Looking for a fast RAID5 4x 3TB setup

[Oscar Whiskey]

All

I tried to follow the 'read-this-before-you-post' stuff but the links are dead so please direct me to the proper sources if an answer is fairly obvious to you guys but not to me.

As the title suggests I'm looking for a NAS to house 4x 3TB WD Red drives in a RAID5 setup. I will connect the NAS to my Gigabit router, which in turn is connected to my Gigabit NIC in my PC and via 802.11n to my HTPC. AFAIK, a Cat 5E cabled Gigabit network should be able to offer about 110MB/s net data throughput. A single WD Red has 147/147MB/s read/write. I will be accessing the array via Windows on my PC, preferably via the built-in file browser but if I need to use an FTP-style manager or similar I'd be OK with that if it improves speed.

The HTPC will stream 10GB~20GB MKV files to play in Kodi (the media app).

Now the difficult part comes, what NAS would be able to provide me with 110/110MB/s read/write in a RAID5 setup. IOW, what NAS would not limit me further than my 1GbE network does? I've been looking into the QNAP TS-431/431+/451/451+ as they kinda match my budget. But maybe my budget is unrealistic compared to my expectations? Also, the higher end NASes offer different amounts of RAM, does this play a part in the net throughput speed? For the record, when it comes to streaming the HTPC will do all the decoding, the NAS only has to provide the data.

Thanks

 

[Ois]

All of the NASes you mentioned should work just fine.
I have an old Atom based NAS from Thecus, it's pretty crappy and it even has no problem providing ~110MB/sec TP.
I only see slow down when multiple devices connect to it or when the NAS is processing something else.
A used a link aggregation switch to add a second LAN connection, but the difference it makes is very small.

A NAS with 2-4MB of RAM is fine for what you will be doing - people only require much more RAM when running VMs or using ZFS file system.

The need for a more powerful CPU really for some people comes from the use of video transcoding, i.e. on the fly processing of a video stream to make it suitable for clients such as phones and tablets.
Kodi does not do any server-side transcoding so you will be okay with any of the NASs you mentioned.

I'd watch the video streaming over WLAN, this is likely to be the only thing to hold you back.

Get the best NAS you can afford but probably any of them will be suitable for what you want.

 

[Oscar Whiskey]

So what you're saying is that 110MB/s read/write is not a problem on a cheap NAS like the TS-431 with 512MB RAM, as long as I don't have the NAS do stuff where it requires CPU power?

You're saying streaming is likely to hold me back. Why? If I know for a fact that streaming works right now with my Wifi setup (I stream HD content on a HTPC which is stored on my PC), why would it be an issue with the NAS? If the NAS can handle the 110MB/s read/write, it can certainly handle the 10MB/s I pull over the Wifi, right?

 

[Ois]

okay, so I just realised that the 431 is ARM based, 2x A9 which is really pretty slow, even for a cell phone....It should be fine for 110MB/sec but I am not 100% sure - please check with someone who has used it.
The 451/451+ with an INTEL CPU will definitely be good enough.

If you know for fact that your WiFi works for streaming then good. In my apartment I have so much interference from neighbors that I never get reliable streaming at that rate - I am actually currently having network cabling installed.

 

[sfx2000]

The TS-x31's perform well - even with the Cortex-A9 chips...

The TS-x31+ series move to the Cortex-A15, and that is a pretty healthy chip - on QTS 4.2.1, it's strong enough to support Docker Containers, just like their X86 models.

 

[System Error Message]

Actually with ARM based chips certain streaming software wont do re-encoding. If you plan to go with ARM go for the A15 as they run software way better than the A9. As for RAID itself even intel ATOMs have no issues keeping up because intel have good chipsets even though RAID5 has more computing overhead than RAID0. Regardless of which setup the performance depends on the RAID controller and the NICs.

 

[sfx2000]

That's more of a SW issue with some of the ARM cores out there - some have the VED from Imagination Technologies, that does an excellent job at H.264, but there's licensing involved - Intel uses the same VED in the 22nm Silvermont's that have a GPU, and they pass thru the license to the OEM.

If you've ever looked at the BCM2708/2709, the GPU in that chip is pretty awesome - and that's ARM11 or Cortex-A7... and then there's every smartphone chip out there - so it's not a question of "if", it's perhaps a question of when...

 

[Oscar Whiskey]

@ System Error Message

That's kinda my point. The fact that the performance depends on the RAID controller yet I can't find reliable performance comparisons between the RAID contorller(s) used in those QNAPs.

 

[kamina]

I had about 70MB/s read speeds on my old Synology 211j which is now about 5 years old, the new budjet NAS devices should be a lot faster.

But this is talking of large files like video's, when you move to small files like pictures (or worse yet thumbnails of pictures) then it get's a lot slower, and this is where the faster CPU's really make a difference.

Now I have a 453s with 2.5" disks and it can saturate a gigabit network with pretty small files.