Building your own NAS?
Discussion
Synology do SSD caching, they also have an online demo of the interface on their website.
https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/5.1/live_de...
The only real downside is lack of SLA on support, but we have a couple for storing archive data and general cruft that's not worth putting on the proper arrays and I really do rate them.
DS1815+ would be worth a look - it's difficult to be too specific as the OP has no idea of his IO profile but the software stack is the same regardless of the model so I guess another option is buy one of the 12 bay rackmount units and start with 6 spindles and add more if they're needed.
https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/5.1/live_de...
The only real downside is lack of SLA on support, but we have a couple for storing archive data and general cruft that's not worth putting on the proper arrays and I really do rate them.
DS1815+ would be worth a look - it's difficult to be too specific as the OP has no idea of his IO profile but the software stack is the same regardless of the model so I guess another option is buy one of the 12 bay rackmount units and start with 6 spindles and add more if they're needed.
I've got a Netgear ReadyNAS 2 drive box which can easily saturate a gigabit network when reading / writing reasonable sized files (typical MP3s or large JPEGs for instance) but it slows down quite a bit if you're copying lots of small files to / from it.
Avoid the consumer level NAS boxes, their CPUs are too slow, not enough RAM, and parity calculations aren't fast enough really.
I've just superceded my ReadyNAS with an old Dell PC scrounged from work, the crucial addition is a Dell PERC H700 PCIe RAID card - these can be picked up used from EBay at a decent price now. Plus 4 x 4TB drives in RAID 5. The read / write speed from this (with small files) is great. Using Debian Wheezy and samba. The CPU and RAM in the PC aren't that great, Q6600 and 8GB RAM, but due to the RAID card, the computers CPU isn't really doing much.
Avoid the consumer level NAS boxes, their CPUs are too slow, not enough RAM, and parity calculations aren't fast enough really.
I've just superceded my ReadyNAS with an old Dell PC scrounged from work, the crucial addition is a Dell PERC H700 PCIe RAID card - these can be picked up used from EBay at a decent price now. Plus 4 x 4TB drives in RAID 5. The read / write speed from this (with small files) is great. Using Debian Wheezy and samba. The CPU and RAM in the PC aren't that great, Q6600 and 8GB RAM, but due to the RAID card, the computers CPU isn't really doing much.
RichwiththeS2000 said:
For home, I got a HP Microserver, filled it with 4x 4Tb SATA drives. Cost less than £300 for the lot IIRC. RAID 1 the disks for protection, install linux + Samba. Speeds are good (it will max out a 100/100 connection, and it has spare PCI slots if you want to add faster network cards.
Job done, and it only uses about 100W of power on full chat so its not going to cost much to leave on.
Avoid the NAS 'appliances' you can get, they typically have really s
tty CPUs and NICs which makes the speeds terrible.
£300??.?Job done, and it only uses about 100W of power on full chat so its not going to cost much to leave on.
Avoid the NAS 'appliances' you can get, they typically have really s
tty CPUs and NICs which makes the speeds terrible.Sorry, but that sounds like utter bulls
t to me. 4TB drives are easily £100 each on their own.Edited by ZesPak on Saturday 7th March 16:00
fwaggie said:
I've got a Netgear ReadyNAS 2 drive box which can easily saturate a gigabit network when reading / writing reasonable sized files (typical MP3s or large JPEGs for instance) but it slows down quite a bit if you're copying lots of small files to / from it.
Avoid the consumer level NAS boxes, their CPUs are too slow, not enough RAM, and parity calculations aren't fast enough really.
I've just superceded my ReadyNAS with an old Dell PC scrounged from work, the crucial addition is a Dell PERC H700 PCIe RAID card - these can be picked up used from EBay at a decent price now. Plus 4 x 4TB drives in RAID 5. The read / write speed from this (with small files) is great. Using Debian Wheezy and samba. The CPU and RAM in the PC aren't that great, Q6600 and 8GB RAM, but due to the RAID card, the computers CPU isn't really doing much.
