I'm looking to get myself a NAS. I've been offered a 4 bay NAS for free. I have spare SODIMMS and can upgrade it to 8GB. Additionally, I want to get some SSD's because they are reliable, quiet and even the cheapest are faster than SATA drives. What ssd's would you guys reccomend. I don't need high performance, just reliability.
Cheapest SSD for Home NAS?
McOzbargainer on 02/11/2021 - 17:05
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It's an older QNAP (451), I'm looking for 6tb of space, thinking RAID 10, no hotswap needed, might run some containers/vm's off them over iscsi or nfs.
4x4TB HDDs for $99 a pop would be my recommendation then. This gives you 8TB capacity.
Shuck these: https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/seagate-4t…
If you really want SSDs, you'll want 4x2TB MX500 SSDs at ~$250 each giving you 4TB total capacity.
Which 4TB NAS HDD is $99 a pop? Are they CMR?
@avoidfullprice: Shucked Seagate Expansion drives. They're SMR but fine for budget use. Have many of them on 24/7 in HP Microservers with no issues. Super slow write but all working perfectly fine. That QNAP unit seems to support SSD caching so would use that option to boost speeds too.
Of course Ironwolf CMRs will be better so if OP wasn't looking for "cheapest" then these at $145 each are a better option: https://www.amazon.com.au/Seagate-IronWolf-3-5-Inch-Internal…
fine for budget use
I shucked the 8TB SMR and it is so goddam bad. I had ideas about using it as a media storage device but it's literally so slow it's unuseable :D
The only thing I'd use these drives for is some sort of automated backup where the user has nothing to do with them such as on a USB 2 port on a router.
Maybe things are different for NAS.
@Diji1: SMR are at their worst when you need to rebuild a RAID array, and it should only be write performance that sucks, read should be pretty normal.
If in a NAS if you avoid RAID5/6 or 10 and stick with mirror/RAID1 or simple JBOD they should be ok, especially with a cache SSD to hide their slow write
So in your case raw media storage and playback should be fine, but stuff like recording live TV streams or security camera footage (even alone not in any RAID array) would be a bad idea without SSD caching - so if it is awful for read as well yours might be faulty
Watch the warranty TBW (total bytes written) as you may hit this before the time.
cheap and NAS not something that goes together imo
The way you use SSDs in a home or SMB NAS is for write caching (as that is the slowest part of the spinning rust drives, especially for RAID5 or 6) with the spinning rust doing the bulk of the storage volume, and if in RAID5/6 it can handle the read performance pretty well too.
I mean sure, SSDs are faster, but my RAID5 of 3x8TB spinning rust shucked WD drives gives near on 300mbps sequential read (with about half that at best for sequential write) without any SSD caching, so you'd not quite double that performance going to SSDs (or triple to quadruple performance for writes, but cache drive not full SSD achieves the same thing so long as your write isn't bigger than the SSD) and still not max out gigabit cause you need NVMe or RAID0 SSDs for that, but the cost vs performance is pretty terribad
Unless you are using this for work where the time delay costs money it is really a pissing money up a wall exercise. If you're doing something like video editing or 3D rendering and need the massive read/write bandwidth then SSD makes sense to a degree, though you'd usually have it local, not in the NAS.
I mean, you said you want reliability not performance, so you're barking up the wrong tree going SSD in the first place. I think Backblaze (or someone like them) has recently shown SSDs are no more reliable than spinning rust with failure rate hard data from their data centres, totally busting the "more reliable" myth.
Does the NAS you acquired support SSD caching? NVMe or only SATA?
Having so much memory support implies it is a pretty decent unit, though I assume it is older being free so it may not have NVMe support which would be your ideal for caching support - but still a 512GB/1TB MX500/EVO860/WD Red/Seagate NAS SSD combined with regular spinning rust to get you your total storage capacity is probably your cost to performance win, unless you only need like 4TB or something tiny in the thing
Just don't buy enterprise drives if you're worried about noise, or the 16TB Seagate shuckable that has those Exos drives in them (great performance, but reportedly loud AF). If the NAS isn't next to your bed or TV or something you're unlikely to hear it anyway
Thanks! Might just get some desktop HDD's then.
Which NAS unit and what does it support? How much storage space do you need? What RAID & resilience are you running them in? Hot swap required? Would you benefit from DRAM enabled SSDs?
SATA SSDs are nowhere near as cost-effective as HDDs for large storage NAS solutions.
Something like Crucial MX500 or Sandisk Ultra Plus would be bare minimum go-to.