2 Bay NAS, Maximum throughput configuration

[jjlee138]

Hello good sirs,
I have a 2-bay QNAP TS-231 (linked below) that I'm putting 2x 3TB WD Red drives into. The data will be backed up locally and to the cloud, and isn't mission critical enough that I can't suffer downtime while restoring. It's primarily going to be used for accessing RAW photography files (25-100mb in size) from multiple local devices (primarily only by me, so not simultaneously). I'm technically proficient, but don't dabble in storage often, and am completely new to NAS.

My questions are:

- What drive configuration would maximize throughput? I would obviously think RAID0, but would I be bottle-necked by the NIC rendering that config useless?

- Along the same lines, but secondary in concern to getting the drives configed correctly to get up and running. Would link aggregating the dual NIC's help relieve any potential NIC bottlenecks?

Thank you for any help or suggestions you may have!


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[boosted1g]

Hard drives can transfer between 90 -140 megabytes per second so 700-1100 mbps.
Thus the throughput of one hard drive is enough to completely utilize a single gigabit ethernet connection.

With link aggregation you will be able to double your throughput to support 2 drives but that is only to your switch.
This can be very usefull for multitasking. I have my file server with 2 nic link aggregation so I have enough bandwidth to do a full disk image backup over network, while downloading media from the internet at its full speed and still supporting simultaneous streaming of movies/files from the server to devices.
In the case of a single desktop, it still only has 1 nic so whether your QNAP has 1 or 2 or even 4 nics it is still only going to move files at the speed of that single nic on the desktop (so 1000 mbps).

The downfall to raid 0 is the potential for data loss and the stress of the drives.
You have everything backed up so the data loss is not a factor.
You have RED drives designed for RAID so that is not really a factor either.

So if you need to multitask then RAID0 + nic teaming would be good.
If you do not then you will not see any gains vs just keeping the drives as individual drives, pool them (making it appear as 1 large drive) and using jus the 1 nic.

 

[Solandri]

The bottleneck on most low- and mid-grade NASes like the TS-231 is the CPU. Frequently they use a ARM processor which has to run almost flat out just to reconstruct the file data from both drives and send it over the network. You're fortunate that the TS-231 uses a newer ARM A9. It's fast enough to almost saturate gigabit ethernet. Older and cheaper NASes frequently topped out at 20-50 MB/s.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2015/09/29/qnap-ts-231-review/2

So your drive configuration won't really matter. Your bottleneck will be the CPU or gigabit ethernet. The link aggregation is wasted on this unit as the CPU simply can't process drive data fast enough to take advantage of the extra bandwidth.

 

[jjlee138]

Hard drives can transfer between 90 -140 megabytes per second so 700-1100 mbps.
Thus the throughput of one hard drive is enough to completely utilize a single gigabit ethernet connection.

With link aggregation you will be able to double your throughput to support 2 drives but that is only to your switch.
This can be very usefull for multitasking. I have my file server with 2 nic link aggregation so I have enough bandwidth to do a full disk image backup over network, while downloading media from the internet at its full speed and still supporting simultaneous streaming of movies/files from the server to devices.
In the case of a single desktop, it still only has 1 nic so whether your QNAP has 1 or 2 or even 4 nics it is still only going to move files at the speed of that single nic on the desktop (so 1000 mbps).

The downfall to raid 0 is the potential for data loss and the stress of the drives.
You have everything backed up so the data loss is not a factor.
You have RED drives designed for RAID so that is not really a factor either.

So if you need to multitask then RAID0 + nic teaming would be good.
If you do not then you will not see any gains vs just keeping the drives as individual drives, pool them (making it appear as 1 large drive) and using jus the 1 nic.

The bottleneck on most low- and mid-grade NASes like the TS-231 is the CPU. Frequently they use a ARM processor which has to run almost flat out just to reconstruct the file data from both drives and send it over the network. You're fortunate that the TS-231 uses a newer ARM A9. It's fast enough to almost saturate gigabit ethernet. Older and cheaper NASes frequently topped out at 20-50 MB/s.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2015/09/29/qnap-ts-231-review/2

So your drive configuration won't really matter. Your bottleneck will be the CPU or gigabit ethernet. The link aggregation is wasted on this unit as the CPU simply can't process drive data fast enough to take advantage of the extra bandwidth.

Perfect, thank you very much for taking the time to lay that out guys. Given my single NIC bottleneck on the end user device that you pointed out as well as the NAS CPU limitations. I'll skip the RAID0 config and use whatever option they have to pool the drives in one virtual storage space with the combined capacity (JBOD?). Sounds like any benefits from the increased hassle of striping the data would be negligible for my needs.

Thanks again!