[HN Gopher] Building a fast all-SSD NAS on a budget ___________________________________________________________________ Building a fast all-SSD NAS on a budget Author : walterbell Score : 41 points Date : 2022-07-26 06:46 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.jeffgeerling.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.jeffgeerling.com) | [deleted] | sorenjan wrote: | > Every minute of 4K ProRes LT footage (which is a very | lightweight format, compared to RAW) is 3 GB of space | | Do you really need to save all of that footage? I would think | keeping the pro res footage for the current projects on the | workstation and reencoded archive video on a NAS would be | sufficient. I'm not a video professional, but I suspect it's easy | to fall in the trap of thinking that you need to save everything | in highest possible quality in case you need it later, but what | are the realistic chances of that? If you end up needing some old | footage again, AV1 coded 4K or even HEVC 1080p would probably be | just fine. The final result are Youtube videos after all. | | I know he mentions editing from it, but that's enough space for | more than a week of pro res video. | gigatexal wrote: | Anyone know if any core level work on ZFS where there's an effort | to audit the code base for speed ups given the big differences in | designs between spinning rust and SSDs? | mastax wrote: | I do know that if you have very fast NVMe SSDs (>6000MB/s or | so) ZFS is not currently able to give you the whole | performance, due to time spent memcpying to/from the ARC[0]. | Direct IO support could eventually alleviate this[1]. | | [0]: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/8381 | | [1]: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/10018 | jsmith99 wrote: | Oracle themselves have been selling all flash ZFS appliances | for a long time so I imagine this is a development focus. | mbreese wrote: | I doubt any Oracle SSD performance enhancements will make it | into OpenZFS though. | CharlesW wrote: | In this case "on a budget" means $4,329. That's reasonable if it | speeds up billable work, but sadly the cost puts it a bit out of | reach for my home office. | PaywallBuster wrote: | the budget option is < 800$ ? | magicalhippo wrote: | Still quite a lot. All you really need is an old i7 and a | 10GbE Mellanox Connect-X2 or Connect-X3 card from eBay for | $10-20. | CTDOCodebases wrote: | I agree with your message but it's hard to find an i7 that | supports ECC RAM and the Mellanox Connect-X has lost | support in modern distros. | | Best bet is to pick up an old HP Z620 of find someone who | is upgrading their old Xeon homelab. Generally its a choice | of cheap, quite, energy efficient and you can only pick two | of these options. | dylan604 wrote: | "I edit videos non-stop nowadays." | | For a video editor, at least one that's been around long enough | to remember DAS and SAN solutions, $4300k for 40TB of edit | capable storage is cheap. | | Perspective is everything. | jeffbee wrote: | I would have been pretty tempted to build this with a W480 Xeon | platform having 2x thunderbolt ports. Conceivably that could have | broken through the 1GB/s ceiling the article is seeing with 10g | ethernet. | mbreese wrote: | 1.1GB/sec throughput is pretty good over a 10Gb/sec network. | That's 88% saturation. Right? | liuliu wrote: | TBH, not sure if spending $3500 on 40TB storage v.s. ~$800 with | rotating disks at the same storage capacity. You can put $200 on | top with a 2TB NVMe SSD as cache. | | The reason to question this is that 40TB seems small if you want | to have a NAS for small video editing studios. And for personal | use, you probably not going to need more than 2TB work set paged | in at any given moment. | jjcm wrote: | Possibly for smaller projects, for anything remotely sizable, | 2TB is likely not going to cut it. 5k prores is 1TB for every | 30min of footage, which means you're only getting an hour out | of a 2TB drive. | | Storage needs for any pro video workflow get very large, very | quick. | rektide wrote: | For compare $16/TB is pretty awesome[1], which for that budget | would be about 217GB. ~5.5X. | | [1] | https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new&capacity=12-... | sorenjan wrote: | I'm not familiar with NAS file systems. Is it fairly straight | forward to use hard drives with SSDs as