• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Buy or build a NAS

M

m heisty

Gawd
Joined
May 14, 2014
Messages
638
All,

I have been wanting to set up a NAS in my house and build a multi gigabit wired network as well. The question I have is that given the need for a multi gigabit file transfer speed would you guys suggest that I buy a pre built NAS or build my own.

Thanks
 
What do you mean by multi-gigabit? 10 Gb? To saturate that you will need something faster than the usual consumer NAS systems. But to really saturate 10 Gb ethernet you have to put a bit more thought into the configuration as it is almost impossible to serve random accesses from multiple systems from HDDs that fast.
 
If you need substantial transfers, you're probably going to need to build. However, from what I've seen, unless you have an extreme performance need or want something like ZFS, it seems easier for most home users to just buy a NAS.

I very, very seriously considered one when I picked up my new server. One that would have met my needs would have cost half what my server did.

Just out of curiosity, what do you need the high amount of transfer for?
 
m heisty said:
Either two 2 one gigabit cards or a one 4 one gigabit card depending on what ever makes most sense from a money stand point.
Click to expand...

So you'd need to buy a NAS that supports LACP and has or supports 4 ports and even then you won't go above 1Gb/s per stream. For the cost, you're probably better off building your own.
 
iroc409 said:
Just out of curiosity, what do you need the high amount of transfer for?
Click to expand...

Video encoding. I deal with incredibly massive raw files in the multi TB range. Since I have to compile footage from multiple individual files working on a file by file basis isn't really possible.
 
Then I'd probably build your own, with 10GbE cards in the server and workstation, or LACP between the machines with multi-port cards directly connected. I don't think LACP will usually do more than gigabit, but if you have two machines linked together that way they should... I think.

Or, is this going to be serving multiple machines doing the editing?

What do you use now to provide storage? If you're dealing with multi-TB files over more-than-single-gigabit, you're probably looking at a pretty beefy server.
 
I honestly just have a lot of external storage devices. It is a pain in the ass to use. I currently do editing on 2 machines and having to schedule file use really slows the system down. What I was thinking about doing was creating a file host that both machines can use at the same time and use multiple gigabit Ethernet nics to serve and receive the files across the gigabit network. Sure it will be a bit of a pain in the ass to run 4 cat 6 cables to every connection point but really not much harder than running a single cable. Just more prep work.
 
The good news here is there are quite a few ways to accomplish what you want to do, but in the end you might look more towards a server solution compared to a simple NAS solution. The reason is you will get a more robust system on a server platform and may have the option to support the expansion that you are looking at accomplishing here. For example, you can throw in a 10 GbE card and run direct Cat6E or Cat7 cables to each workstation and run full 10 GbE.

If you don't go the full 10 GbE route, you can do LACP for network teaming. It is true that most implementations of this can combine multiple ethernet adapters together into a single logical adapter and it can send at greater than 1 Gbps to individual computers, but not multi-gigabit simultaneously to the same system. However, I have had great luck with the built-in teaming features from Windows Server 2012 at doing multi-gigabit throughput in a LACP team using Address Hashing. Using SSDs to test between two of my DL360e G8 servers at home, I've been able to transfer large files between the servers with the Microsoft network teaming configured on both ends at between 300 - 400 MB/s

Usually sharing out small files between a few computers doesn't require much performance to do, but where you are looking at really pushing the speed through and need high capacity in addition, you may need to look into a multiple drive RAID.

It's just one option and suggestion, but you might look at getting a server that you can do Windows Server 2012 on and create a NIC team that way. You'll need a switch capable of LACP as well, and I've found the HP ProCurve 1810 series switches are great for this and also quite affordable for their features. I don't know if you have space for rackmount servers but that might be a good option if you need a lot of space because you can find a decently priced simple 1U server to actually run your storage, and attack off of that an external JBOD disk shelf to store multiple hard drives. As you need more space, add more drives or even more JBOD units. Of course you can also look into buying a single server unit with one large chassis, such as the Supermicro 4U systems.
 
