took the plunge and replaced the factory-fitted 1GB RAM module with a new 4GB one.
Result, almost no memory-swaps reported now, and the whole thing just flies now! Thank you so much for the advice.
Tyler Woods · January 31, 2020 at 6:33 pm
I’m happy you were able to improve your experience! Thank you for your support.
Michael · February 2, 2018 at 4:50 pm
Thanks a lot for this video!
I Upgraded my DS416play today to 8GB and it’s flying. Everything is much, much, much faster. Logging in is done in an second. Pictures in the PhotoStation are loaded immediately. Watching Videos in the VideoStation ist stunning fast. Switching forth and backwards in the movie is done almost in realtime.
But the best of all ist, that the backups with HyperBackup are done ten times faster. Usualy it took me 10 hours to save 10% of the full backup to an external harddrive (USB3). Now it’s fone in 1 (one) hour!!!!!
Mike
WFP · May 22, 2017 at 4:04 am
How do you disable memory compression? And what performance improvements did you find with plex. I bought mine to run plex and found it unacceptably sluggish. Keen to fix it if I can.
Tyler · May 22, 2017 at 8:14 am
In Control Panel > Hardware & Power, theh first in the list on that page is a toggle for enable/disable memory compression.
I didn’t get any improvement with transcoding plex video; unfortunately until a few days ago I was sharing my plex library over SMB to my server with plex installed. I finally copied all that (~5TB) over to local storage on the hypervisor this past weekend, but I would recommend maybe using one NIC for a direct-attached network storage of the sorts (to your server/hypervisor) and simply using the synology as storage, or otherwise replace this unit with something more powerful as this will not do well with Plex.
(I am disappointed with that, too, since I bought it mainly for Plex)
WFP · May 23, 2017 at 12:57 am
Thanks for the update. I have attempted to update my old system (Acryan reading files from a 413J) to implement a feature rich all in one solution after seeing Plex in action.
Initially I tried an upgraded HP Proliant Microserver (N36L),which is a great little server but the CPU is its let down. Then I went for 416play with an Apple TV4, which revealed the underpowered 416play CPU as the issue. Now I have the 416play being accessed by my Macmini with Plex installed and running on it. It’s a much smoother experience, however I now realise I could have saved a ton of money and headaches by just running Plex on the macmini and accessing my movies from the 413J.
Been an expensive journey.
I may sell off the new hard ware (apple TV4 and 416play) and revert to the 413J, or take a look at Qnap systems. They have some potent hardware for this wit their TVS systems which are a bit more pricey, but would have solved the problem from the outset.
Interesting but expensive lesson.
tnwoods · May 23, 2017 at 7:33 am
I’m in the same boat as you — I decided I’ll keep my 416play but because I didn’t have an older model to fall back on and really liked having 8TB that can hold its own lol
I considered getting an 8 bay QNAP with quad nic… then there’s room for more storage and maybe an iSCSI target or NFS share with the extra NICs. I just don’t want to pour any more money into my setup, probably exceeded some budget for the year lol, and otherwise you have to spend more for less drive bays on one of the newer models to get a good CPU
I question the proper shared/networked storage setup all the time. Expensive lesson indeed!
Woody · February 22, 2017 at 12:23 pm
Did you notice an increase in performance after install?
tyler · February 22, 2017 at 12:32 pm
Hi Woody,
I didn’t see an immediate performance improvement for normal operations in DSM, but I have had much more success since upgrading RAM for running apps like BTSync and Plex plus a bunch of community apps because the memory doesn’t max out anymore or use the disks for swap (which slows down your NAS, marginally)
I also disabled memory compression because I read that it moves unused memory to swap on the disk to free up RAM, and I don’t need that.
– Tyler