Help for high perf NAS

[Liscio]

Hello,
I need to replace my NAS...
what i need is:

- great read/write performance
- few user connected (1-3)
- reliabilty (need a fail-safe raid array)

Reading this forum and the charts of comparison, i've selected 2 products:
Qnap TS-459 Pro
Synology DS1010+

Is it a good selection? What can you suggest me? What kind of RAID configuration shall i use?

Thanks a lot.

Andrea.

 

[claykin]

RAID is a good first step to protect your data, but try not to look at it as fail safe. For fail safe you should still backup your important/irreplaceable data to an external source.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-basics/30060-smart-sohos-dont-do-raid


Take a look at the Netgear Readynas Series. The Pro has excellent performance (100MB/s if your NIC can do it) and the NVX should be able to read @ 60MB/s realistically. The Pro also supports RAID 6 so you can have 2 redundant disks.

Netgear has new Atom based NAS products that will begin shipping in a week or two. One is based on the NVX chassis and the other on the Pro.

www.netgear.com/ultra.
www.readynas.com

Readynas products come with a 3 year or 5 year warranty (depending on model) and have an excellent user community where the developers actively participate. www.readynas.com/forum. Poke around and compare to QNAP and Syno. All are great products at the end of the day.

Tim loves it when I plug Netgear. And no, I don't work for them. Just a happy user of a few Readynas products.

 

[thiggins]

Hello,
I need to replace my NAS...

What are you using now? What are you expecting for throughput? How much do you want to spend? How much storage do you need?

RAID won't provide reliability and can be more trouble than it is worth. Security comes from backup of all data that you don't want to lose.

 

[Liscio]

Hi,
thanks for replies...
About the failsafe, I think that "hardware-fail" is my only need, for this kind of data.
For really critical data, i already have a geographical backup system for disaster recovery. So, i supposed RAID to be enough, and combined with stripping, i supposed it could bring me even more throughput.

At this moment, for this kind of data, i have a Linksys NAS (the one with gigabit) with 2 x 1 TB WD in RAID 1, but the throughput is too low, and can use it only for backup purposes.

About expected throughput.... don't know, i thought something about 100mb/s

About my LAN, it's all gigabit with cat5e and cat6, and wireless/n for wifi.

About the budget, i'd like to spend less than 800 euro (i'm in italy, here i found a lot of Synology, QNAP, and Buffalo products).

Size of storage.... now i have 1TB, but it's small... i think 2 TB should be enough, by now...


Andrea.


Edit: Thanks for moving my thread, i've seen the right section, just a little too late...

 

[Liscio]

anyway, i suppose i can use the old NAS (with 2TB in jbod) to backup the new NAS.... in this way, on the new NAS i can use a RAID configuration less reliable than RAID1, with better performance (RAID 5 ?).

 

[thiggins]

Thanks for the info.

Given what you're starting with (one of the slowest NASes made), anything is going to be an improvement.

You can get 2TB single-drive NASes now, so you don't really need RAID.

For 100 MB/s performance, you'll need an Intel-based NAS. Marvell hasn't yet made a SoC that will deliver more than 40 - 60 MB/s. But again, that may be plenty given where you are starting from.

RAID won't really deliver higher throughput. It's either the same as a single drive or slightly lower.

You won't find single-drive Intel-based NASes, though. Too expensive. So if you want to move to that performance level, a dual-bay is the entry point.

For price/performance, a two-drive QNAP TS-239 Pro II is hard to beat. But it's discontinued now and can be hard to find. $500 U.S. though, without drives. Synology DS710+ is the equivalent.

Model that replaces the QNAP is a TS-259 for about $100 more. Pretty pricey.

Check the NAS Charts for other options in between.

 

[thiggins]

anyway, i suppose i can use the old NAS (with 2TB in jbod) to backup the new NAS.... in this way, on the new NAS i can use a RAID configuration less reliable than RAID1, with better performance (RAID 5 ?).

RAID 5 isn't going to give you higher performance. Will be same as RAID 1 or less.

 

[Liscio]

Yes, i completely know the limits of my current NAS. But, now it's used just for backup, so it's ok.

So, if with RAID (even RAID 10?) are all slower, can i buy an high-throughput solution, with 4 bays, an configure in it 2 RAID1 arrays for a total of 2 TB size?

About the charts, i've used them, before posting, and found 2 solutions (avaible, at similar prices) that have throughput around 100mb/s :

Qnap TS-459 Pro
Synology DS1010+

 

[thiggins]

I'm trying to save you money, but it looks like you want to spend.

Either the Synology or QNAP can handle multiple volumes.

 

[Liscio]

Hi Tim,
thanks for your attention, i really appreciate your time...

Well, i don't want to waste, but i can spend that money...
Looking at the charts, it looks like the two nas above, are similar performance.

Comparing them, i see that QNAP:
- supports ext4
- has more Flash (512 vs 128)
- has LCD panel

The Synology has:
- one more HDD bay (5 instead of 4)
- a little better bench performance


I've noticed from comparison, that QNAP should be more expensive...
For me, it's the opposite... here, the Sinology costs 50$ less than the QNAP.

Do you think differences are relevant?

 

[claykin]

All this talk about 100MB/s throughput, yet I don't know of a single desktop class Gigabit NIC thats capable of 100MB/s sustained. You'll need a server class NIC running on the PCIe bus.

 

[beisser]

All this talk about 100MB/s throughput, yet I don't know of a single desktop class Gigabit NIC thats capable of 100MB/s sustained. You'll need a server class NIC running on the PCIe bus.

thats bollox

just about every onboard gigabit nic on a current pc (2-3 years old) will deliver close to 1gbit (125MB/sec) sustained speed.

you just need to wire two computers with onboard nics together and have iperf run between them. you will get ~920-980 mbit stable throughput.

if it cant deliver the same while copying stuff, the harddrive or something else is limiting it, but not the nic.

cheap pci-nics on the other hand a very slow and deliver 400-500 mbit at best.

 

[claykin]

Here's a quick example of a motherboard test of NIC performance. This is only an example. Look for others.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/06/07/msi_x58_proe_motherboard_review/3

IPerf is great for testing, but it won't get your files from one place to the next on your LAN.

 

[HDClown]

That one test doesn't prove anything. How about some real world results with my hardware

Source: ASUS P5K Deluxe, using the onboard Realtek RTL8110SC GigE NIC - Jumbo enabled, MTU 7000
Switch: HP 1810G Switch - Jumbo frame enabled
Target: QNAP TS-459 Pro - 802.3ad link aggregation, Jumbo enabled, MTU 9000

I pushed 94.1 MB/s sustained on some tests I did the other night.

QNAP's own benchmarks shows sustained rates of a few MB/s higher to the TS-459 Pro, and that's over Samba, and with a 5GB test file.

 

[HDClown]

One more test on my own hardware.

FileZilla FTP Client to QNAP TS-459 Pro over FTP, port, 21 active mode.

4.6g file - Speeds bounch between 90-103MB/sec for first 2.5 gigs. Then speeds settle around 95-98MB/s

12gig - Pretty much the same as the 4.6gig file, but once you get into the 7-8g portion fo the file, speeds settle in around 96MB/s sustained.

These speeds are observed based on the FileZilla transfer queue, as well as some bandwidth monitoring programs.