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Archaea
[H]F Junkie
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2004
- Messages
- 11,825
I have owned a trusty old Qnap TS-231P for the last few years. It's now a EOL product, meaning support will soon dry up. 2 bay, 1.7Ghz Arm dual core process 1 GB DDR3 RAM. I've used it a few LAN parties and it holds its own. Really an impressive piece of kit for under $200 on the hardware.
I threw a couple of Western Digital Elements 10TB shucked USB 3 drives in it on the cheap. 2 disk mirror in RAID 1.
I have the NAS connected via dual NICs and LACP. It'll hold steady at max upload/download of two nics if multiple people are pulling or pushing to it at the same time at LAN party. I do not have encryption enabled or do anything other than use it as a file server.
The Church I go which I also volunteer for IT duty for wanted to put together a NAS for surveillance cameras and general storage for a small domain of workstations. Probably a half dozen machines, and probably 8 video cameras or so.
I suggested a 2 bay cheapie like the one I have - from either Synology or Qnap, but it was feared it wouldn't be enough by my partner in this decision and so we went with a Synology 920+ NAS which is a 4 bay unit. We bought four 8TB Seagate IronWolf NAS drives. 4 disk SHR RAID (Synology's proprietary RAID technology) That's what I agreed to after discussion and we both figured it should be wholly sufficient.
Turns out, the purchaser, without asking me of my opinion, went ahead and bought an extra 4GB of Synology branded RAM for $99 (bringing the total RAM to 8GB from the original standard of 4GB) AND purchased two 500GB NVME 970 EVO SSDs for volume caching performance. Neither of these were necessary at all IMO, but he said he wanted to make sure it would be future proof, and like I say he bought the extra without asking me -- it just showed up for me to install.
I just finished building this new powerhouse NAS this weekend. (Took forever to build the array and verify integrity on the 4, 8GB drives). The Synology 920+ has a dual core Celeron, better hard drives actually rated for NAS/SAN use, and 8GB of RAM, vs. my QNAP, and I setup the SSD Caching with a RAID 1 500GB Cache on the single ~21TB volume. I set the QNAP to use adaptive network option which uses both NICs.
As a test I copied a 16GB temp folder of random stuff from my hard drive SSD ( samsung 960 evo) - anything from pictures to videos to install files from my desktop PC to the beasty Synology and compared that speed vs. my few year old Qnap.
Here are the times:
Synology 920+ (dual core Celeron, 4 spindles SHR RAID, 8GB RAM, 500GB Raid 1 NVME SSD Cache array) - 6:24
Qnap TS-231P (dual core Arm, 2 spindles RAID 1, 1GB RAM) - 6:29
You can't fix 1GB LAN speeds - and that's the bottleneck -- all that fancy hardware got us nowhere.
The bad news:
My QNAP setup costs about $550-$600. ($150 hardware NAS + $400 in drives) - ~9TB storage
The Synology setup cost about $1700. ($550 hardware NAS + $800 in drives + $100 in RAM, + $200 in SSD) ~21TB Storage
What a waste.
The good news: ???
To test the SSD caching - I did the same folder copy three more times on the Synology to see how the caching helped. Same folder. Copied it over thrice. By the third copy the copy only took 5:01. SOOOOO -- the SSD Caching isn't totally useless. Someone might find advantage in it. But I don't think it will be very valuable for our particular use case.
I threw a couple of Western Digital Elements 10TB shucked USB 3 drives in it on the cheap. 2 disk mirror in RAID 1.
I have the NAS connected via dual NICs and LACP. It'll hold steady at max upload/download of two nics if multiple people are pulling or pushing to it at the same time at LAN party. I do not have encryption enabled or do anything other than use it as a file server.
The Church I go which I also volunteer for IT duty for wanted to put together a NAS for surveillance cameras and general storage for a small domain of workstations. Probably a half dozen machines, and probably 8 video cameras or so.
I suggested a 2 bay cheapie like the one I have - from either Synology or Qnap, but it was feared it wouldn't be enough by my partner in this decision and so we went with a Synology 920+ NAS which is a 4 bay unit. We bought four 8TB Seagate IronWolf NAS drives. 4 disk SHR RAID (Synology's proprietary RAID technology) That's what I agreed to after discussion and we both figured it should be wholly sufficient.
Turns out, the purchaser, without asking me of my opinion, went ahead and bought an extra 4GB of Synology branded RAM for $99 (bringing the total RAM to 8GB from the original standard of 4GB) AND purchased two 500GB NVME 970 EVO SSDs for volume caching performance. Neither of these were necessary at all IMO, but he said he wanted to make sure it would be future proof, and like I say he bought the extra without asking me -- it just showed up for me to install.
I just finished building this new powerhouse NAS this weekend. (Took forever to build the array and verify integrity on the 4, 8GB drives). The Synology 920+ has a dual core Celeron, better hard drives actually rated for NAS/SAN use, and 8GB of RAM, vs. my QNAP, and I setup the SSD Caching with a RAID 1 500GB Cache on the single ~21TB volume. I set the QNAP to use adaptive network option which uses both NICs.
As a test I copied a 16GB temp folder of random stuff from my hard drive SSD ( samsung 960 evo) - anything from pictures to videos to install files from my desktop PC to the beasty Synology and compared that speed vs. my few year old Qnap.
Here are the times:
Synology 920+ (dual core Celeron, 4 spindles SHR RAID, 8GB RAM, 500GB Raid 1 NVME SSD Cache array) - 6:24
Qnap TS-231P (dual core Arm, 2 spindles RAID 1, 1GB RAM) - 6:29
You can't fix 1GB LAN speeds - and that's the bottleneck -- all that fancy hardware got us nowhere.
The bad news:
My QNAP setup costs about $550-$600. ($150 hardware NAS + $400 in drives) - ~9TB storage
The Synology setup cost about $1700. ($550 hardware NAS + $800 in drives + $100 in RAM, + $200 in SSD) ~21TB Storage
What a waste.
The good news: ???
To test the SSD caching - I did the same folder copy three more times on the Synology to see how the caching helped. Same folder. Copied it over thrice. By the third copy the copy only took 5:01. SOOOOO -- the SSD Caching isn't totally useless. Someone might find advantage in it. But I don't think it will be very valuable for our particular use case.
