Looking for reasonably priced but extremely fast NAS device

[lupodwdm]

A few months ago I decided to purchase a D-Link NAS to back up music and videos from our Avid/ProTools system. I configured the Dlink as a Raid 5 for redundancy and the speed was HORRIBLE!!!! We were seeing 10-30 MB/s read and write speed to and from the NAS. A call to D-Link provided me with this advice:

We are aware that the controller used for RAID 5 can severely slow down access times. We suggest you configure the device so that each drive shows up individually. Not only does that COMPLETELY defeated the purpose of a RAID 5 setup, but the speed was just as bad. For comparison, the two windows 7 boxes we have here for business applications averages 85-120MB/s which is perfect.

So here is my question; can some of the true experts on here please recommend a NAS device for me that has extremely fast network access speed? I am currently running a 8TB RAID 5 setup in one of my Windows 7 boxes using a highpoint RAID card and get anywhere from 80-120BM read and write speed through the network.

I can't spend thousands on this setup but I figured I wold take a shot and see what you all recommended. I don't need more than 4-6 drive bays. SATA 6.oGb/s would be nice but I can live with 3.0Gb/s. I just want the fastest network speed I can afford.

Any suggestions?

Thanks all!

Adam

 

[MrFixit]

Adam,

What size files are we talking about? You may get high network file access speeds from the QNAP range of 4 and 5 disk NAS' (I have a TS-509 and can read / move large video files over Gigabit Ethernet at 100+MB/s - effectively getting close to the maximum bandwidth of Gigabit).

However, for smaller file sizes the speeds will drop due to the overhead of the network and the effective fragmentation of multiple file access (this is also true for local disk access to an extent).

So, if the files are much smaller than video files (which are typically GByte in size) then you might want to try iSCSI which is block based rather than file based. I use this on my TS-509 with great success for an application which does significant file caching and DB access (Adobe Photoshop Lightroom).

As always, YMMV

 

[teknojnky]

So here is my question; can some of the true experts on here please recommend a NAS device for me that has extremely fast network access speed? I am currently running a 8TB RAID 5 setup in one of my Windows 7 boxes using a highpoint RAID card and get anywhere from 80-120BM read and write speed through the network.

I don't think your gonna find any NAS as fast as that at a price you consider reasonable.

Most NAS don't even have a hardware card, especially not cheap nas.

Most NAS won't have as fast as a CPU as your windows box either.

To get a nas as fast as your win7 box + raid card, I expect your gonna be spending quite a bit.

Not to mention, there is also always the computing axiom:
Fast, Cheap, Dependable. Pick 2.

 

[lupodwdm]

I ended up buying a miniatx system for less than $500 that will run windows 7 and utilize a pci-e x1 gigabit NIC which should give me the same throughput as my other two systems

I have another questin you all may be able to answer; Most of the time we are streaing movies in real time form the drives, not copying a whole file. Does jumbo frame support slow down the streaming speed? What would be the proper settings to chose to optimize bandwidth when streaming movies, i.e. Blue ray which is about 5 MB/s

Adam,

What size files are we talking about? You may get high network file access speeds from the QNAP range of 4 and 5 disk NAS' (I have a TS-509 and can read / move large video files over Gigabit Ethernet at 100+MB/s - effectively getting close to the maximum bandwidth of Gigabit).

However, for smaller file sizes the speeds will drop due to the overhead of the network and the effective fragmentation of multiple file access (this is also true for local disk access to an extent).

So, if the files are much smaller than video files (which are typically GByte in size) then you might want to try iSCSI which is block based rather than file based. I use this on my TS-509 with great success for an application which does significant file caching and DB access (Adobe Photoshop Lightroom).

As always, YMMV