No matter how beautiful IOPS the manufacturers promise us, no matter what synthetic tests show, the real speed of a typical virtual machine depends on how your server is configured and how the application itself works. Let's explore the impact of different types of caching on Synology NAS.

The amount of data stored in the world not only continues to grow, but is growing faster than predicted. It was expected that the share of data stored on flash and solid state drives would increase, while the amount of data stored on hard drives and tape would decrease. However, today it is clear that all three technologies continue to evolve simply because they require a lot of storage capacities.

Synology now has a free solution to back up and restore all of its infrastructure, including virtual machines, desktops, Windows servers, and NAS. We tested all its features, measured the speed and evaluated the pros and cons of this package.

This 2.4 TB hybrid hard disk for servers is interesting because it supports non-volatile write cache and has a 16 GB NAND read buffer. We tested it to see how the cache accelerates applications, whether WCE is set to 1, and to see if it is economical to use hybrid drives.

If in 2017 we backed up ourselves to the cloud, then starting from 2018 we back up the cloud to ourselves to protect our calendars, mail and contacts from blocking any messengers, disconnecting accounts and others misfortunes. Synology has a great tool for backing up Google and Microsoft services, which we'll test. Since we use such business-friendly products as Office 365, Google Drive and Calendar, Gmail and Shared Folders in G-Suite, we need to make sure that this data is safe.

With this storage system, you can create a 2-node Failover Virtualization Cluster in one box. This model is designed for video surveillance, for installations on hundreds of IP cameras, for storing hundreds of terabytes of data and for analyzing video recordings. We tested it using the Macroscop software.