NAS Choice

noobftw · 6 Jul 2020 at 11:58

Can someone recommend me a decent 3.5 inch 8 bay NAS that is capable of 10Gbp/s speeds (RJ45 preferred, but SFP is ok also), and that can actually hit those speeds and not just 500-600Mbp/s due to an under-powered CPU?

Also, are there any options out there for an 8 bay external drive enclosure (cold storage as such - NAS features not absolutely required) that has a high speed data connection of some-sort onboard.

noobftw · 6 Jul 2020 at 15:29

BongoHunter said:
What's you budget for the 8 bay NAS without drives?

For your second point I think your talking about DAS - there are loads of options out there for those with connectivity ranging from USB though to SAS and more so depends what your looking to do really.

Thanks for the reply, would want to keep it under (or at) £1000 for the NAS, for the DAS, I would need it to have a data connection of at least 10Gbp/s (USB C Gen 2/Thunderbolt) or a DAS that has an SFP connection on it, also must support RAID.

noobftw · 6 Jul 2020 at 16:26

It's just for backups, that's it. Need it to have high throughput though. It doesn't really have to be turned on all the time, which is why I was thinking of a DAS. I don't have a server rack/or want one tbh, no room for it.

noobftw · 8 Jul 2020 at 16:17

ecksmen said:
8 bays and wanting to be able to saturate 10Gbps or approx (1.2GB/sec) is going to need some decent individual disk through put with only 8 drives. How big is the data set to be backed up?

I'm aware I am not going to saturate the full 10GB, i just want a setup that in the future, if I was to go all SSD's, it would have the ability to do so and hit the peak speed. This system I am building now will have 8x 14tb drives, with a couple of cache drives to help speed things up, not sure what type of RAID setup I will use, might be ZFS or just plain Windows RAID 5-6 or 10. I currently have around 30TB of data to be backed up.

TBH, I have re-looked over the components in those NAS enclosures, and your right, they are way underpowered, even the ones at £2000 - £3000 :/. Been looking at some SuperMicro ITX boards that have 4-8-16 core Xeon's in them, seem way better value. Some of them also come with dual 10GB NICS built-in, 8x SATA ports, 4 through OCuLink. However, i would probably use that for a 4TB NVME Drive and use an LSI HBA or a RAID card for expansion.

Or I could get an X570 I AORUS PRO WIFI, a 3700x, i would have to get a M.2 SATA expansion card to get 4 extra SATA ports though, and use the one on the back as a cache drive, a USB dongle for FreeNas or Unraid, and a separate card for 10GB network, but what about video? ahhhhhhh haha

noobftw · 8 Jul 2020 at 16:45

PiKe said:
Some boards will boot headless, you'll have to check which.

Thanks, I will look into that. Just realised, the SuperMicro boards come with built-in video output, it's the older VGA standard, but it will work fine until remote access is set up then there's no need for it

.

noobftw · 8 Jul 2020 at 16:47

BongoHunter said:
I had the same issue building servers from Ryzen bits - you can't go APU as they only have half the lanes (and only ECC on Pro model if you car about that), headless does not work with all boards and can be a real pain to deal with.

Best solution I could find was to use a PCIEx1 GFX card like this https://www.anandtech.com/show/10269/zotac-quietly-releases-pcie-x1-gt-710-graphics-card

I think it will be less stressful if I go with a server board, built-in video.

PiKe said:
Unraid doesn't need a GUI at all because it's all based in a browser.

It must need some setting up before you get an IP though right?

noobftw · 8 Jul 2020 at 16:50

BongoHunter said:
I had the same issue building servers from Ryzen bits - you can't go APU as they only have half the lanes (and only ECC on Pro model if you car about that), headless does not work with all boards and can be a real pain to deal with.

Best solution I could find was to use a PCIEx1 GFX card like this https://www.anandtech.com/show/10269/zotac-quietly-releases-pcie-x1-gt-710-graphics-card

Could you not have just used a normal graphics card, or am I missing something? i.e. space in the case, other PCI slots taken?

PiKe said:
Gets an IP by DHCP.

Do you know if FreeNass is the same? Thanks

noobftw · 8 Jul 2020 at 17:02

BongoHunter said:
Definately less stressful - probably need to avoid Ryzen then, only 2ish server orientated boards available right now as far as I know.

X570 should comfortably have a enough lanes for a decent box though as long as its on a board where the primary x16 slot can be split into x8x8 at least

Hmm, made me think a bit there, I wonder if the x1 PCI-E 3.0 x8 on the SuperMicro X11SDV-12C-TLN2F can run at 4x4 so I can use an M.2 dual expansion card? Otherwise, i will have to use an HBA or Raid card in it's place, and run a single M.2 drive from the OCuLink port.

noobftw · 8 Jul 2020 at 17:05

BongoHunter said:
Slots taken - I had to sacrifice 1 PCIe x8 for a 10GB NIC, and another for storage. Only left a few PCIEx1 slots free for anything else needed!

