How to test performance without wasting money buying beforehand?

[GodAtum]

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?

 

[GodAtum]

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.

 

[GodAtum]

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.