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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

#41

Post by jeffbee »

jkortufor wrote: post #36
jeffbee wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard of these disconnects. The OWC ThunderBay works well.

I have experienced them - I have a B650 AM5 motherboard and if I connect a Orico USB HDD enclosure to the fastest USB ports, the ones comming directly from the AMD CPU (yes, it's a thing now), after 5-10 min the HDD just disappears from the system. Doesn't happen on the other USB ports.

Well, AMD makes a good core but there are reasons that Intel is preferred by some users in some applications, and one of those reasons is that the peripheral devices on Intel platforms tend to work.

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

#42

Post by layer8 »

bee_rider wrote: post #14

Should a mini-NAS be considered a new type of thing with a new design goal? He seems to be describing about a desktop worth of storage (6TB), but always available on the network and less power consuming than a desktop. This seems useful. But it seems quite different from his previous (80TB) NAS. What is the idle power draw of an SSD anyway? I guess they usually have a volatile ram cache of some sort built in (is that…

HDD-based NASes are used for all kinds of storage amounts, from as low as 4TB to hundreds of TB. The SSD NASes aren’t really much different in use case, just limited in storage amount by available (and affordable) drive capacities, while needing less space, being quieter, but having a higher cost per TB.

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

#43

Post by turnsout »

Havoc wrote: post #8

I've been running one of these quad nvme mini-NAS for a while. They're a good compromise if you can live with no ECC. With some DIY shenanigans they can even run fanless If you're running on consumer nvmes then mirrored is probably a better idea than raidz though. Write amplification can easily shred consumer drives.

I’m a TrueNAS/FreeNAS user, currently running an ECC system. The traditional wisdom is that ECC is a must-have for ZFS. What do you think? Is this outdated?

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

#45

Post by layer8 »

wyager wrote: post #31
qwertox wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minisforum N5 Pro Nas has up to 96 GB of ECC RAM https://www.minisforum.com/pages/n5_pro https://store.minisforum.com/en-de/products/minisforum-n5-n5... no RAM 1.399€ 16GB RAM 1.459€ 48GB RAM 1.749€ 96GB RAM 2.119€ 96GB DDR5 SO-DIMM costs around 200€ to 280€ in Germany. https://geizhals.de/?cat=ramddr3&xf=15903_DDR5~15903_SO-DIMM... I wonder if that 128GB kit would work, as the CPU supports up to 256GB https://www.am…

Is this "full" ECC, or just the baseline improved ECC that all DDR5 has? Either way, on my most recent NAS build, I didn't bother with a server-grade motherboard, figuring that the standard consumer DDR5 ECC was probably good enough.

The DDR5 on-die ECC doesn’t report memory errors back to the CPU, which is why you would normally want ECC RAM in the first place. Unlike traditional side-band ECC, it also doesn’t protect the memory transfers between CPU and RAM. DDR5 requires the on-die ECC in order to still remain reliable in face of its chip density and speed.

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

#46

Post by herf »

Which SSDs do people rely on? Considering PLP (power loss protection), write endurance/DWPD (no QLC), and other bugs that affect ZFS especially? It is hard to find options that do these things well for <$100/TB, with lower-end datacenter options (e.g., Samsung PM9A3) costing maybe double what you see in a lot of builds.

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

#47

Post by evanjrowley »

turnsout wrote: post #43
Havoc wrote: post #8

I've been running one of these quad nvme mini-NAS for a while. They're a good compromise if you can live with no ECC. With some DIY shenanigans they can even run fanless If you're running on consumer nvmes then mirrored is probably a better idea than raidz though. Write amplification can easily shred consumer drives.

I’m a TrueNAS/FreeNAS user, currently running an ECC system. The traditional wisdom is that ECC is a must-have for ZFS. What do you think? Is this outdated?

One way to look at it is ECC has recently become more affordable due to In-Band ECC (IBECC) providing ECC-like functionality for a lot of newer power efficient Intel CPUs.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IGEN6-IBECC-Driver

Not every new CPU has it, for example, the Intel N95, N97, N100, N200, i3-N300, and i3-N305 all have it, but the N150 doesn't!

It's kind of disappointing that the low power NAS devices reviewed here, the only one with support for IBECC had a limited BIOS that most likely was missing this option. The ODROID H4 series, CWWK NAS products, AOOSTAR, and various N100 ITX motherboards all support it.

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

#48

Post by nightfly »

herf wrote: post #46

Which SSDs do people rely on? Considering PLP (power loss protection), write endurance/DWPD (no QLC), and other bugs that affect ZFS especially? It is hard to find options that do these things well for <$100/TB, with lower-end datacenter options (e.g., Samsung PM9A3) costing maybe double what you see in a lot of builds.

ZFS isn't more effected by those, your just more likely to notice them with ZFS. You'll probably never notice write endurance issues on a home NAS

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

#49

Post by sandreas »

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 and has 10 docker containers and 1 windows VM running.

So I would prefer a mATX board with ECC, IPMI 4xNVMe and 2.5GB over these toy boxes...

However, Jeff's content is awesome like always

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

#50

Post by miladyincontrol »

Still think its highly underrated to use fs-cache with NASes (usually configured with cachefilesd) for some local dynamically scaling client-side nvme caching.

Helps a ton with response times with any NAS thats primarily spinning rust, especially if dealing with decent amount of small files.

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