All-flash NAS fight: DIY or Buy – Round III!

Special thanks to both ASUSTOR and Silvertip Labs for sending these NAS storage servers to test!

I purchased the drives used in the video, though the two Seagate IronWolf NVMe drives I put into my older NAS were provided by Seagate.

Here are things I mentioned in this video (some links are Amazon affiliate links):

#ASUSTOR #NAS #homelab

Contents:

00:00 - Flash-off and new plans
00:39 - The contenders: Flashstor and Pocket NAS
01:28 - Pocket NAS: Rock 5 model B and OMV
04:51 - Flashstor 12 Pro: Intel and ADM
07:11 - PCIe is the bottleneck
08:11 - Read speeds good enough for video editing
09:28 - The best feature: TrueNAS?
11:11 - The victor
11:59 - A glimpse of the future

[marcogenovesi]

Also big props for not locking down the bios and providing a convenient video port

[etimacias]

N5105 can easily run with 32GB of RAM - should help TueNAS. And the slow-down on write speeds is due to reaching end of cache. Most cheaper flash drives use QLC memory as the most cost-effective with some cache (DRAM or SLC). Once it fills - the drive becomes dreadfully slow. Would be interesting to see the influence of that for the ZFS poo performance.

[indy.b]

That "write speed cliff" which you fell off is there for al NAND based flash storage- sometimes better and sometimes worse. But it is always there. Basically when you write you are really writing to pre-cleared blocks of flash. The pre-clearing is a LOT slower than writing to an already cleared block. The pre-clearing happens in background using hidden blocks in your NAND flash device. If you do constant writes you eventually run out of pre-cleared blocks, then you drop down to the speed of clear-a-block-then-write. If you leave the storage alone for 10 minutes then you'll get another burst of high write performance then a drop back down to the slower write perf. All NAND based storage devices suffer this problem eventually, if your writes exceed the pre-clearing rate of the device. Enterprise drives normally just allocate more Flash storage to hidden blocks which are used for wither faster write performance, or to replace the inevitable failed blocks. For some more details, read "Over-Provisioning NAND-Based
Intel SSDs for Better Endurance" which also talks about performance.

[plica]

Another thoroughly researched and excellently presented video by Jeff "The Man" Geerling.

[TMoneyJones]

It was DNS 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 That shirt is top tier, brother.

[terrorpup]

I bow to the master. I am using Google Drive for my video storage since I am using my phone. I am looking for a camera in the poor man range. I have three SuperMicro with about 10 TB on each of them, but noise and heat is an issue. I have my PC that has 18TB of disk space, that I just got back online which the community freaked because I was still using Hard Drives. That my main place for editing because of the large amount of storage. I got a lot of comments about using 3.5 Hard drives. I like a NAS because then if my PC dies another Root Beer death, I am not dead in the water like I was. I carry with me a Libre Computer La Potato with a 2.5" 2 TB drive for remote storage with OMV, it nice to have a portable unit. So your Rock 5B would be great. Sorry I edit because I am dyslexic some time, my Yoda speak is hard for folks to follow.

The one issue Jeff for us small home lab guys is this. 10 GB Network switch and cards are out of the out price range. 2.5 Ghz is growing, I just picked up a few USB Ethernetfrom ASUS that are 2.5 Ghz, I think I could get pci cards for my SuperMicros that wouldn't cost me my first born, but the issue is switches. I haven't see at Microcenter a 2.5 Ghz off the shelf switch I can go and buy. A lot of SBC are starting to come with 2.5 Ghz. Any thought how I could fix that issues so I could improve my DIY NAS storage? Storage needs faster Networks, and faster Storage ( NVMe are become the best as you pointed out for that. )

[turboltr]

I like the origami design. Very compact as long as you can keep it cool.

[dstinYwOw]

For BTRFS - it also supports snapshots and more, so BTRFS also might be viable option. Check Synology and Rockstor

[mariushmedias]

@1:40 Oh man that could probably use some heatsinks between the m.2 drives. I'm imagining even something as simple as two copper plates with some metal spacers between them and then thermal adhesive on both sides. Then have a squirrel cage fan or something blow air from the side, which would force air to go through thole copper plates cooling them.

[MichaelKlements]

The Pocket NAS looks quite promising! I'm interested in how it interfaces to the Rock 5 B - I assume through the M.2 slot underneath the Rock 5 B, but it also looks like it has an interface through the GPIO pins, or are those just for power?

[derkjochems]

He Jeff, could you so some micro sd tests? By that mean the cheaper Sillicon Power 3D Nand models they seem to be ok for the price but i'd like to see a serious test with comparison. Thanks

[Ollital]

The Flashtor looks a little bit like my old USR Courier modem

[zambonidriver]

I’m 30 seconds in, and I smell a kernel recompile.

Hmm. Guess I was wrong. 😅

[RomanoPRODUCTION]

I have replaced my 4TB RAID 1 storage Synology NAS with 2 HDD with 4 TB RAID 5 with 3 SATA SSD on my ubuntu box. it is all fine but my network is Gbit/s so I am limited to 100 MB/s so I don't to worry with the HDD 50.000 hour life.

[ASUSTOR_YT]

Hey Jeff! Thanks so much for taking a look at our first ever All-Flash NVMe NAS! We have made numerous improvements to our design since the last time we sent products to you and we'd love to share all the ways we keep Red Shirts out of our NAS and enthusiasts and tinkerers inside! With our recent endorsement of third party operating systems, (though without technical support) we're sure that using our NAS is nothing short of a NASTastic experience and we want to keep listening! If you, dear commentor; or youtuber, want to send me a message, feel free to do so! I love praise, comments, questions and even criticism! Hit me up and thanks again!

[johngraham]

One additional thing I'd call out when comparing HDD vs SSD: how much data you can store in a given physical space. It's a little insane to me the absolute minimal footprint that a flash based system can occupy, and for people who live in places where physical space is at a premium, that's a very real consideration.

[StillConfusing]

man it's crazy seeing those prices on ssds I remember paying $140 for my 1tb drive a few years ago

[Rettro]

Amazing product from asustor! Open bios is crazy, I love being able to use my own software

[BioToxin]

the pocket nas would be perfect for me as a trucker, great to store some games on for my laptop, might even be able to make a ceph storage cluster, that would be something

[youdontneedmyrealname]

The pocket nas is almost EXACTLY what I've been wanting for a few years. I'm a traveler who requires a lot of offline video storage.