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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

#61

Post by samhclark »

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…

I think you're right generally, but I wanna call out the ODROID H4 models as an exception to a lot of what you said. They are mostly upgradable (SODIMM RAM, SATA ports, M.2 2280 slots), and it does support in-band ECC which kinda checks the ECC box. They've got a Mini-ITX adapter for $15 so it can fit into existing cases too.

No IPMI and not very many NVME slots. So I think you're right that a good mATX board could be better.

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

#62

Post by lostlogin »

geerlingguy wrote: post #20
dwood_dev wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem quickly becomes PCIe lanes. The N100/150/305 only have 9 PCIe 3.0 lanes. 5Gbe is fine, but to go to 10Gbe you need x2. Until there is something in this class with PCIe 4.0, I think we're close to maxing out the IO of these devices.

Not only the lanes, but putting through more than 6 Gbps of IO on multiple PCIe devices on the N150 bogs things down. It's only a little faster than something like a Raspberry Pi, there are a lot of little IO bottlenecks (for high speed, that is, it's great for 2.5 Gbps) if you do anything that hits CPU.

This is what baffles me - 2.5gbps.

I want smaller, cooler, quieter, but isn’t the key attribute of SSDs their speed? A raid array of SSDs can surely achieve vastly better than 2.5gbps.

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

#63

Post by lostlogin »

devwastaken wrote: post #22

i want a NAS i can puf 4tb nvme’s in and a 12tb hdd running backup every night. with ability to shove a 50gbps sfp card in it so i can truly have a detached storage solution.

10gbps would be a good start. The lack of wifi is mentioned as a downside, but do many people want that on a NAS?

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

#64

Post by lostlogin »

jbverschoor wrote: post #28
devwastaken wrote: post #22

i want a NAS i can puf 4tb nvme’s in and a 12tb hdd running backup every night. with ability to shove a 50gbps sfp card in it so i can truly have a detached storage solution.

Yeah that’s what I want too. I don’t necessarily need a mirror of most data, some I do prefer, but that’s small. I just want a backup (with history) of the data-SSD. The backup can be a single drive + perhaps remote storage

Would you really want the backup on a single disk? Or is this backing up data that is also versioned on the SSDs?

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

#65

Post by stoltzmann »

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?

That traditional wisdom is wrong. ECC is a must-have for any computer. The only reason people think ECC is mandatory for ZFS is because it exposes errors due to inherent checksumming and most other filesystems don't, even if they suffer from the same problems.

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

#66

Post by x0x0 »

michaelt wrote: post #32
whatever1 wrote: post #23

Question regarding these mini pcs: how do you connect them to plain old hard drives ? Is thunderbolt / usb these days reliable enough to run 24/7 without disconnects like an onboard sata?

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?

power regularly hits 50 cents a kilowatt hour where I live. Most of those seem to treat power like its free.

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

#67

Post by magicalhippo »

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?

Been running without for 15+ on my NAS boxes, built using my previous desktop hardware fitted with NAS disks.

They're on 24/ and run monthly scrubs, as well as monthly checksum verification of my backup images, and not noticed any issues so far.

I had some correctable errors which got fixed when changing SATA cable a few times, and some from a disk that after 7 years of 24/7 developed a small run of bad sectors.

That said, you got ECC so you should be able to monitor corrected memory errors.

Matt Ahrens himself (one of the creators of ZFS) had said there's nothing particular about ZFS:

There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT, NTFS, btrfs, etc without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as if you used ZFS without ECC RAM. Actually, ZFS can mitigate this risk to some degree if you enable the unsupported ZFS_DEBUG_MODIFY flag (zfs_flags=0x10). This will checksum the data while at rest in memory, and verify it before writing to disk, thus reducing the window of vulnerability from a memory error.

I would simply say: if you love your data, use ECC RAM. Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data, such as ZFS.

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1235679&p=...

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

#68

Post by matja »

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?

ECC is a must-have if you want to minimize the risk of corruption, but that is true for any filesystem.

Sun (and now Oracle) officially recommended using ECC ever since it was intended to be an enterprise product running on 24/7 servers, where it makes sense that anything that is going to be cached in RAM for long periods is protected by ECC.

In that sense it was a "must-have", as business-critical functions require that guarantee.

Now that you can use ZFS on a number of operating systems, on many different architectures, even a Raspberry Pi, the business-critical-only use-case is not as prevalent.

ZFS doesn't intrinsically require ECC but it does trust that the memory functions correctly which you have the best chance of achieving by using ECC.

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

#69

Post by archagon »

These look compelling, but unfortunately, we know that SSDs are not nearly as reliable as spinning rust hard drives when it comes to data retention: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/unpowered...

(I assume M.2 cards are the same, but have not confirmed.)

If this isn’t running 24/7, I’m not sure I would trust it with my most precious data.

Also, these things are just begging for a 10Gbps Ethernet port, since you're going to lose out on a ton of bandwidth over 2.5Gbps... though I suppose you could probably use the USB-C port for that.

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