Your requirements are quite different than OP's. For his purposes Raid5 would be lousy choice. RAID10 and couple of SSDs automatic backup to cloud if he wants, and most importantly one stop shop. While you might be perfectly happy to rebuild kernel, disable atime to squeeze few extra KB/s, in production environment that's hardly priority. IMO anyway.Avoid the consumer level NAS boxes, their CPUs are too slow, not enough RAM, and parity calculations aren't fast enough really.
I've just superceded my ReadyNAS with an old Dell PC scrounged from work, the crucial addition is a Dell PERC H700 PCIe RAID card - these can be picked up used from EBay at a decent price now. Plus 4 x 4TB drives in RAID 5. The read / write speed from this (with small files) is great. Using Debian Wheezy and samba. The CPU and RAM in the PC aren't that great, Q6600 and 8GB RAM, but due to the RAID card, the computers CPU isn't really doing much.
Something link this then: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Synology-Rackstation-RS814...
Synology RS814 4 Bay 1U Rackmount Network Attached Storage
Dual Core CPU with Floating-Point Unit
Over 135MB/s Writing, 211MB/s Reading
Dual LAN with Failover and Link Aggregation Support
1GB RAM Boosting Multitasking Power
Scale up to 32TB with Synology RX410
Synology site shows up to 24TB capacity but I would look at WD Red 4TB x 4 and may be just get the case for £414...
Thoughts?
We bought an RS814RP+ - slightly better performance.
I would highly recommend buying from Ebuyer as they install the disks and provide better warranty coverage because they fitted the disks.
You can find the spec for the RP814RP+ here
I have ours running with 4 bonded Gigabit ports to maximise LAN throughput (even though we only primarily use it for backups!).
Short spec:
Dual Core CPU with Floating-Point Unit
● Over 330MB/s Reading, 196MB/s Writing
● 4 LAN with Failover and Link Aggregation Support
● 2GB RAM for Boosting Multitasking Power
● Features USB 3.0 ports
● Scale up to 40TB with Synology
RX410
● Redundant Power Supplies Ensure
Service Uptime (RS814RP+ only)
● VMware® / Citrix® / Hyper-V®
Compliance
● Running on Synology DiskStation
Manager (DSM)
I would highly recommend buying from Ebuyer as they install the disks and provide better warranty coverage because they fitted the disks.
You can find the spec for the RP814RP+ here
I have ours running with 4 bonded Gigabit ports to maximise LAN throughput (even though we only primarily use it for backups!).
Short spec:
Dual Core CPU with Floating-Point Unit
● Over 330MB/s Reading, 196MB/s Writing
● 4 LAN with Failover and Link Aggregation Support
● 2GB RAM for Boosting Multitasking Power
● Features USB 3.0 ports
● Scale up to 40TB with Synology
RX410
● Redundant Power Supplies Ensure
Service Uptime (RS814RP+ only)
● VMware® / Citrix® / Hyper-V®
Compliance
● Running on Synology DiskStation
Manager (DSM)
Edited by TonyRPH on Sunday 8th March 15:07
GJOB said:
Something link this then: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Synology-Rackstation-RS814...
Synology RS814 4 Bay 1U Rackmount Network Attached Storage
Dual Core CPU with Floating-Point Unit
Over 135MB/s Writing, 211MB/s Reading
Dual LAN with Failover and Link Aggregation Support
1GB RAM Boosting Multitasking Power
Scale up to 32TB with Synology RX410
Synology site shows up to 24TB capacity but I would look at WD Red 4TB x 4 and may be just get the case for £414...
Thoughts?
It's probably OK. The difficulty if you have no idea of what your IO requirements are.Synology RS814 4 Bay 1U Rackmount Network Attached Storage
Dual Core CPU with Floating-Point Unit
Over 135MB/s Writing, 211MB/s Reading
Dual LAN with Failover and Link Aggregation Support
1GB RAM Boosting Multitasking Power
Scale up to 32TB with Synology RX410
Synology site shows up to 24TB capacity but I would look at WD Red 4TB x 4 and may be just get the case for £414...