I'm not convinced running 4 ethernet cables to each device is a good solution, or one that would even buy you anything. A single drive these days is typically a little faster than a single GigE connection. What about LACP or MPIO on a dual-port NIC on your storage device, and good GigE single link on your two workstations?

What is your budget for this, and your expected involvement (i.e. how much you want to set up, and maintain)?
 
iroc409 said:
I'm not convinced running 4 ethernet cables to each device is a good solution, or one that would even buy you anything. A single drive these days is typically a little faster than a single GigE connection. What about LACP or MPIO on a dual-port NIC on your storage device, and good GigE single link on your two workstations?

What is your budget for this, and your expected involvement (i.e. how much you want to set up, and maintain)?
Click to expand...

The reason for running 4 gigabit connections is that the files currently reside on up to 6 different drives at a time. Would this allow for files to flow independently of one another across different lines?
 
m heisty said:
The reason for running 4 gigabit connections is that the files currently reside on up to 6 different drives at a time. Would this allow for files to flow independently of one another across different lines?
Click to expand...

You need to look into LACP and how it works and then determine if that will work for you because you're going to have to invest in a switch that supports it as well if you don't already have one. The hard drives internal to the box aren't going to use a different nic, each stream should use a different nic if it's going to a different destination.

If you're looking for bandwidth aggregation over multiple nics, windows 2012 is probably the easiest way to do it as Choucove described.
 
m heisty said:
The reason for running 4 gigabit connections is that the files currently reside on up to 6 different drives at a time. Would this allow for files to flow independently of one another across different lines?
Click to expand...

Full-duplexing allows two-way communicating in both direction at full speed. But, what do you mean? Are you actively working on multiple file streams off the same machine, or for two separate machines? Would this work be simultaneous with multiple users? I would probably personally first look to just running a single GigE line to each workstation, and have the server run 2 ports in LACP/MPIO to the switch where they are all congregated. If that's not fast enough, next home-budget-friendly connection is probably direct-connect with some used 10GbE cards instead of trying to get quad-port NICs in every machine and LACP working for all that. That's a lot of stuff flying around.

How much do you want to spend on the project? Do you want a full-sized, quad-core (or more cores) file server with a large RAID array that's capable of moving several Gb/sec over a home network, or do you want to spend $1500 on a "good enough" server with a lot of storage capable of saturating a single GigE stream at once? I built a storage server on Dell's website for a coworker for his house and his massive data collection, and it came to almost $6,000.

To push this kind of data throughput, you'll probably need a sound RAID implementation with many disks.

ETA: You'll also be consolidating your storage into a single server so you don't need to worry about the data residing on 6 different drives, even if it is. That's what the disk storage pool/RAID is for.
 
Well I am looking for a good enough set up. While I would love to get a full server for this paid hobby, it really isn't practical given that I can't claim this as a tax deduction because I don't make enough doing this.

I want to be able to actively work on the same file from the both work stations. Since many of the finished product files have a lot of cross over data, I have to have a lot of redundant workstation storage that I am trying to avoid while speeding up the output of product.
 
Do you have any sort of budget in mind and how much space are you looking to have? Do you want it built yourself, are you comfortable with *NIX, or do you want a Windows-based solution?

On the lower end, a NAS will be cheaper than a server, but on the higher/mid range end as Choucove suggests a server will probably be cheaper--or at least probably provide better performance for the dollar.

It's difficult without setting a price range, because there are a plethora of possibilities (like the $6,000 server I just quote, we went anywhere from a $250 TS140 to a $6k 24TB Dell). I just spent about $400 on a Dell that will suffice plenty for my needs, but I don't have the performance requirements you do. I also looked at a Synology 2-bay unit for under $200 that probably would have done what I need, but only in the short term (and no ZFS).
 
Its all about the switch. Make sure you get a decent switch, big packet cache.
 
Port aggregation (LACP) will not do more than 1 Gbit host-to-host unless you have complete control over both sides and access to a non-standard configurations (i.e. Linux). Even then you have to do switchless connections, because swittches do not support these modes.

SMB 3.0 would be able utilize multiple connections even across a switch, but it will probably not work across clustered switches.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top