Suggestions for NAS solution?

RavenLunatic

RavenLunatic

RavenLunatic

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376
I need to replace my aging Drobo5n as it is no longer supported.

In the meantime, I have just been using an old X99 PC running TrueNAS Scale which is working great but consumes 100W at idle and the HDD’s are slowly beginning to fail as they are over 5 years old.

My Case a Thermaltake Core W200 has as space for loads of HDD’s but they are difficult to remove on the secondary chassis as they don’t have backplane resulting in a mess of tangled wires and inaccessible drives.

I have been looking at the QNAP TS-932PX-4G 9 Bay (5 + 4) Desktop NAS Enclosure as it ticks most of the boxes however it does not use ZFS but EX4. I like ZFS as it has detected 3 failing drives before even SMART noticed it so far.

I have thought about building a custom NAS but I couldn’t find a decent case that wasn’t silly money, had poor reviews or too big.

My budget it around £700.

What are your recommendations Overclockers?
 
I think the only NAS offering ZFS are those running QNAP's QuTS-hero and I'm surprised the TS-932PX-4G doesn't run it.*
You could consider an Asustor like the AS5404T, AS6704T or AS6706T which offer four M.2 slots and four or six 3.5" slots then run your choice of NAS OS on it. Asustor actually documents how to do this so you're not risking your warranty.

*Ah, it's the cosmetically identical TVS-951X and TVS-h973AX that run Quts-hero as standard
 
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I have 7 healthy 10TB Ironwolf HDD NAS drives and eight 500Gb SSD’s. I was using the HDD’s to mine Chia and Burstcoin to offset the cost of running the X99 but I have now stopped that due to poor returns and frequent disk failures.

I would be happy to have 30TB running five drives in a RAID6 or even better a Z2 pool, keeping two Ironwolf HDD for spares. Traffic wise I have two PC’s with 10Gb NIC’s one at 2.5Gb and my WIFI running off 1Gb all connected to a 10Gb unmanaged switch.
 
Snapshot said:
I think the only NAS offering ZFS are those running QNAP's QuTS-hero and I'm surprised the TS-932PX-4G doesn't run it.*
You could consider an Asustor like the AS5404T, AS6704T or AS6706T which offer four M.2 slots and four or six 3.5" slots then run your choice of NAS OS on it. Asustor actually documents how to do this so you're not risking your warranty.

*Ah, it's the cosmetically identical TVS-951X and TVS-h973AX that run Quts-hero as standard
Click to expand...
The QNAP’s QuTS-hero systems are too expensive for me, and I am seeing reports that the 10Gb SFP+ ports on the QNAP TS-932PX-4G 9 Bay are unreliable.

I’m quite impressed with the specifications of the Asustor AS6704T given its x86 and I can run whatever O/S I like, and it has some great power saving features built in to ADM that I am looking for. Power draw is more important to me than potential data rot and I have backups. Unfortunately the 10Gb NIC with 2 NVME costs an extra £230.
 
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Yes, I have that NIC and I had to order it from Asustor's online shop in Taiwan. I've had my AS6706T for two years and can't see me changing it soon.
However, for your use it might be worth waiting for the upcoming AS68xx series which were announced in June and are expected next month as they will have dual 10GBe built-in as well as four M.2 slots. https://www.asustor.com/product?p_id=86 is the AS6804T.
 
Snapshot said:
Yes, I have that NIC and I had to order it from Asustor's online shop in Taiwan. I've had my AS6706T for two years and can't see me changing it soon.
However, for your use it might be worth waiting for the upcoming AS68xx series which were announced in June and are expected next month as they will have dual 10GBe built-in as well as four M.2 slots. https://www.asustor.com/product?p_id=86 is the AS6804T.
Click to expand...
Thank you for finding that!

The AS6804T specs look amazing and it supports Btrfs which I think has data integrity features similar to ZFS.

I have been also been looking at Synology DS1522+ 5-Bay Desktop NAS as it had a 10Gb add in card for £100 that did not replace the NVME M.2 slots. The Synology also supports Btrfs.

I think I am sold on the Asustor AS6804T as it has everything I want bar the 5 drive capacity without needing to upgrade the RAM or NIC from the get go.
 
RavenLunatic said:
I have 7 healthy 10TB Ironwolf HDD NAS drives and eight 500Gb SSD’s. I was using the HDD’s to mine Chia and Burstcoin to offset the cost of running the X99 but I have now stopped that due to poor returns and frequent disk failures.

I would be happy to have 30TB running five drives in a RAID6 or even better a Z2 pool, keeping two Ironwolf HDD for spares. Traffic wise I have two PC’s with 10Gb NIC’s one at 2.5Gb and my WIFI running off 1Gb all connected to a 10Gb unmanaged switch.
Click to expand...

Something with a decent amount of RAM. For £700 I’d probably look at a building something. I personally have a ZFS system based on a E3-1260l with 64gb of ECC running headless from a 400watt platinum PSU and it’s pretty power efficient.
 
