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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

#51

Post by al_borland »

chime wrote: post #30
al_borland wrote: post #24

I’ve been thinking about moving from SSDs for my NAS to solid state. The drive are so loud, all the time, it’s very annoying. My first experience with these cheap mini PCs was with a Beelink and it was very positive and makes me question the longevity of the hardware. For a NAS, that’s important to me.

I've been using a QNAP TBS-464 [1] for 4 years now with excellent results. I have 4x 4TB NVMe drives and get about 11TB usable after RAID. It gets slightly warm but I have it in my media cabinet with a UPS, Mikrotik router, PoE switches, and ton of other devices. Zero complaints about this setup. The entire cabinet uses under 1kwh/day, costing me under $40/year here, compared to my previous Synology and home-made NAS…

Thanks, I’ll give it a look. I’m running a Synology right now. It only has 2 drives, so just swapping those out for SSDs would cost as much as a whole 4xNVMe setup, as I have 8TB HDDs in there now.

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

#52

Post by CharlesW »

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…

> Should a mini-NAS be considered a new type of thing with a new design goal?

Small/portable low-power SSD-based NASs have been commercialized since 2016 or so. Some people call them "NASbooks", although I don't think that term ever gained critical MAS (little joke there).

Examples: https://www.qnap.com/en/product/tbs-464, https://www.qnap.com/en/product/tbs-h574tx, https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=80

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

#54

Post by attendant3446 »

I was recently looking for a mini PC to use as a home server with, extendable storage. After comparing different options (mostly Intel), I went with the Ryzen 7 5825U (Beelink SER5 Pro) instead. It has an M.2 slot for an SSD and I can install a 2.5" HDD too. The only downside is that the HDD is limited by height to 7 mm (basically 2 TB storage limit), but I have a 4 TB disk connected via USB for "cold" storage. After years of using different models with Celeron or Intel N CPUs, Ryzen is a beast (and TDP is only 15W). In my case, AMD now replaced almost all the compute power in my home (with the exception of the smartphone) and I don't see many reasons to go back to Intel.

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

#55

Post by asalahli »

projektfu wrote: post #38
michaelt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you not simply buy a regular NAS? Why buy a tiny, m.2 only mini-NAS if your need is better met by a vanilla 2-bay NAS?

Good question. I imagine for the silence and low power usage without needing huge amounts of storage. That said, I own an n100 dual 3.5 bay + m.2 mini PC that can function as a NAS or as anything and I think it's pretty neat for the price.

This sounds exactly like what I'm looking. Care to share the brand&model?

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

#56

Post by privatelypublic »

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.

QLC isn't an issue for consumer NAS- are 'you' seriously going to write 160GB/day, every day?

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

#58

Post by privatelypublic »

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…

With APSD the idle draw of a SSD is in the range of low tens of milliwatts.

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

#59

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#60

Post by magicalhippo »

privatelypublic wrote: post #56
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.

QLC isn't an issue for consumer NAS- are 'you' seriously going to write 160GB/day, every day?

QLC have quite the write performance cliff though, which could be an issue during use or when rebuilding the array.

Just something to be aware of.

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