NAS Drive

[LunarMist]

It's been in every Windows release since Vista.

Oh I see. There are some in there for the NAS and nothing else. I changed the PW again to no avail.
Is the NAS is powered up, the password is not lost when the computer is rebooted, but if the computer is on and the NAS is rebooted, the password is lost.
Doesn't that mean the NAS is the problem?

 

[Mercutio]

You probably need to take it up with the people who make the NAS at that point.
Why are you shutting the NAS off in the first place?

 

[LunarMist]

I never had a NAS, but it seems that the fans would wear out and dust accumulate. Ideally the NAS would turn off when the computer is off, but it's only a minor annoyance.

 

[ddrueding]

My home NAS lives in the garage. Dusty and with thermal fluxuations. It has been on for about 4 years, being restarted two or three times for drive upgrades. I wouldn't worry about that.

 

[Handruin]

I agree, my NAS units stay on 24x7 also. In my case they're in a cool basement and don't collect much dust. If you're worried about fan reliability, get some Noctua fans to replace them.

 

[LunarMist]

Thanks. I still can't decide on a primary NAS. I like the Syunoly software and it is nice to use but the QNAP seem to have worse reviews and more complaints.

 

[Handruin]

What is the software they're offering doing that is solving a problem for you? Can you not just put together a computer with a bunch of storage and a NIC and store data on it via CIFS/SMB/NFS?

 

[Mercutio]

A single core Atom with 256MB RAM or some crappy ARM system can handle everything you need out of a NAS, Lunar. We're talking about sharing data via SMB for a single user, not differential, deduplicating file replication for hundreds of people.

 

[LunarMist]

Thanks, but what should I buy then with 10 GbE to get at least 250MB/sec transfer rates in RAID 6?

 

[timwhit]

Thanks, but what should I buy then with 10 GbE to get at least 250GB/sec transfer rates in RAID 6?

250GB/s????

 

[LunarMist]

What is the software they're offering doing that is solving a problem for you? Can you not just put together a computer with a bunch of storage and a NIC and store data on it via CIFS/SMB/NFS?

That would be possible, but there are many pitfalls and a lot of time would be required as I am a novice in that area. Still it could be a learning experience.

 

[Handruin]

Thanks, but what should I buy then with 10 GbE to get at least 250MB/sec transfer rates in RAID 6?

What is the workload/access pattern going to be comprised of? Will it be mainly large monolithic files (1+GB), lots of medium sized files (10-100MB), or a lot of smaller files (1MB or less)? Are you looking for read or write performance with this kind of bandwidth? How many concurrent clients need to meet the bandwidth requirements?

 

[Handruin]

That would be possible, but there are many pitfalls and a lot of time would be required as I am a novice in that area. Still it could be a learning experience.

It's the age-old build vs buy argument. If you don't want to deal with managing the system at a lower level then you'll have to pay for it from a consumer level. If you can go into more details on your use case and requirements and a bit about your expected budget we might be able to collectively come up with a reasonable solution on the build side.

 

[LunarMist]

What is the workload/access pattern going to be comprised of? Will it be mainly large monolithic files (1+GB), lots of medium sized files (10-100MB), or a lot of smaller files (1MB or less)? Are you looking for read or write performance with this kind of bandwidth? How many concurrent clients need to meet the bandwidth requirements?

Most of the files are 30-600MB, but I have a few 60GB files also. I am the only user. I don't have hard data on the importance of latency, for example when opening a folder of 5000 RAW files with DPP etc. and waiting for the large thumbnails to populate. I'll do a bit of comparisons with what I have. Both read and writes are about equally important.

 

[LunarMist]

It's the age-old build vs buy argument. If you don't want to deal with managing the system at a lower level then you'll have to pay for it from a consumer level. If you can go into more details on your use case and requirements and a bit about your expected budget we might be able to collectively come up with a reasonable solution on the build side.

If I understand correctly a NAS could die and the drives can be transplanted to another one relatively easily. Building a computer is very time consuming for me, especially the OS BS that keeps changing. A NAS should be smaller and easier to ship around the country too.

 

[LunarMist]

I was hoping to spend only $2K without disks, but may reconsider. Ideally I could get 3-4 years of usage out of a system.

 

[Mercutio]

We know you don't get rid of old systems.
Do you have an LGA1366 system sitting around? An 1155? I'm sure it's loaded up with RAM already, but make sure it has crap tons of RAM. All the RAM.

Take that machine. Add a tiny SSD. TINY. 8GB, even. Hell, boot it off a thumb drive. That's how little it matters.

Install FreeNAS.

Create zPools to taste. Feel free to re-use tiny SSDs you probably have sitting around as cache drives.

There. You have an incredibly powerful, extensible NAS.

 

[LunarMist]

I would only use good, new equipment and have to find a space-efficient case with the drive bays.

Now I have some timed results for a relatively simple task.
In a folder with 2000 RAW files (124GB), the times for thumbs to fully display in BB are NAS=301 sec., Hitachi 6TB 7200RPM NAS drive=197 sec., and SSD=185 sec.
The NAS is slow, but not too bad for GbE speeds. However, the times to extract all the jpegs (not a CPU intensive task) in BB are NAS=21.7 min., Hitachi NAS drive=7.4 min., and SSD=5.3 min. Obviously that NAS is sucky slow. Anything that requires a lot of reads then writes like working with the panos would be terrible. The real concern I have is if a good 10GbE NAS will solve all the problems or not.

 

[Mercutio]

Why not at least give FreeNAS a try? You already know the NAS you bought isn't doing what you want and I'm sure you have some kind of PC sitting around that you can use with it.