transparent cache, and | make it look like a single file share? | walrus01 wrote: | personally if I had to do this I would go with rotating disk | for bulk storage in a NAS, and something like two 2TB to 4TB | size NVME SSDs in a proper video editing workstation | motherboard directly attached to pci-e 4.0 bus. | | This will be considerably faster for working with "immediate" | needs of video files rather than over a 10GbE network. | | like, a difference of 900MBps over network vs 2500MBps with | local sequential read/writes on NVME SSD on same motherboard. | aetherspawn wrote: | At this speed I'm thinking you're probably going to bottleneck on | the network/switch. | | Ubiquiti have a cheap fiber optic switch you could try. You could | also try a 2x 10G SFP+ configuration, which would give you 20 | Gbps (but only 10Gbps per client). | alexk307 wrote: | Huge fan of Jeff's work on YouTube! Highly recommend checking it | out if this blog interests you | walrus01 wrote: | I would be extremely cautious about using any consumer grade TLC | or quad-level-cell SSD in a "NAS" for serious purposes because of | well known write lifespan issues. | | There's a reason that a big difference in price exists between a | quad-level-cell 2TB SSD and an expensive enterprise grade one | with a much higher TB-write-before-dead rating. | | This might look cool but check back in a few years and see how | much of the drives' cumulative write lifespan is worn out. | | I also cannot even _imagine_ spending $4000+ on a home file | server /NAS with copper only 10GbE NIC and it not having at least | one 10G SFP+ interface network card. | | Okay, so he wants it to be tiny? But in a home environment the | major problem is more power consumption and noise, so you can | often go with a well ventilated 4U height rackmount case for full | size ATX motherboard, which is roughly the size of a midtower PC | case turned on its side. | | This lets you use motherboards that will have enough PCI-E 3.0 x8 | slots for at least one dual-port Intel SFP+ 10G NIC which are | very, very cheap on ebay these days. | hatware wrote: | This is definitely an engineering disaster. Sometimes we get | too caught up in how to do something that we never ask | ourselves if we should. | nichch wrote: | I was thinking the same thing, but wouldn't these be okay if | his workload is mainly WORM? | mbreese wrote: | TrueNAS used to be designed to boot off of smaller SataDOMs | that were used only for boot. They were effectively WORM. At | least, it used to be a few years ago. Everything that was | written for the server was either a RAM disk or spread out | amongst the RAID drives (as a separate partition, which has its | own issues, but still). | | I had assumed this is what he was using the TLC SSD for. If | that's the case, so long as there isn't much writing to it, it | should be fine. | rr888 wrote: | Has anyone tried to replace NAS with a cloud service? If you have | gig internet it should but I'm not sure if dropbox etc can keep | up. | hatware wrote: | Usually you go the other way with that. | karmicthreat wrote: | I just went through getting the parts for my own NAS. All SSD was | way overkill for my needs, I ended up going with spinning disks | and a SLOG cache. I kept waffling about the motherboard to use | but I ended up with a x470d4u motherboard with a Ryzen 7 4700GE | which brings the TDP down to 35W. I wanted this to be kind of | quiet. I will put a 10Gb network card on it eventually. | | Maybe not THE BEST (tm) choices. But I was getting bad decision | paralysis choosing parts. | neilv wrote: | That's a neat 2U case design, and will fit in some very shallow | wall-mount network switch cabinets. | | For installing outside of a machine room/closet/center, if you're | using 2U of height, you might also fit a PSU with a larger and | quieter fan, since all the Flex PSUs I've had come with | noticeably loud fans. (I replace them with Noctuas, but it isn't | a fun kind of soldering, IMHO.) | | The components from the build would also fit in a Supermicro 1U | short-depth chassis, especially if you can go a little deeper in | your cabinet. (My new K8s server got a used Supermicro 1U chassis | for ~$60 shipped, including a PSU. In the photo on | https://www.neilvandyke.org/kubernetes/ , it's the 1U immediately | below the 4U.) ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-27 23:00 UTC)