Ahh ok, I wish 'all' boards that came out now had 10GB NICS, it should be standard surely.

noobftw · 8 Jul 2020 at 17:07

BongoHunter said:
Some M2 expansion boards handle the lane splitting themselves for boards that don't support bifurcation - though these cost a lot more than the 'dumb' dual and quad m2 boards.

Well, that's good, at least it's not a lost cause

.

Would a 4 core 8 thread Intel Xeon processor D-1521 (2.40 GHz base/
2.70 GHz Turbo) be enough power to drive data through 10GB connection without being bottlenecked, might be a stupid question :/

I don't want to overspend on something I don't need, there will be no VM's or anything like that, just for backups, won't even be powered on all the time.

Also, I read that i need a GB of RAM for every TB of HDD space I have, well i will have 112TB, that's without considering a storage (RAID) method though. How much would you recommend I get, bearing in mind the 10GB throughput i require.

noobftw · 8 Jul 2020 at 19:53

BongoHunter said:
4c8t should be enough - your not asking for that much work to be done by the CPU for this really unless your getting into some fancy pants dedup or compression config.

The 1GB of RAM per TB is a rough guide provided by things like say Freenas, in my own Freenas box I had 8GB of RAM for a 16 TB of disk (presented as 8TB by ZFS due to redundancy) - this was fine and I had no issues. If I had multiple users then I think 16GB would be required to maintain performance.

I've actually got 32GB of RAM now, and I'd have no worries about 64TB pool based on my experience with it so far at least.

Thanks for the reply, if I go with a 2 disk redundancy I will have 84TB to work with. I might go with 64GB RAM and leave it at that, would save me a ton of money. The system will only ever have two max connections backing up, sometimes at the same time.

noobftw · 8 Jul 2020 at 20:39

BongoHunter said:
What OS is it your actually looking at - I just noticed Freenas have slightly refined their docs to suggest a minimum of 8GB + 1GB extra per drive - so that's in the cheap territory for memory at least.

Edit: Just to add - I don't think you'll hit 10GB throughput using the minimum RAM BTW

Would amount of RAM would you recommend?

noobftw · 8 Jul 2020 at 21:15

BongoHunter said:
It depends
Are you starting out with all bays fully populated, or adding any SSDs?

How much do you backup a day? And how frequently?

All bays populated yes. Probably x2 SSD's and an NVME drive. Backup around 1TB a day, sometime more.

noobftw · 9 Jul 2020 at 13:08

As quick as possible yes. Content will be pulled off the NAS infrequently. I think I will put the SSD's/NVME storage in a single pool instead of being used as cache.

In terms of motherboard choice, I have narrowed it down to a few, I did want to get an ASRock Rack D1540D4U-2T8R and put it inside a Silverstone CS381. However, I cannot find one in stock or being sold anywhere for that matter, not even on eBay.
So now it's between the ASRock Rack X470D4U2-2T AM4 and something like a Ryzen 3400/3600/3700x in the same case as above, or a Supermicro X10SDV-TLN4F mITX Intel Xeon D-1541 8-Core/16-Thread 2.1GHz/3Ghz Turbo DDR4 Motherboard inside a Silverstone DS380.

noobftw · 9 Jul 2020 at 19:46

BongoHunter said:
As quickly as possible is expensive and can lead to making choices that cost a bomb for very limited perf gains with your use case. As fast as possible is probably a pure NVME + SSD setup with more RAM than you can shake a stick at and some 40gbps NICs

I think I'd be looking for 32GB minimum to start with and at least 8 decent enterprise type HDD's. I would only increase the RAM if needed - I wouldn't bother with a read cache, and get the biggest drives you can get your hands on as well (as long as not SMR).

I would give the TrueNAS/Freenas forum/wiki a decent search if you looking to do a modern AMD build as I think Freenas can be quite picky about what it will run on compared to Linux based systems (E.G the cheaper 10G Aquantia NICs don't work well if at all without some decent FreeBSD knowledge - and even then you will find you break the driver doing OS updates).

I went with a Supermicro X10SDV-TLN4F mITX Intel Xeon D-1541 8-Core/16 Threads 2.1GHz/3GHz Turbo DDR4 Motherboard, got it for a steal, saved £200 over the AM4 alternative.

Are there any HBA cards that come with fans pre-installed on the heat sync?

noobftw · 9 Jul 2020 at 20:13

Times like this I wish I had a 3D printer haha