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Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

chrisbergeron.com

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Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#71

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

wil421 wrote: post #70
conradev wrote: post #60

I was actually looking for something like this. I have one computer that I want to back up to both local hard drives and to the cloud. A NAS is great, because you can back up to it and have the backup stored on local hard drives, but it also has a CPU and it can be responsible for uploading the data to the cloud. This is better to do from a dedicated device, especially if you are uploading large amounts of data with…

Running FreeNAS on a 1GbE network and I wouldn’t call it slow at all. The initial back is much much faster than my 1TB personal media library I sometimes backup to OneDrive. I think I have 3TB of video from Usenet that is downloaded onto a windows box, uses a 10 year old intel as an unpack scratch pad, and then is stored on the NAS box. Sure the initial library transfer is slow but if you can use a wire it’s not that…

I have a freenas too. Uploading to it gives me 100 mb write speed, which is definitely enough for most of my needs.

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#72

Post by wil421 »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #71
wil421 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running FreeNAS on a 1GbE network and I wouldn’t call it slow at all. The initial back is much much faster than my 1TB personal media library I sometimes backup to OneDrive. I think I have 3TB of video from Usenet that is downloaded onto a windows box, uses a 10 year old intel as an unpack scratch pad, and then is stored on the NAS box. Sure the initial library transfer is slow but if you can use a wire it’s not that…

I have a freenas too. Uploading to it gives me 100 mb write speed, which is definitely enough for most of my needs.

Yea I was debating on using SAS drives instead of SATA but cost was too much. Bought WD Red drives instead. Hopefully I won’t have to resilver.

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#73

Post by SilverRed »

lxe wrote: post #66

> As NVMe disks and interfaces have gotten faster I’ve found myself saturating a 10Gb ethernet network. I love this race between network speeds, drive speeds, and RAM speeds. The classic "net vs disk vs ram vs cache vs register" interview question is much trickier these days.

I recently moved to somewhere with a real fiber internet connection and was impressed that I could get up to a gigabit speeds but when I tested it I found my wifi network could only handle about 100Mbit and sometimes it was dropping to 50. First time I have ever had wifi actually be the limiting factor. Thankfully my apartment has wired Ethernet to most rooms so my steam downloads are flying along now.

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#74

Post by SilverRed »

reacharavindh wrote: post #10
jeffbee wrote: post #5

Where by "ultra fast" it is meant that it is much slower than a directly-attached SSD that occupies the same port.

Local storage and Networked storage always have their places. Local solid state storage almost always gets you better performance because you negate the overhead of network. Unless, you’re talking fancy arrays connected to saturate 100G NICs. Local storage falls apart the moment you need that storage accessible from another machine…

Networked storage also falls apart the moment you need anything better than basic file storage. So many filesystem features do not work networked, most network file mounts do not support any kind of modern security and the ones that do are often super slow.

Everything has its place, but I wasted so much time trying to get a nas to work as storage for my home server.

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#75

Post by SilverRed »

interactivecode wrote: post #42
cyberge99 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing this out. I’ll add a fallback using the “picture” element (TIL). I also use some javascript to delay rendering until the browser window stays on an image. That could very well be introducing some wonkiness.

you should use the built in lazy loading https://caniuse.com/loading-lazy-attr or intersection observer for this https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Intersectio...

Is there really a need for lazy loading a blog page over just providing a height and width attribute and letting the browser work it out?

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#76

Post by ballenf »

I wonder if there will be "reality" tv shows about data hoarders one day. Probably have to wait for data to be easily visualized with VR or AR.

In fact, I really love the idea that I could have to walk to a particular room in order to view a particular set of old photos. Wearing some AR glasses, of course. And that I could grant view access to visitors. Would suck if the photos accidentally glitched through the floor and I had to dig down through a foot of concrete to get them back though.

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#77

Post by genewitch »

zhengyi13 wrote: post #67
unicornfinder wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If memory serves the main problem is some Thunderbolt cards don't ship with the necessary firmware on them, so would need to be used at least once in a supported motherboard before just used in any system.

That seems even more WTF, and puts me in mind of the old Winmodem setup. Not precisely analogous, but boy it seems weird.

There's still benefits today to using actual modems instead of glorified sound cards or literal sound cards. I have a pactor modem for ham radio use, and it can do several modes other than pactor, like rtty. Compared to using something like fldigi, if I can hear the other side and they can hear me, the data will 100% go through correctly on the physical pactor modem. There's weird jank even when using the basic RF mail software, which can control a variety of modems, or just use your sound card, too. Every session is longer when using software based modems, for example.

I'm aware that the pactor modem itself is probably a software defined device like an FPGA, but it is much better than the software on the PC - and I can use it with an anemic laptop from 2007 with no issues at all, since it just sends text back and forth over a serial port - via USB.

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#78

Post by genewitch »

reacharavindh wrote: post #22
minhazm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fastest thunderbolt to ethernet adapter I could find is 25 Gbps and it's $1500. 10 Gbps ones are in the $200+ range as well.

True. I assumed it was a simple adaptor for TB3 to 40Gbps Ethernet or atleast QSFP+ Since TB also advertises 40 Gbps, but looks like expensive niche. At $1500, you might as well spend time to figure out how to get Linux to work better with Thunderbolt card. For other devices in the network that do not impose Thunderbolt though, Melanox 40G NICs are surprisingly cheap.

How cheap is "surprising" and who sells them? I wouldn't mind upgrading my link to the server barn and my house to an assuredly future proof 40gbit...

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#79

Post by genewitch »

SilverRed wrote: post #73
lxe wrote: post #66

> As NVMe disks and interfaces have gotten faster I’ve found myself saturating a 10Gb ethernet network. I love this race between network speeds, drive speeds, and RAM speeds. The classic "net vs disk vs ram vs cache vs register" interview question is much trickier these days.

I recently moved to somewhere with a real fiber internet connection and was impressed that I could get up to a gigabit speeds but when I tested it I found my wifi network could only handle about 100Mbit and sometimes it was dropping to 50. First time I have ever had wifi actually be the limiting factor. Thankfully my apartment has wired Ethernet to most rooms so my steam downloads are flying along now.

I think most people will find that they'll get <100mbit over wifi. I had to design, buy, and implement 802.11ac stuff to get close to gigabit. And then wifi6/802.11ax came out and nothing wanted to play with Linux and wifi6. So I got a fiber media converter and put a switch on my desk backhauled over fiber to the "house switch" which is in turn backhauled to the server barn switch via fiber. Doing this prevents lightning from blowing up my wifi access points and NAS boxes, which has happened before, necessitating the need for fast WiFi in the first place.

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#80

Post by FullyFunctional »

21com wrote: post #53
FullyFunctional wrote: post #49

Funny I went down this rathole very shortly after discovering the "Thunderbolt networking" change in the Linux kernel. My hope was the use the Linux box (with 10 GbE) as a bridge/switch to give my Mac cheap 10 GbE access. While point-to-point did hit more or less the expected speed, bridging was horribly slow. Ended up just getting an Sonnet Solo10G SFP+ adapter (which is great).

> bridging was horribly slow. Can you quantify that? (I'm wondering if it might be good-enough for my needs.)

I'm afraid it was 2+ years ago so I don't remember, but it must have been slower than the comparable speed from the gigabit wired connection. FWIW, I was so happy with the Sonnet (not as hot as some alternatives I've used) that I bought two more. However, unless you are using fiber or for other reasons preferring SFP+, going with the grain and getting 10Gbase-T is probably easier.

Getting back to the OP, this could be interesting for me if and only if I can get fiber based Thunderbolt-4, but it seems to not yet be available.

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