Thoughts?
4x Red drives in RAID10 is fine for sequential IO but it isn't a whole heap of random IO which is what you tend to get when you have lots of machines simultaneously accessing different files.
So it isn't a bad choice because it's a poor product, it might be a bad choice if your IO requirements mean you need more spindles.
bhstewie said:
hstewie said: It's probably OK. The difficulty if you have no idea of what your IO requirements are.
4x Red drives in RAID10 is fine for sequential IO but it isn't a whole heap of random IO which is what you tend to get when you have lots of machines simultaneously accessing different files.
So it isn't a bad choice because it's a poor product, it might be a bad choice if your IO requirements mean you need more spindles.
Can you help by advising how I go about defining my IO requirements?4x Red drives in RAID10 is fine for sequential IO but it isn't a whole heap of random IO which is what you tend to get when you have lots of machines simultaneously accessing different files.
So it isn't a bad choice because it's a poor product, it might be a bad choice if your IO requirements mean you need more spindles.
GJOB said:
<snip>
my understanding is the motherboard, CPU and RAM is key with a NAS, the drive speeds are less important: http://blog.brianmoses.net/2014/01/diy-nas-2014-ed...
<snip>
Actually - the converse is true.my understanding is the motherboard, CPU and RAM is key with a NAS, the drive speeds are less important: http://blog.brianmoses.net/2014/01/diy-nas-2014-ed...
<snip>
With a proper RAID controller, CPU is not that important - although RAM can be fairly important.
You're looking to maximise I/O - which is what fast disks and a good RAID controller will give you.
And then you'll want a quad port network card to bond 4 interfaces to your switch (you'll need a managed switch for this).
As for RAID config - RAID 10 will likely give the best performance on your budget.
ETA:
Actually - I have just run a couple of quick rudimentry tests here at work to analyse disk speed, and the performance of the Synology has left me somewhat shocked.
Using hdparm
Synology RP814RP+ with 4x 4TB WD Red disks
nas1> hdparm -tT /dev/vg1000/lv
/dev/vg1000/lv:
Timing cached reads: 1948 MB in 2.00 seconds = 974.10 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 886 MB in 3.01 seconds = 294.42 MB/sec
nas1>
Linux virtual machines running under ESXi
root@remote-ssh:~# hdparm -tT /dev/disk/by-uuid/2e68e359-9083-442d-99b7-e911c7eb60e8
/dev/disk/by-uuid/2e68e359-9083-442d-99b7-e911c7eb60e8:
Timing cached reads: 12938 MB in 2.00 seconds = 6474.20 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 530 MB in 3.01 seconds = 176.17 MB/sec
root@remote-ssh:~#
HP Microserver (N54L IIRC) with standard on board SATA - Linux RAID (mirror)
root@nas:~# hdparm -tT /dev/md1
/dev/md1:
Timing cached reads: 3118 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1559.65 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 346 MB in 3.01 seconds = 115.09 MB/sec
root@nas:~#
Benchmarking with 'dd' tells a similar story:
Synology RP814RP+ with 4x 4TB WD Red disks
nas1> time dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=/volume1/test conv=fsync
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
real 0m 37.26s
user 0m 0.00s
sys 0m 4.30s
nas1>
Linux virtual machines running under ESXi
root@remote-ssh:~# time dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=/root/test conv=fsync
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 6.67677 s, 161 MB/s
real 0m6.899s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m1.056s
root@remote-ssh:~#
HP Microserver (N54L IIRC) with standard on board SATA - Linux RAID (mirror)
root@nas:~# time dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=/storage/test conv=fsync
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 9.14599 s, 117 MB/s
real 0m9.174s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m2.560s
root@nas:~#
Edited by TonyRPH on Monday 9th March 10:28
TonyRPH said:
Actually - the converse is true.
With a proper RAID controller, CPU is not that important - although RAM can be fairly important.
