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Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

#161

Post by layoric »

sandreas wrote: post #49

While it may be tempting to go "mini" and NVMe, for a normal use case I think this is hardly cost effective. You give up so much by using an all in mini device... No Upgrades, no ECC, harder cooling, less I/O. I have had a Proxmox Server with a used Fujitsu D3417 and 64gb ecc for roughly 5 years now, paid 350 bucks for the whole thing and upgraded the storage once from 1tb to 2tb. It draws 12-14W in normal day use an…

No ECC is the biggest trade off for me, but the C236 express chipset has very little choice for CPUs, they are all 4 core 8 thread. Ive got multiple x99 platform systems and for a long time they were the king of cost efficiency, but lately the ryzen laptop chips are becoming too good to pass up, even without ECC. Eg Ryzen 5825u minis

Re: Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

#162

Post by wpm »

ezschemi wrote: post #143

I was about to order that GMKtek G9 and then saw Jeff's video about it on the same day. All those issues, even with the later fixes he showed, are a big no-no for me. Instead, I went with a Odroid H4-Ultra with an Intel N305, 48GB Crucial DDR5 and 4x4TB Samsung 990 Evo SSDs (low-power usage) + a 2TB SATA SSD to boot from. Yes, the SSDs are way overkill and pretty expensive at $239 per Samsung 990 Evo (got them with a…

> (as the whole house slightly shakes when pickup or trash trucks pass by)

I have the same problem, but it is not a problem for my Seagate X16s, that have been going strong for years.

Re: Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

#163

Post by foobiekr »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #132
riobard wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would four 2TB SSD be more or less expensive than one 8TB SSD? And also counting power efficiency and RAID complexity?

4 small drives+raid gives you redundancy.

Given the write patterns of RAID and the wear issues of flash, it's not obvious at all that 4xNVME actually gives you meaningful redundancy.

Re: Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

#164

Post by wpm »

9x39 wrote: post #108
gorkish wrote: post #90

NVMe NAS is completely and totally pointless with such crap connectivity. What in the WORLD is preventing these systems from getting at least 10gbps interfaces? I have been waiting for years and years and years and years and the only thing on the market for small systems with good networking is weird stuff that you have to email Qotom to order direct from China and _ONE_ system from Minisforum. I'm beginning to think…

>What in the WORLD is preventing these systems from getting at least 10gbps interfaces? Price and price. Like another commenter said, there is at least one 10Gbe mini NAS out there, but it's several times more expensive. What's the use case for the 10GbE? Is ~200MB/sec not enough? I think the segment for these units is low price, small size, shared connectivity. The kind of thing you tuck away in your house invisibly…

> What's the use case for the 10GbE? Is ~200MB/sec not enough?

When I'm talking to an array of NVMe? No where near enough, not when each drive could do 1000MB/s of sequential writes without breaking a sweat.

Re: Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

#165

Post by wpm »

atmanactive wrote: post #155
zerd wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's annoying, around 10 years ago 10gbps was just starting to become more and more standard on bigger NAS, and 10gbps switches were starting to get cheaper, but then 2.5GbE came out and they all switched to that.

That's because 10GbE tech is not there yet. Everything overheats and drops-out all the time, while 2.5GbE just works. In several years from now, this will all change, of course.

Speak for yourself. I have AQC cards in a PC and a Mac, Intel gear in my servers, and I can easily sustain full speed.

Re: Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

#166

Post by wpm »

1oooqooq wrote: post #79

I will wait until the have AMD efficient chip for one very simple reason: AMD graciously allow ECC on some* cpus. *well, they allowed on all CPUs, but after zen3 they saw how much money intel was making and joined in. now you must get a "PRO" cpu, to get ECC support, even on mobile (but good luck finding ECC sodimm).

And good luck finding a single fucking computer for sale that even uses these "Pro" CPUs, because they sure as hell don't sell them to the likes of Minisforum and Beelink.

There was some stuff in DDR5 that made ECC harder to implement (unlike DDR4 where pretty much everything AMD made supported unbuffered ECC by default), but its still ridiculous how hard it is to find something that supports DDR5 ECC that doesn't suck down 500W at idle.

Re: Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

#167

Post by deanc »

jhancock wrote: post #152

thanks for the article. I'm dreaming of this: mini-nas connected direct to my tv via HDMI or USB. I think I'd want HMDI and let the nas handle streaming/decoding. But if my TV can handle enough formats. maybe USB will do. anyone have experience with this? I've been using a combination of media server on my Mac with client on Apple TV and I have no end of glitches.

Just get a nvidia shield. It plays pretty much anything still even though a fairly old device. Your aim should not be to transcode but to just send data when it comes to video.

Re: Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

#168

Post by kristianp »

wpm wrote: post #162
ezschemi wrote: post #143

I was about to order that GMKtek G9 and then saw Jeff's video about it on the same day. All those issues, even with the later fixes he showed, are a big no-no for me. Instead, I went with a Odroid H4-Ultra with an Intel N305, 48GB Crucial DDR5 and 4x4TB Samsung 990 Evo SSDs (low-power usage) + a 2TB SATA SSD to boot from. Yes, the SSDs are way overkill and pretty expensive at $239 per Samsung 990 Evo (got them with a…

> (as the whole house slightly shakes when pickup or trash trucks pass by) I have the same problem, but it is not a problem for my Seagate X16s, that have been going strong for years.

How does this happen? Wooden house? Only 2-3 metres from the road?

Re: Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

#169

Post by sandreas »

philjohn wrote: post #128
markhahn wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

such power claims are problematic - you're not letting the HDs spin down, for instance, and not crediting the fact that an SSD may easily dissipate more power than an HD under load. (in this thread, the host and network are slow, so it's not relevant that SSDs are far faster when active.)

There's a lot of "never let your drive spin down! They need to be running 24/7 or they'll die in no time at all!" voices in the various homelab communities sadly. Even the lower tier IronWolf drives from Seagate specify 600k load/unload cycles (not spin down, granted, but gives an idea of the longevity).

Is there any (semi-)scientific proof to that (serious question)? I did search a lot to this topic but found nothing...

Re: Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

#170

Post by sandreas »

1over137 wrote: post #129
markhahn wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

such power claims are problematic - you're not letting the HDs spin down, for instance, and not crediting the fact that an SSD may easily dissipate more power than an HD under load. (in this thread, the host and network are slow, so it's not relevant that SSDs are far faster when active.)

Letting hdds spin down is generally not advisable in a NAS, unless you access it really rarely perhaps.

Is there any (semi-)scientific proof to that (serious question)? I did search a lot to this topic but found nothing...

(see above, same question)

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