How to test performance without wasting money buying beforehand?

GodAtum · 16 Mar 2019 at 16:12

I have a 5x 1TB Xponology RAID physical server which performs well. I want to upgrade my NAS by buying a 24 bay server and putting in some 1TB SSDs. This will be running Windows Server 2019 with storage spaces setup.

I did a test in a VM with virtual SSDs setup. But this was half as slow! How can I not waste my money buying all the hardware before testing?

Avalon · 17 Mar 2019 at 03:26

Virtual SSD's? As in you set-up virtual volumes on the same physical SSD and then wondered why you were limited by single disk numbers of 24 virtual disk files running with additional system/VM overheads on a single physical disk? If so I think I can see the problem

SSD's can individually saturate SATA 6GB/s links with the SATA/AHCI overhead (550MB/s ish), if you throw a bunch of them on the same controller or as you are intending the same backplane, then you will be limited by the backplane's connectivity and remote access is going to be limited to your network connectivity, realistically that means 10Gb upgrades. If you want fast, buy NVMe, if you want storage, mechanical still wins unless latency is the issue.

GodAtum · 17 Mar 2019 at 10:41

Avalon said:
Virtual SSD's? As in you set-up virtual volumes on the same physical SSD and then wondered why you were limited by single disk numbers of 24 virtual disk files running with additional system/VM overheads on a single physical disk? If so I think I can see the problem

SSD's can individually saturate SATA 6GB/s links with the SATA/AHCI overhead (550MB/s ish), if you throw a bunch of them on the same controller or as you are intending the same backplane, then you will be limited by the backplane's connectivity and remote access is going to be limited to your network connectivity, realistically that means 10Gb upgrades. If you want fast, buy NVMe, if you want storage, mechanical still wins unless latency is the issue.

I didn't realise that. Linus used SSDs in his Storinator which looked good. How many NVMes can I fit in a server?

I'll be using it to edit 4K video so need something fast.

Avalon · 17 Mar 2019 at 11:53

GodAtum said:
I didn't realise that. Linus used SSDs in his Storinator which looked good. How many NVMes can I fit in a server?

I'll be using it to edit 4K video so need something fast.

How much space do you need? NVMe is already potentially 6-7x faster than a single SSD and Samsung do at least 2TB in the 970 range. The way I normally spec out AV builds is for local working space that’s as fast as possible and then write it out to slower storage. Once you start having to dump over the LAN, you need to look at 10G or suck up 100MB/s ish being slow.

Throrik · 17 Mar 2019 at 12:55

Also - don't copy a single thing LinusTechTips does in his server configurations. His are done for videos and to make revenue, it's akin to getting Clarkson to fix your car.

As Avalon says make sure you get 10G if you're going to do this over the LAN, and make sure you have the throughput on your devices/switches.

BongoHunter · 17 Mar 2019 at 16:24

If you go for that much disk IO - what kind of networking are your going to have between your machine and the NAS?

In terms of try before you buy, that's a tough one. What size are the files do you move and at what frequency? Are you sticking with Xpenology?

GodAtum · 17 Mar 2019 at 22:32

I'll probably upgrade to 10gb ethernet. Files are large scenery files for P3D flight sim. Also 4K videos for streaming across multiple users in Plex (no transcoding). I like Synology but their hardware is so overpriced.