You're looking to maximise I/O - which is what fast disks and a good RAID controller will give you.
And then you'll want a quad port network card to bond 4 interfaces to your switch (you'll need a managed switch for this).
As for RAID config - RAID 10 will likely give the best performance on your budget.
All of the above + number of drives. More physical drives you have, better performance, everything else being the same. Too many people go for R5/6 without realising the performance issues.With a proper RAID controller, CPU is not that important - although RAM can be fairly important.
You're looking to maximise I/O - which is what fast disks and a good RAID controller will give you.
And then you'll want a quad port network card to bond 4 interfaces to your switch (you'll need a managed switch for this).
As for RAID config - RAID 10 will likely give the best performance on your budget.
Those hdparm numbers look like sequential IO which shouldn't be an issue.
Things get interesting when multiple clients try to do sequential IO at the same time because as the contention increases you end up with random IO ("blender effect").
Cache can help with reads and especially soaking up writes, but ultimately once you've exhausted cache it's all down to the speed and quantity of spindles sitting behind everything.
Cache and the smart things some arrays can do can make for some very interesting results using stuff like IOmeter - I still think for the OP's purposes an 8 bay Synology will be enough though that's jut a gut feel in the absence of more info.
Things get interesting when multiple clients try to do sequential IO at the same time because as the contention increases you end up with random IO ("blender effect").
Cache can help with reads and especially soaking up writes, but ultimately once you've exhausted cache it's all down to the speed and quantity of spindles sitting behind everything.
Cache and the smart things some arrays can do can make for some very interesting results using stuff like IOmeter - I still think for the OP's purposes an 8 bay Synology will be enough though that's jut a gut feel in the absence of more info.
Who knew it could be such a interesting topic!
What do I currently have: WD 6TB thing from PCWorld, cost about £300, Gigabit LAN
How is it configured?: I Plugged it in and switch it on
It may get set up to provide network storage of individuals files and as well as having shared drives for collaborative working. It will be mainly used by those with very large files that would a) hammer the bandwidth b) fill up the allowances on the users cloud account.
So the major will be very large files. We need them to open as fast as possible on a users machine, they may reference dozens of these large files at a time.
HTH
What do I currently have: WD 6TB thing from PCWorld, cost about £300, Gigabit LAN
How is it configured?: I Plugged it in and switch it on
It may get set up to provide network storage of individuals files and as well as having shared drives for collaborative working. It will be mainly used by those with very large files that would a) hammer the bandwidth b) fill up the allowances on the users cloud account.
So the major will be very large files. We need them to open as fast as possible on a users machine, they may reference dozens of these large files at a time.
HTH
Any advance on "WD thing" such as model number or number of drives? 
If it's just a single 6TB HDD then pretty much anything should be an improvement - when it comes to spindles it's almost always a case of "more is better" so a 4 bay unit will be better (especially at random IO) than a single bay, an 8 bay unit should be better than a 4 bay etc.
I'd work out the price difference between a 4 bay and 8 bay unit, even if you only populate 4 bays, and work from there - you might spend a few more quid upfront but if it gives you room to grow when you need it, it may be worth it.
Go with RAID10 for the best mixture of performance and availability.
If it's just a single 6TB HDD then pretty much anything should be an improvement - when it comes to spindles it's almost always a case of "more is better" so a 4 bay unit will be better (especially at random IO) than a single bay, an 8 bay unit should be better than a 4 bay etc.
I'd work out the price difference between a 4 bay and 8 bay unit, even if you only populate 4 bays, and work from there - you might spend a few more quid upfront but if it gives you room to grow when you need it, it may be worth it.
Go with RAID10 for the best mixture of performance and availability.
jjlynn27 said:
more meaningful results would be gained from bonnie++ or similar. As for your 6TB WD box; if it's configured from 2x3tb drives, it's configured as r0 aka suicide raid. Failure of either drive will result in loss of all data.
