In my experience restart are infrequent. DSM runs plenty fast.

When I have a container that performs frequent small read/writes, i.e. lemmy and pictrs, I put those directories on a USB connected SSD. That greatly increased the performance of the containers I moved to that solution.

My other biggest performance boost was caching my main volume with two NVME SSDs.

You’re welcome.

I’m not sure if you’ll get a speed benefit or not since there is no way to prioritize the SSD.

DSM and settings are installed on all volumes.

https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/Which_drive_is_DSM_installed_on

I didn’t realize vscode is open source. Good to know!

Not just performance; I can’t imagine it would be good for five drives of a volume to go missing if a single cable fails.

I’m wondering if I can move my four current drives into the DX517 and save the volume. Can I just move the drives around without consequence?

I’m starting to think a second NAS full of SSDs would be best to host home lab applications off of instead of trying to make it work with my current NAS and an expansion unit.