Computers

Fast NAS

The concept of a NAS has always intrigued me. The shared filesystem that everyone in the house can access is great, but there’s always one downside.

It’s slow.

No, not unbearably slow, but mechanical hard drive slow. The limit of access over a gigabit network is about 110MB/s transfer rates, which is just a step down from the 130-150MB/s transfer rate that a HD can physically deliver.
Though I have a NAS now that can saturate my gigabit LAN connection, putting in a 10GB LAN would not make sense when the max I can achieve is 1.5 times my current throughput.

Some research on the max speed one can achieve with mechanical drives in some sort of an array can be hound here: https://calomel.org/zfs_raid_speed_capacity.html

A couple things surprised me. One was the speed boost one gets with LZ4 compression enabled on a raidz volume, especially for a mechanical drive! Incredible.

Second was the SSD array transfer rates. I’m not thinking about getting a few SSDs to dedicate to a new NAS just to have the high transfer speeds.
This means a LAN upgrade is also necessary to 10GB in order to capitalize on the faster NAS.

 

 

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