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Stereodude
Not really a
Only...
Stereodude
Not really a
What are you storing?
Just normal files of any format. None are more than 30 GB and very few are more than 4095 MB. That is not the issue.
I have 5x8TB RED drives in the UX-500P, i.e., 28.5 TB usable space. QTS encrypted write performance of the array was absolute crap so I tried to create a crypto container. It tends to fail between 2-4 TB. I found that Verano has an expander, so I started with a small container of theirs and expanded it in increments.
Stereodude
Not really a
You're coming up with 10's of TB per year of data to store on a personal basis? I bet even Merc wasn't downloading that much. Somehow I doubt you are either. You must be shooting an awful lot of HD/UHD (or higher res) video or something.
No, this is the moist important ~24TB of data from the last 20 years.
There is no wiring and I don't want to make any infrastructure changes now. My job changed this year and I think next year the organization's role may be different, so I would be relocating again.
What do you think of the TS-1635AX? It has 12 bays and an A72 Armanda processor. It is no Xenon x86, but supposedly that is about twice as fast as the older one.
That's tough to quantify my thoughts on that NAS without knowing your use cases. From the little information I can find, the pricing at $1500 without storage seems rather expensive given the capabilities and expandability. If you're familiar with QNAP's ecosystem then it's probably worth it for you to stick with them versus a competitor or building your own.
I was thinking that it would eventually replace the TS-831X, which has the original 1.4GHz Annapurna CPU (not the 1.7GHz Amazon one). From what I gather an A72 is a big improvement over an A15, especially allowing encryption without the dramatic slowdown. I won't be the first to jump in on this NAS after my experiences with other new products.
Not that it is a huge difference, but the model with 4GB RAM is $1300 compared to $1500 for the 8GB model.
Maximum RAM capacity is 16GB, which makes more sense than 8GB. However, the memory slot is a Long-DIMM.
How does that socket or specs differ from the regular DDR4 RAM used on typical PC mainboards? It would nice to buy the 4GB and upgrade the RAM.
Maximum RAM capacity is 16GB, which makes more sense than 8GB. However, the memory slot is a Long-DIMM.
How does that socket or specs differ from the regular DDR4 RAM used on typical PC mainboards? It would nice to buy the 4GB and upgrade the RAM.
Stereodude
Not really a
I was surprised that your link actually worked...
I suspect that a Long-DIMM just means it's desktop memory, not a laptop SO-DIMM, but I'm not 100% sure. http://www.ism-tek.com/DDR4-ECC-DIMM.html
DrunkenBastard
Storage is cool
So I'm looking for my first NAS.
Candidates are the QNAP 963X-2G: https://www.amazon.com/TS-963X-2G-US-64bit-x86-based-2-0GHz-10GBASE-T/dp/B07CVLSCSJ/
And the QNAP 873-4G:
https://www.amazon.com/TS-473-4G-US-IP-SAN-Quad-core-2-1GHz-10G-Ready/dp/B07BMXG7KK/
The 963 has five 3.5 bays and four 2.5 bays, integrated 10G Ethernet, some kind of AMD chip.
The 873 has eight 3.5 bays and two m2 slots that arent hot swappable, no integrated 10G but room for two PCI expansion cards, and an AMD processor. A little more money as well. This one can take upto 64GB of DDR4, the 963 limited to 16GB of DDR3.
Will be using Seagate Enterprise Capacity drives. Use case is for upto 8 surveillance cameras (using Surveillance Station) and general media sharing. Don't have a 10G switch presently.
Anyone have any thoughts or recommendations? My leaning is towards the 873 which sems to be more robust from a processor perspective, and then get a 10G expansion card later when I get a 10G switch. Other option is to get two smaller 4 bay units to have some redundancy via multiple units versus putting everything on a single power supply etc.
Candidates are the QNAP 963X-2G: https://www.amazon.com/TS-963X-2G-US-64bit-x86-based-2-0GHz-10GBASE-T/dp/B07CVLSCSJ/
And the QNAP 873-4G:
https://www.amazon.com/TS-473-4G-US-IP-SAN-Quad-core-2-1GHz-10G-Ready/dp/B07BMXG7KK/
The 963 has five 3.5 bays and four 2.5 bays, integrated 10G Ethernet, some kind of AMD chip.
The 873 has eight 3.5 bays and two m2 slots that arent hot swappable, no integrated 10G but room for two PCI expansion cards, and an AMD processor. A little more money as well. This one can take upto 64GB of DDR4, the 963 limited to 16GB of DDR3.
