Question Recommendations for a decent NAS ?

[jay9991]

Hi,

I'm looking for a good NAS to use at home. First, it shouldn't be as loud as a dryer. It should be silent. So I thought about 2 HDDs 2.5" and a SSD cache. This thing does nothing other than being a fileserver, but I hate to wait for my backups to finish, so I would like to have 2.5 GBit Ethernet. Any good recommendations?

 

[Ralston18]

The network speed will only be as fast as the slowest component in the connection path.

If you have some other available computer, consider something like FreeNAS.

Then you can do some experimenting etc. to work out requirements and what hardware/software will fulfill those requirements.

And if noise (fan or otherwise) is a problem you can work on solutions for that as well.

Plus, remember that backups can be scheduled for times when you do not need to sit there and wait.

Just run overnight or at some other convenient time(s) when you can go do something else.

Waiting for a backup to finish is a much better situation than waiting for some data recovery service to save what (if anything) they can save....

 

[jay9991]

The slowest device would be the HDDs. Their read and write speed might not be as good, but the ssd cache could fix that easily.

 

[jay9991]

I think it will be the TBS-464. A bit more expensive, but the 2.5 Gbit Port is the slowest component here.

 

[jay9991]

Now ordered a DIY-NAS with 2*10 GBit ports

 

[Misgar]

You'll probably need to go fully solid state if you want to make good use of 10G Ethernet. An array of 10,000 rpm 12Gb/s SAS3 2.5in hard disks (for speed and low noise) will not saturate 10Gb/s Ethernet, even with an SSD cache.

I have a couple of HP Servers with 10GbE NICs on an SFP+ fibre network running TrueNAS Core (the successor to FreeNAS) but with 3.5in 6G SAS2 hard drives in RAID-Z2, I don't see network transfer speeds over 125Mbytes/s, i.e. not much faster than Gigabit. It's a limitation of using this type of RAID and spinning disks.

N.B. TrueNAS caches some of the more frequently accessed files in RAM. The more system RAM you have, the better. 8GB is the absolute minimum for entry level. 16GB is recommended for a basic TrueNAS system, but there's no harm in adding a lot more more RAM, especially if you want to run jails or VMs. The RAM cache reduces the need for a physical L2ARC cache SSD, which is only of benefit on a TrueNAS system with more than 64GB RAM.

if you want to saturate a 10GbE link, you might consider four (or eight) Gen4 M.2 NVMe SSDs on a PCIe controller card in RAID0, but as many people will tell you, RAID0 is only advisable in certain very specific scenarios.

As a matter of interest, what hardware and OS will you be using in your DIY NAS? You don't state the capacity. Is the capacity more or less than 10TB? Will it be RAID or JBOD?

A few links that might be of interest.

https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/10-gig-networking-primer.42/

https://www.servethehome.com/buyers-guides/top-hardware-components-for-truenas-freenas-nas-servers/

https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/adding-cache.99760/

 

[jay9991]

You'll probably need to go fully solid state if you want to make good use of 10G Ethernet. An array of 10,000 rpm 12Gb/s SAS3 2.5in hard disks (for speed and low noise) will not saturate 10Gb/s Ethernet, even with an SSD cache.

I bought 4 *Samsung QVO 8 TB and 1*1 TB Samsung 990 NVMe.

I have a couple of HP Servers with 10GbE NICs on an SFP+ fibre network running TrueNAS Core (the successor to FreeNAS) but with 3.5in 6G SAS2 hard drives in RAID-Z2, I don't see network transfer speeds over 125Mbytes/s, i.e. not much faster than Gigabit. It's a limitation of using this type of RAID and spinning disks.

N.B. TrueNAS caches some of the more frequently accessed files in RAM. The more system RAM you have, the better. 8GB is the absolute minimum for entry level. 16GB is recommended for a basic TrueNAS system, but there's no harm in adding a lot more more RAM, especially if you want to run jails or VMs. The RAM cache reduces the need for a physical L2ARC cache SSD, which is only of benefit on a TrueNAS system with more than 64GB RAM.

if you want to saturate a 10GbE link, you might consider four (or eight) Gen4 M.2 NVMe SSDs on a PCIe controller card in RAID0, but as many people will tell you, RAID0 is only advisable in certain very specific scenarios.

As a matter of interest, what hardware and OS will you be using in your DIY NAS? You don't state the capacity. Is the capacity more or less than 10TB? Will it be RAID or JBOD?

A few links that might be of interest.

https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/10-gig-networking-primer.42/

https://www.servethehome.com/buyers-guides/top-hardware-components-for-truenas-freenas-nas-servers/

https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/adding-cache.99760/

I bought Unraid but I am disappointed by now. The write speed on the SSD is 160 MB/s when it is fast (you can see the speed inside of the NAS homepage). It is not able to use all drives at once when reading and writing. It is easy to get around this by using the write cache (If I don't copy a bunch of small files I have about 280 MB /s over my 2.5 connection).

I read through the Unraid Forums (and through the TrueNAS Forum) and I found a lot of articles like "One drive damaged, data lost" . It seem to be common among both distros, so I will create a win 10 machine with RAID 5 that uses the 990 as cache. Other then the linux distros, I will have full and reliable acess to my network drives - my Unraid-nas is invisible to the explorer if you map a network drive. You then can explore it in cmd, but you can not access it in explorer (except if you browse the network, the nas and the shares are visible). The overall solution seems to be grant everyone rights to everything, which I will not do (I will not install smb 1.0 on my win-machine, I will not give access to guests to my machine and so on - these are not solutions, these are security nightmares). I need something as simple as a Network drive. Sometimes, a VM would be nice. A Win machine is perfect for this, and from my experience more reliable.