My basket at OcUK:

Total: £678.91 (includes delivery: £0.00)​

I have a HBA card that can go in the x16 slot supporting 8 SATA drives, but this leaves me with no 10Gb ethernet.

I could use the x16 slot for a 10Gb ethernet and use an M.2 to 6 SATA adaptor, but I am unsure if the cooling fan on the chipset is required.

Or I just forget about the 5th drive and run just 4 disks and save all the hassle with a 10Gb NIC in the x16.

PSU Calculator maximum power requirements are 193W which is no better than my X99 system. Since TrueNAS doesn't support C states idle power consumption will be more than a dedicated NAS system.

What do you think?
 
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I was just searching for reviews of the N1 and came across this video by Level1Techs.
youtu.be

AM5 mini-server: N1 Jonsbo and... may include a bandsaw

The moment you've all been waiting for is finally here! Home server build in the N1 Jonsbo case! Also a bandsaw. BZZZZZZZZEnGenius EWS357-FIThttps://www.amaz...
youtu.be youtu.be
Idle power is 60-70W using a 7900 with just 3 HDD's so I would expect it would be around 65-75W with 4 Drives.

The AS6804T only uses 35 W (Operation) and 17.3 W (Disk Hibernation) with 0.88 W (Sleep Mode) using just one drive. So I would expect 55-60W(operation) with just the 4 drives.

It would be fun to build a N1 server, but think a dedicated NAS power savings would make quite a difference to my electricity bill.
 
Don't forget there will be 6, 8 and 10-bay versions as well when they are finally released.

The problem with Synology is that they try to force you to use their branded RAM and HDDs. I understand there's a fair bit of whining from the OS if you don't.
 
A few things I would consider.

What are the main tasks? You might not need anything like a 6 core Ryzen 7000.

What type and how many drives are you planning to use? You’d need a good few HHDs in raid to reach 10 gigabit transfers.
 
jigger said:
A few things I would consider.

What are the main tasks? You might not need anything like a 6 core Ryzen 7000.

What type and how many drives are you planning to use? You’d need a good few HHDs in raid to reach 10 gigabit transfers.
Click to expand...
My 8 Ironwolf HDD Z2 pool with one faulted disk, 98% full, and no SSD Cache gets this.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0 x64 (C) 2007-2019 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World: https://crystalmark.info/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

[Read]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 938.097 MB/s [ 894.6 IOPS] < 8928.35 us>
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 541.923 MB/s [ 516.8 IOPS] < 1932.29 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16): 278.178 MB/s [ 67914.6 IOPS] < 7521.94 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 14.401 MB/s [ 3515.9 IOPS] < 283.61 us>

[Write]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 1085.535 MB/s [ 1035.2 IOPS] < 7694.37 us>
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 400.758 MB/s [ 382.2 IOPS] < 2612.64 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16): 191.618 MB/s [ 46781.7 IOPS] < 10901.13 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 9.461 MB/s [ 2309.8 IOPS] < 430.86 us>

Profile: Default
Test: 1 GiB (x5) [Interval: 5 sec] <DefaultAffinity=DISABLED>
Date: 2024/07/30 12:38:20
OS: Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 22631] (x64)

Way over a 2.5Gb connection and if I used just 4 drives, I'm probably still in 5Gb territory.

I do intend on using an SSD or NVME cache depending on what machine I decide to use which at the moment looks like the AS6804T.

I use my NAS for local Backups mostly and two of my machines are 10Gb capable so I think it makes sense to have a NAS capable of 10Gb.

The choice of CPU was that it was the cheapest AM5 CPU with basic graphics capability. I think an APU chip would use more power and is unnecessary for my use case. I don't want to use an Intel 13/14 gen due to their apparent quality issues.
 
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I’d be tempted to look at something ATX/MATX with a more flexible PCIE layout and possibly consider something like a Ryzen 5350GE.
 
jigger said:
I’d be tempted to look at something ATX/MATX with a more flexible PCIE layout and possibly consider something like a Ryzen 5350GE.
Click to expand...
Its a good suggestion, looking into it, I see that the 35W CPU was only ever available to large OEM's, and was for NUC type devices. It probably was soldered direct to the MB as I cannot see anyone selling them by itself just whole Mini Lenovo systems.

With regards to using ATX/MATX, the NAS cases to fit them tend to be poor build quality, very expensive, or too big.
 
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RavenLunatic said:
Its a good suggestion, looking into it, I see that the 35W CPU was only ever available to large OEM's, and was for NUC type devices. It probably was soldered direct to the MB as I cannot see anyone selling them by itself just whole Mini Lenovo systems.

With regards to using ATX/MATX, the NAS cases to fit them tend to be poor build quality, very expensive, or too big.
Click to expand...

They are available at as tray chips at retail. Silverstone have some nice NAS chassis options.
 
ATX is too big for what I want to do, and M-ATX motherboards seem to only have 4 SATA as standard plus the two extra PCIe gen3 x1 lanes are not very useful to me. My aim is low power and I don't think I can get it by building a machine myself.
 
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