Will be using Seagate Enterprise Capacity drives. Use case is for upto 8 surveillance cameras (using Surveillance Station) and general media sharing. Don't have a 10G switch presently.
Anyone have any thoughts or recommendations? My leaning is towards the 873 which sems to be more robust from a processor perspective, and then get a 10G expansion card later when I get a 10G switch. Other option is to get two smaller 4 bay units to have some redundancy via multiple units versus putting everything on a single power supply etc.
Stereodude
Not really a
Are you going to make one big drive or have multiple arrays/pools?
I don't see the point of 2.5" bays in a NAS. Then again, I don't really see why someone is going to use a SSD for caching either. The disk subsystem should be able to outpace the network interface if you stuff a reasonable number of drives in it.
I don't see the point of 2.5" bays in a NAS. Then again, I don't really see why someone is going to use a SSD for caching either. The disk subsystem should be able to outpace the network interface if you stuff a reasonable number of drives in it.
How much space are you planning to provision for your immediate use and for the next 2-4 years? I find expanding the NAS and/or re-provisioning the space can be a hassle so it's better to plan for it in advance if you have the funds to do to so.
I'm still of the opinion that you might be better off building a light weight dedicated system to run your own NAS. If you don't want to manage the config you could always try FreeNAS or Unraid to do that work for you. I agree with SD that I don't see the point of dedicated 2.5" bays. I don't use any SSD caching on either of my NAS devices and the network is always the limiting factor for any use I have. Some day if I get to upgrading the entire house to 10Gb then maybe it might be a factor but even then I'll have other bottlenecks in the way.
I'm still of the opinion that you might be better off building a light weight dedicated system to run your own NAS. If you don't want to manage the config you could always try FreeNAS or Unraid to do that work for you. I agree with SD that I don't see the point of dedicated 2.5" bays. I don't use any SSD caching on either of my NAS devices and the network is always the limiting factor for any use I have. Some day if I get to upgrading the entire house to 10Gb then maybe it might be a factor but even then I'll have other bottlenecks in the way.
I would also advise against using 2.5" SSDs for caching. I tried every mode in the QNAP a couple years ago and the Synology after that. Although a dual-SSD configuration it is supposed to support write acceleration, after a while all it does is allow faster reads of smallish files, for example if there are a lot of users. The SSD SATA III interface is a bottleneck compared to multiple hard drives if you have a good CPU and 10GbE network. Spend the money on RAM as that makes a larger difference in buffering writes.
I don't know those models, but would chose one that was introduced relatively recently to prolong vendor support. After a certain amount of time there will be no further updates to the NAS OS and apps.
Make sure you are happy with the surveillance software and licensing transferability if the NAS dies for example. Typically only a couple of licenses are included and every additional camera is fairly expensive.
I don't know those models, but would chose one that was introduced relatively recently to prolong vendor support. After a certain amount of time there will be no further updates to the NAS OS and apps.
Make sure you are happy with the surveillance software and licensing transferability if the NAS dies for example. Typically only a couple of licenses are included and every additional camera is fairly expensive.
ddrueding
Fixture
Agreed on all that. I use Synology units with 10GbE Ethernet. SSD really only makes sense when there is a queue of IOs. For single user stuff it isn't necessary. The 10GbE, though, is bad-ass.
My current home unit is a Synology DS1817+ with the RAM maxed out and a 2x 10GbE card in it. One of each of the ports go directly to the 10GbE cards in the workstations as a secondary interface (No gateway).
My current home unit is a Synology DS1817+ with the RAM maxed out and a 2x 10GbE card in it. One of each of the ports go directly to the 10GbE cards in the workstations as a secondary interface (No gateway).
Is it just me or is Synology not producing much new lately? I'd really like to upgrade to a larger backup unit from the TS-831X v1 and would like to buy another Synology, but there are no good choices.
QNAP is frequently producing new models recently. In general there are not many useful reviews of NAS online other than the more basic models.
ddrueding
Fixture
I'm not sure there is enough tech advancement in NAS to warrant new units? 10GbE, SSD caching, RAM upgrades....the rest is really just software, and they have been making progress on that. Their sync to NAS and sync to cloud stuff has gotten better within just the last 3 months.
ddrueding
Fixture
Where are you seeing a bottleneck? Replication?
What kind of IO workload are you sending to your NAS? Large files, small files, mixed? Do you see consistently low write performance through all types of workloads? How many sessions are writing at the same time? What write speeds are you observing over your network?
