Should You Use SSD In Your NAS? LET'S TALK

[pbrigham]

The best feature of a SSD array you guys didn't even talked about it, that is the rebuilding time of SSD array compared to HDDs, especially when is the period that you are more at risk of losing data, a 10TB SSD array can be rebuilt in a couple hours compared to days in HDDs.

[acerx]

hybrid makes sense if you are running anything ritualized on your NAS, editing files on your NAS, or if a lot of users are accessing the data then SSDs make sense, IF you have a network fast enough to really utilize the extra speed. But just for pure storage HDDs are really great, long life, cheap per GB, all the current HDD NAS drives today don't really eat up much power when idle. Currently the cheapest 4TB ssd is $190 a Seagate Ironworlf 4tb is $80. If you can pay for a 10TB home network, you most likely have "server closet".

[ridewithme]

My system consists of a RS3618XS with 7 X 10TB WD Red Pro drives and a DS 1821+ (for backup) with 5 X 16TB WD Red Pro drives, all in RAID 5. At first I utilized the 4 X 1Gbps ports on each device but found the transfer speeds to be awful. I purchased a 10GbE NIC for each NAS and disconnected the 1Gbps ports on both NAS boxes. Much improved. I installed 2 M.2 NVME 480GB SSDs in the DS1821+ and 2 standard 480GB SSDs in the RS3618XS as cache devices. Now the system just rocks. Transfer speeds between the NAS boxes are in the 600MBps to 900 MBps range. Copying files on the same volume with BTRFS format and the speeds are in the 26GBps range! One thing I noticed is that 7 drives in RAID 5 collectively yield over 1 GBps consistently.

[themodesttraveler]

you need to let Eddie finish when he talks.

[playlist]

SSD/NVME for apps and scratch space where temp files can be written. Then, the hard drives can spin down to save power and noise.
If you get up to serving more than a family or its more than two or so video editors, then the hard drives get more useful as they just get hit more and can't spin down.

[IntoxicatedVortex]

There's a case that can be made for both SSD and HDD and which is better one just comes down to personal needs and what one's priorities are. For the most part though the choice will still come down to price whether its based on a straight cost/TB for media storage or one's ability to buy that 12-bay NAS to cover for the 8TB cap on an SATA SSD. The more prohibitive the price tag of the NAS is going beyond 4-bays the less likely one is to deploy SSD.

FWIW my NAS all have SSD as my overall need of TBs actually isn't that great and 4TB SSDs are a great match for me but my NVR is filled with HDDs.

BTW, one thing that wasn't mentioned was size. Look at the physical size SSD solutions are in comparison to 3.5" HDD. The Synology DS620slim is a perfect example of compactness that's even easily portable.

[TheRTM]

So my take from this video is SSD for NAS (in a raid 5 config) for performance and speed... and HDD (to a secondary system using HHDs) for cold long term storage.

[HunterOfMyFate]

Even if an all SSD NAS is best for your situation you have to concede that RAID is not a backup. It doesn't matter if you use and external drive or second NAS as your backup. The best option for that backup will be hard drive(s). The speed is mostly irrelevant. In most situations you can put it somewhere you won't hear it (off site even better). Even if you live in a 500sq foot NYC studio apartment you can set it to start backing up at the same time as you alarm clock. The backup will be larger and cheaper allowing for more revisions.

[adenwellsmith]

1. Caching
2. Tiering

Would make interesting talks relating to SSDs.

3. Back up

4. Deduplication
5. Glacier storage. [To disks]
6. Glacier storage. [To tapes]
6. Off site replication.

Would also make interesting talks.

[Alan-rtse]

I used an older desktop computer with 3 NVME SSDs, and installed True NAS on it for my home NAS about a year ago. 2 SSDs for data storage, and one as the boot drive. It works great, twice as fast as the QNAP system I was using before. And it's never crashed. I use it primarily for backing up and syncing files on my 3 other computers. I have a 1 Gbps ethernet network and I get about 90 Mbps transfer rates to/from the NAS, which is just fine for my needs. If you have an older desktop computer sitting around, this is an excellent way to put it to good use.

[oHotirono]

Thank you both... I think we can walk away from this knowing that both storage technologies are significant and can be used in various NAS situations which make them both very suitable for Network attached storage. Thanks again for all your efforts.

[anthonyhope]

I learned the hard way how noisy large hard drives are. When my WDMyCloud stopped receiving updates, I bought a Synology NAS with 2 x 10 TB drives by Seagate. The WD was pretty quiet in my bedroom but the Seagate drives are very noisy, so much so that I had to hibernate them during the night. Noise level is probably twice that of the 2 TB WD drives I had in my old NAS.

[smegleberry]

I learned something today .. Did not know a SSD you could lose data if its not in use over time

[greggzupcsics]

Thanks for starting a discussion of hybrid & tiered storage - this approach makes a lot of sense and is an ideal best of both worlds approach of course, and it's of considerable interest to me.

I've been searching your website for this and so far, I have not found further discussion on this as a stand-alone video (or series). Part of the challenge for me so far in exploring this is that vendors seem not to be very upfront about the degree to which their products support true tiered storage (as opposed to caching) in particular (they may consider this too technical perhaps)

If you haven't already, please consider creating a video or series of videos that discusses more about some of the current product options particularly in the entry and middle level ranges for tiered hybrid storage NAS or DAS. If you have already done a video which covers this recently or know of someone who has, it would be most appreciated if you would please post a pointer - thanks!

As I'm a fan of SSDs for noise reasons and my storage needs are (relatively) modest, finding a solution that supports a several types of RAID over mix of SATA SSDs and NVME SSDs would be particularly interesting.

[esunisen]

In my 10 years old PC, i have a M.2 SSD capped to 1 GB/s because of the mobo (Gen 2 slot) and with a smallish buffer, and the speed drops to about 100 MB/s when the cache is full.

I also have an array of 8 HDDs (EXOS 8 TB SATA) in RAID 5 able to *sustain* 1.6 GB/s reading or writing without using any cache. The max speed i measured is a bit less than 6 GB/s staying in the cache (Gen3 x8 controller so theorical limit is about 8 GB/s).

Having SSDs in a NAS can work if you don't have a bottleneck somewhere... For caching, better use a ramdisk.

[ImreBertalan]

This video couldn't have came a better time for me. I'm just about to "build" a NAS for my companys webapplication for storage and I needed a few more ideas why we should buy a Synology NAS with SSD caching and not just hard drives. Spot on!

[hostile_]

Ive got a Unraid 34tb all SSD NAS. Love it, completely silent. 95% for media, 5% for important documents/photos etc.

[jaylord]

iv got 6 2.5in 250gb ssd's as a read right pool i managed to burn through 1 set in little over year but this is me righting the whole drives worth 2-3times full per week ish

[Seandotcom]

I go hybrid: my 16 bays are 10 rust, 6 flash. they are completely separate zfs pools; the ssds are served as iscsi / VM storage / git repos while the rust is meant for media / Plex. plus using zfs you can leverage NVMe to accelerate the pools in a variety of ways. fully committing to flash or rust has too many compromises

[chebrubin]

Show me a NAS with 10 manageable bays. Otherwise I am using 8 x SATA ports on a mini itx in addition to USB JBOD disc enclosures attached for archival long term storage.