Synology DS1520+ Memory Upgrade

In Decebember 2022, I bought a Synology DS1520+ to temporarily1 substitute a bigger server I had previously “built”.

My Synology DS1520+ standing still while powered off.
My Synology DS1520+ standing still while powered off. (full size)

Now, I don’t run a lot of software on my server. It mostly boils down to file sharing, media consuming and chat applications, some of it running on Docker containers. Even though my scale doesn’t require a lot of resources to run, sometimes the 8GB of RAM the server has is not enough to keep streaming movies while other tasks are running.

Which RAM stick should I buy?

🗒️ tl;dr: If you can, buy Samsung’s M471A2K43CB1-CTD.

This is my first time using a proprietary hardware and software in this form. One of the bad sides of this is that you have to use “approved” products, both for software and hardware. And, as it implies, the RAM stick should also be compatible with the rest of the hardware.

While doing some research online, I found out that people had success using Samsung’s M471A2K43CB1-CTD and I was lucky enough to have it available on my country for an accessible price.

The new RAM stick on the top and the old RAM stick on the bottom.
The new RAM stick on the top and the old RAM stick on the bottom. (full size)

Installation process

Enough talking, let’s install this! In order to do it, you need to remove your disks. The first step is to remove the disks from your device. What I did was to remove them left-to-right while piling them up on top of each other, this way I wouldn’t mess the order up.2

The piled up disks next to my device.
The piled up disks next to my device. (full size)

Now, turn your device in a direction that would put it’s LED indicators on top of the table. Depending on the model’s specification, you should already see a single RAM stick. To remove it, push the small latches that are around the stick to the side.

The said RAM stick inside the device.
The said RAM stick inside the device. (full size)

Installing the new RAM stick is pretty straight forward, you just have to place it where the previous one was, push it a little bit and check if the small latches are securing the stick on place.

We can see that the stick was recognized by running the pfetch command.

    ___       user@hostname
   (.. |      host   DS1520+ 1.0 synology_geminilake_1520+
   (<> |      kernel 4.4.180+
  / __  \     uptime 3h 14m
 ( /  \ /|    memory 4260M / 19852M
_/\ __)/_)
\/-____\/

  1. “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program infrastructure change” - Milton Friedman ↩︎

  2. I know, I could have just marked the disks with their order, but I didn’t have anything to do it so at the moment. 🤪 ↩︎