The writes of the 831X are limited to about 220MB/sec. for large files and sometimes are less if the drives are too full.
I have no network per se, just direct 10GbE SFP+ connections from NAS to PC. It's even worse with encryption, dropping to 150 or so.
I blame the Arms CPU, but am not sure.
I have no network per se, just direct 10GbE SFP+ connections from NAS to PC. It's even worse with encryption, dropping to 150 or so.
I blame the Arms CPU, but am not sure.
ddrueding
Fixture
That seems a reasonable conclusion, particularly with encryption running. With it only connected to a single computer, I'd be tempted to look into a disk enclosure that uses some other more direct interface to the PC (so it can use your (likely very fast) computer to do a lot of the work). Something that connects via fiber-channel or SAS or something.
You could also try changing your 10Gb network MTU setting to 9000 (jumbo frames) on both interfaces and see if the larger packets help reduce some CPU usage if you really feel it's under powered.
I agree with ddrueding on the encryption. You will need a more-powerful CPU to offload that work or purchase drives that support encryption at rest and let those handle it...and they can be expensive given they are typically targeted at enterprise customers.
You may need to open your wallet a bit more and get something that is suited more for enterprise use than going with QNap or Synology if you really want a blackbox appliance solution that offers better performance. Unfortunately even the entry-level enterprise NAS solutions offer less dollar per value than if you just built your own but I understand that's not something you want to do. Depending on what your performance goal is, you might be able to achieve it with getting a decent desktop and running FreeNAS on it.
I agree with ddrueding on the encryption. You will need a more-powerful CPU to offload that work or purchase drives that support encryption at rest and let those handle it...and they can be expensive given they are typically targeted at enterprise customers.
You may need to open your wallet a bit more and get something that is suited more for enterprise use than going with QNap or Synology if you really want a blackbox appliance solution that offers better performance. Unfortunately even the entry-level enterprise NAS solutions offer less dollar per value than if you just built your own but I understand that's not something you want to do. Depending on what your performance goal is, you might be able to achieve it with getting a decent desktop and running FreeNAS on it.
Stereodude
Not really a
Some of the Intel CPUs have AES acceleration.
Is that due to the Ethernet itself?
Sure, it will help.
No, I doubt it. A single 10Gb Ethernet adapter has plenty of bandwidth to cover your needs and given you have no switch in between means you should have very low latency. We would need to go through the many levels of the stack to figure out where the bottleneck is and also understand what your goals are for performance to see if they are even reasonable. What method are you using to transfer the data over your network? Is it SMB/CIFS, iSCSI, SSH, SCP, FTP, SFTP, rsync, etc? Each of these have a different performance characteristic. How are your drives configured in their pool of storage? Is there some kind of RAID with parity happening (raid5/raid6/raid50/60)? What is the underlying filesystem type (etx4, btrfs, zfs, xfs, etc)? Is the configuration such that you're limited to the speed of a single spindle? What is the performance of the source of your data? Is it capable of reading as fast as you want?
My point is, just throwing a faster CPU at this may having minimal to no performance impact.
So I set up yet another external array on the TX-831X and decided to update the system for the first time in about a year. After copying and fully verifying ~20TB I rebooted and now the login to the NAS sits there forever at the Loading page.
Access seems to be a Windows 7 problem since the last QNAP update. Windows 10 can log in using the Edge.
There are now constant error messages that the Ethernet disconnects a dozen times a day.
However, there is no indication that the network is not performing. I suspect there is a software bug or useless warning of a normal activity.
There are now constant error messages that the Ethernet disconnects a dozen times a day.
However, there is no indication that the network is not performing. I suspect there is a software bug or useless warning of a normal activity.
Probably not, but I upgraded to a different unit recently. Do to my pending relocation, I put together another NAds with eight of the cheap 10TB drives. I tried various potions and really don't see any practical advantages to the Storage Pools, Thin/Thick volumes or the Snapshots. I also tried the RAID 50, which was a first in my experience. The fan on the 10GbE card cut out a little notch in my thumb, which was the most annoying part. I am staying with the QNAP since I should be able to continue using the external drives. The old 831X will be stored in a different zone, but remain in the US independent of my position.
The heat distribution is not so good on the auto settings. What are your thoughts on the desired hard drive temperatures? ^ They range from 34-43°C from left to right. The CPU is on auto and 57°C, but still under load from the array building.