basic home NAS, Asustor or?

[stevech]

It's not the NAS' speed.
It's all the overhead in SMB times 2 (source, destination), all the buffer copies involved to get from SATA to ext4 to IP packets to TCP to SMB and all over again in reverse on the PC side, replacing ext4 with NTFS.

I suppose a file server based on Microsoft's OS, with windows client PCs, is faster at all this.
And so too, a *nix server and clients all running NFS. (oh, had Oracle not murdered Sun Microsystems, we might be better off now.)

I wonder if you can bypass much of this with something like iSCSI over 802.3. Some NASes support that. But Windows? Linux?

Even so, it's rather less than an SSD on SATA.

 

[iunlock]

It's not the NAS' speed.
It's all the overhead in SMB times 2 (source, destination), all the buffer copies involved to get from SATA to ext4 to IP packets to TCP to SMB and all over again in reverse on the PC side, replacing ext4 with NTFS.

I suppose a file server based on Microsoft's OS, with windows client PCs, is faster at all this.
And so too, a *nix server and clients all running NFS. (oh, had Oracle not murdered Sun Microsystems, we might be better off now.)

I wonder if you can bypass much of this with something like iSCSI over 802.3. Some NASes support that. But Windows? Linux?

Even so, it's rather less than an SSD on SATA.

True. Nothing can touch a SSD as that's a given at the moment. As for an iSCSI on a SSD over 802.3, that would probably be the fastest method, so it seems. The newer NAS's like the TVS-x71's series are 10GBe capable so that might be another option as well, granted you have a network that can support the speeds.

 

[stevech]

Is there a cheap way to upgrade a windows desktop to 10GBe, and an affordable switch? Not needed for router.
That done, and considering the big fixed overhead in file systems, SMB, IP stack, etc. - would 10GBe really speed up transfers of folders with lots of not-GB sized files?

A quick search ... 8 port 10GBe switches are thousands of dollars.

 

[thiggins]

Is there a cheap way to upgrade a windows desktop to 10GBe, and an affordable switch? Not needed for router.

Not cheap, but Intel X540T1 takes care of the desktop. Can connect directly to another 10GbE copper NIC without a switch. That's the way our NAS testbed works.

This benchmark summary for a recent 10GbE NAS shows both Gigabit and 10GbE results. There's a significant throughput gain for large sequential files. Directory copies, not so much.

 

[sfx2000]

A quick search ... 8 port 10GBe switches are thousands of dollars

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833122529

NETGEAR Prosafe 8-port 10 Gigabit Unmanaged Plus Switch (XS708E)

$759 (usd) plus shipping from the New Egg...

 

[stevech]

$800 for switch plus $350 for one desktop = better only for GB files.

I'll take a pass on this.

 

[sfx2000]

$800 for switch plus $350 for one desktop = better only for GB files.

I'll take a pass on this.

There is benefit to some use cases, but to most folks, I agree...

 

[RMerlin]

There is benefit to some use cases, but to most folks, I agree...

That's a case where I'd go with a sneakernet rather than spend that much.

 

[sfx2000]

That's a case where I'd go with a sneakernet rather than spend that much.

No doubt, sometimes an external large HDD in a FedEx box is several times faster than any network connection