 

[LunarMist]

Not really any that would accept the controller I suspect. Speaking of which, what RAID card is needed?

 

[Mercutio]

None. You let FreeNAS handle it in software. Get an LSI-something-or-other in IT mode if you need more ports than your motherboard has and add gobs of RAM and/or cache drives to your zPools if you want to improve performance.

 

[LunarMist]

Now maybe I'm missing something, but what is the point of the software based RAID over the NAS?

 

[Mercutio]

The NAS has some pretty hefty performance penalties from being built on an ARM or Atom CPU. It has limited amounts of RAM for caching and, functionally, it's also a software RAID, probably one built on Linux LVM or somesuch, only sitting on extremely limited hardware. On FreeNAS you can add RAM to your heart's content. You'd get to use the NICs you want. You can do RAID6 in software if you'd like, or configure SSDs as caching drives. I have already made these points to you.

 

[Handruin]

Now maybe I'm missing something, but what is the point of the software based RAID over the NAS?

Software based RAID decouples you from specific RAID controller hardware allowing you to use any controller in IT (pass-thru) mode. If you go the FreeNAS route and use the underlying ZFS filesystem with RAID, you'll also get extra functionality that you wouldn't normally get with hardware RAID or off the shelf NAS units. Things like adaptive read caching, intent logs for synchronous write performance improvements, instant snapshots, compression, and more. You can also go beyond a RAID 6 to have three parity drives if you desire.

 

[LunarMist]

Somehow I thought there was some special hardware involved with the NAS. Not too many years ago any software based RAID system was considered to be undesirable.
I suppose the Armenian processors in the cell phones are faster than our P4 desktops back were in the day. :lol:

After the motherboard dies, could I move the hard drives to another computer and be up and running?

 

[Handruin]

Somehow I thought there was some special hardware involved with the NAS. Not too many years ago any software based RAID system was considered to be undesirable.
I suppose the Armenian processors in the cell phones are faster than our P4 desktops back were in the day. :lol:

After the motherboard dies, could I move the hard drives to another computer and be up and running?

Yes you could move the home-built FreeNAS from one dead motherboard to a new working one so long as the new motherboard and CPU are supported by FreeNAS (which is likely). You will want to preserve your NAS settings because if the mainboard or boot drive fails, you might lose settings but the data should remain in the main storage. In the case with ZFS, you would need to reattach all prior drives to the new motherboard and then import the existing pool to the NAS to continue operation.

For whatever it's worth, you can actually try all this right now using VirtualBox or VMWare workstation to download FreeNAS and run it as a VM. Just put a small amount of storage to it just as a proof of concept and then set it up as a VM. This will give you a way to try it out with minimal commitment. Many people actually run FreeNAS this way all the time under the free ESXi. This decouples you even further from the underlying hardware and you can move the VM around. It's a bit more setup initially but it works fine.

 

[LunarMist]

Thanks, but that is all a bit too much effort to be worthwhile for me. I would just install the FreeNAD directly to see if the software was feasible.

Meanwhile I'm hoping Synology will have a replacement for the 2015xs soon but am not counting on it.

 

[LunarMist]

Anybody use the barfts files? It seems better than ext4, similar to the zfs.

 

[timwhit]

Anybody use the barfts files? It seems better than ext4, similar to the zfs.

I assume you mean btrfs. I would use ZFS over btrfs. It's a lot more mature and more feature complete.

 

[Handruin]

Anybody use the barfts files? It seems better than ext4, similar to the zfs.

I assume you mean btrfs. I would use ZFS over btrfs. It's a lot more mature and more feature complete.

I agree with timwhit. If you want to play around with a newer filesystem then try btrfs but ZFS has had more time in the field and is pretty stable. One of the enterprise products my company sells and our next gen product my team is working to develop is based around ZFS on Linux.

 

[LunarMist]

From what I can find only one vendor makes the systems, ix FreeNAS Mini XL.

 

[Bozo]

Looks like FreeNAS is now offering hardware too.

 

[Mercutio]

Or Lunar could let me or dd put something together to get him started.

 

[ddrueding]

Indeed. It isn't tricky, particularly if you have a reasonable budget and are buying new hardware specifically for this task.

 

[LunarMist]

First I have to try the software. I should have access to the secondary 4790K soon. I only need 3 drives for testing right?

 

[ddrueding]

Even two is enough to setup RAID-1 (mirroring), 3 is enough for RAID-5 (parity) and 4 is enough for RAID-6 (double parity).

 

[LunarMist]

Can the system see itself and stand alone, unlike the NAS?

 

[Stereodude]

Can the system see itself and stand alone, unlike the NAS?

Yes, if it has a webcam and you put it in front of a mirror.

 

[LunarMist]

. I mean does it have a KB and monitor only for installation and then web access like the NASd? I'm trying to figure out how it would be controlled, especially if there are problems.

 

[Handruin]

. I mean does it have a KB and monitor only for installation and then web access like the NASd? I'm trying to figure out how it would be controlled, especially if there are problems.

Yes, you could go a step further and get a mainboard that has a BMC on it then you really don't even need a keyboard and mouse connected directly to it. This is what I built mine from and the supermicro has a BMC on it to make your life easier.

Intel Intel Xeon E3-1270V3
SUPERMICRO MBD-X10SL7-F-O
32GB RAM DDR3L ECC (8GBx4)
12 x HGST 4TB Deskstar NAS
SAMSUNG 850 Pro 256GB (boot/OS)
SAMSUNG 850 Pro 128GB (L2ARC)
Seasonic 650W 80+ Gold
Case: Rosewill RSV-L4411