This, it's a prosumer box, the older version of this http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/data-storage/hard-dr...It's RAID0 but it doesn't contain mission critical data at the moment, that's why I'm looking for some help - having checked the specs for what I thought I wanted I don't know if that will meet our needs and I don't want to keep sending stuff back...
...like someone said, chicken & egg ...
If we build something at least we can replace parts or re-purpose them if I spec something incorrectly - we ll that's the idea any way.
TonyRPH said:
We bought an RS814RP+ - slightly better performance.
I would highly recommend buying from Ebuyer as they install the disks and provide better warranty coverage because they fitted the disks.
You can find the spec for the RP814RP+ here
I have ours running with 4 bonded Gigabit ports to maximise LAN throughput (even though we only primarily use it for backups!).
Short spec:
Dual Core CPU with Floating-Point Unit
? Over 330MB/s Reading, 196MB/s Writing
? 4 LAN with Failover and Link Aggregation Support
? 2GB RAM for Boosting Multitasking Power
? Features USB 3.0 ports
? Scale up to 40TB with Synology
RX410
? Redundant Power Supplies Ensure
Service Uptime (RS814RP+ only)
? VMware® / Citrix® / Hyper-V®
Compliance
? Running on Synology DiskStation
?Manager (DSM)
Tony, so how do I tell if this is good? with 4 bonded connections what's the theoretical maximum read/write using 7200rpm disks? I would highly recommend buying from Ebuyer as they install the disks and provide better warranty coverage because they fitted the disks.
You can find the spec for the RP814RP+ here
I have ours running with 4 bonded Gigabit ports to maximise LAN throughput (even though we only primarily use it for backups!).
Short spec:
Dual Core CPU with Floating-Point Unit
? Over 330MB/s Reading, 196MB/s Writing
? 4 LAN with Failover and Link Aggregation Support
? 2GB RAM for Boosting Multitasking Power
? Features USB 3.0 ports
? Scale up to 40TB with Synology
RX410
? Redundant Power Supplies Ensure
Service Uptime (RS814RP+ only)
? VMware® / Citrix® / Hyper-V®
Compliance
? Running on Synology DiskStation
?Manager (DSM)
Edited by TonyRPH on Sunday 8th March 15:07
Would it help if the Ethernet card was 10GB?
What would the effect of a bigger processor or more RAM be?
Is there an ultimate NAS build?
Would something like this perform better of worse your system? http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.a...
Does FreeNAS/TrueNAS allow hot swapping?
Brain hurts. Back later.
GJOB said:
Tony, so how do I tell if this is good? with 4 bonded connections what's the theoretical maximum read/write using 7200rpm disks?
Would it help if the Ethernet card was 10GB?
What would the effect of a bigger processor or more RAM be?
Is there an ultimate NAS build?
Would something like this perform better of worse your system? http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.a...
Does FreeNAS/TrueNAS allow hot swapping?
Brain hurts. Back later.
With 4 bonded connections (4G) or 10G the limiting factor is likely going to be the disks when there are multiple users accessing large files. Using SSDs would improve matters but then the cost rises dramatically.Would it help if the Ethernet card was 10GB?
What would the effect of a bigger processor or more RAM be?
Is there an ultimate NAS build?
Would something like this perform better of worse your system? http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.a...
Does FreeNAS/TrueNAS allow hot swapping?
Brain hurts. Back later.
At a brief glance through the specs, the device you linked to looks pretty good and is probably on a par (but likely better!) with the Synology.
Realistically, it has a superior spec to the Synology, and looks to be quite a neat bundle. It appears to have a PCIx slot, so you could use a dual / quad port Ethernet card to expand the LAN ports, as the device only has two ports, the third being for on board management (IPMI).
For the O/S I would go for unRAID / FreeNAS or similar for ease of Administration - and these tend to be performance tuned out of the box to a large extent.
I'm not sure about unRAID but I know that FreeNAS supports ZFS which is quite an efficient and robust file system.
But of equal importance is your LAN infrastructure.
How good is your cabling?
Do you have enterprise switches?
What about your desktops? Are they of a good spec?
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