NAS Performance, is a PC Better?

[scotty]

I was looking over the charts this morning as I'm looking to buy or build a BYOD NAS, and most GigE NAS's on the market seem to only average around 20-25MB/s read and 15-20 write?. What's the big bottleneck here? Is is just that off-the-shelf NAS products are using cheap or minimal hardware? I built a friend a Thecus n5200R and for medium-small file sizes it was averaging about 40MB/s, which even there I thought was a little low. It supposedly had a 1.7GHz celeron in it, and I put in some decent Seagate 7200.10 SATA drives in it (5x500GB RAID5). Most newer SATA hard drives are averaging 70-80MB/s r/w speeds, and GigE 'should' be able to handle at least 60-70% load (75'ish MB's)...

I was eyeing up the D-Link DNS-323 which seems like a good BYOD performer, even the SNB write-up notes it has 'good performance', but it doesn't seem too impressive considering the capabilities of the disks and GigE. The HP MediaSmart server was getting half decent speeds, but that's obviously a PC/Server.

Here's the question - I can buy relatively decent used computers from work (Athlon64 3200, 1GB, 80GB) for about $100. Would it just be more worth my time and performance to use one of those as a NAS? Perhaps I would try FreeNAS or just throw XP on there, but it seems bang-for-the-buck and performance would be much higher.

 

[Brandon]

I was looking over the charts this morning as I'm looking to buy or build a BYOD NAS, and most GigE NAS's on the market seem to only average around 20-25MB/s read and 15-20 write?. What's the big bottleneck here? Is is just that off-the-shelf NAS products are using cheap or minimal hardware? I built a friend a Thecus n5200R and for medium-small file sizes it was averaging about 40MB/s, which even there I thought was a little low. It supposedly had a 1.7GHz celeron in it, and I put in some decent Seagate 7200.10 SATA drives in it (5x500GB RAID5). Most newer SATA hard drives are averaging 70-80MB/s r/w speeds, and GigE 'should' be able to handle at least 60-70% load (75'ish MB's)...

I was eyeing up the D-Link DNS-323 which seems like a good BYOD performer, even the SNB write-up notes it has 'good performance', but it doesn't seem too impressive considering the capabilities of the disks and GigE. The HP MediaSmart server was getting half decent speeds, but that's obviously a PC/Server.

Here's the question - I can buy relatively decent used computers from work (Athlon64 3200, 1GB, 80GB) for about $100. Would it just be more worth my time and performance to use one of those as a NAS? Perhaps I would try FreeNAS or just throw XP on there, but it seems bang-for-the-buck and performance would be much higher.

For that price, I would go with the computer, much easier to scale than a BYOD NAS device.

I also use a couple of PIII desktop PC's (In rackmount cases) for mini-NAS's, both of which use 3x320Gb 1x40gb ATA-100 drives.

The hardest part is finding an OS you're happy with, I personally use 2003 server on a daily basis, so I know it best. You can also find tons of free NAS made OS's, like FreeNAS, OpenFiler, as well as build your own using a Linux/Unix Distro. I personally haven't ever had much luck with Samba, so I avoid it like the plague.

 

[Bart]

This performance issue was exactly the reason why I opted for Windows Home Server instead of a BYOD NAS device. Unfortunately, the performance of that OS completely s*cked as well. (see my post about this here)

For this reason I'll probably also go for a 2003 server setup now. Sure, it's probably overkill for a home setup, but at least it'll work decently and the performance will be there. I also might tinker with an extra PC next to my server (built in a rackmount) with OpenFiler or Open-e though. Cause I'm curious to know how iSCSI works and how well it performs.

That'll be for later though. My main issue is getting the main server up and running and choosing the right hardware for the network.

 

[Brandon]

iSCSI on gigabit networking is amazing, if you have the hardware/software to support it.

As for speed, your best bet these days is 2008 server, it has a new file transfer protocol. The one used in 2003 and below was set for 10 mb networks and less, as such, the new system gives much much better read/write speeds.

If you have an MSDN, or TechNet Plus membership, you can get quite a few keys for free for "non production" useage. Homes make the perfect testing grounds

 

[thiggins]

If you want high RAID5 throughput, you should consider throwing a good RAID5 controller into the server. And make sure that you are using a gigabit NIC that isn't on the PCI bus.

 

[Bart]

If you have an MSDN, or TechNet Plus membership, you can get quite a few keys for free for "non production" useage. Homes make the perfect testing grounds

Heh! I wished!

 

[crashnburn]

Interesting. I am guessing the key would be to have something that can have a LOW power profile on Idle and maybe Wake Up on LAN.

 

[zx10guy]

iSCSI on gigabit networking is amazing, if you have the hardware/software to support it.

As for speed, your best bet these days is 2008 server, it has a new file transfer protocol. The one used in 2003 and below was set for 10 mb networks and less, as such, the new system gives much much better read/write speeds.

If you have an MSDN, or TechNet Plus membership, you can get quite a few keys for free for "non production" useage. Homes make the perfect testing grounds

iSCSI has draw backs. One of which is CPU overhead. And it goes without saying that you need to have a network infrastructure which can handle the additional demands of iSCSI.

It's been a while since I had to do anything storage related. But when I took a class at Dell on the EMC Clariion, there was a general rule of thumb on when to make the transition over from fiber channel to iSCSI. It mostly had to do with cost and ease of scaleability.