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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

#81

Post by guerby »

Related question: does anyone know of an usb-c powerbank that can be effectively used as UPS? That is to say is able to be charged while maintaining power to load (obviously with rate of charge greater by a few watts than load).

Most models I find reuse the most powerful usb-c port as ... recharging port so unusable as DC UPS.

Context: my home server is my old https://frame.work motherboard running proxmox VE with 64GB RAM and 4 TB NVME, powered by usb-c and drawing ... 2 Watt at idle.

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

#82

Post by HappMacDonald »

stoltzmann wrote: post #65
turnsout wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Is this outdated?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.

I'm curious if it would make sense for write caches in RAM to just include a CRC32 on every block, to be verified as it gets written to disk.

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

#83

Post by p_ing »

lostlogin wrote: post #62
geerlingguy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A single SSD can (or at least NVMe can). You have to question whether or not you need it -- what are you doing that you would go line-speed a large portion of time that the time savings are worth it. Or it's just a toy, totally cool too.

4 7200 RPM HDDs in RAID 5 (like WD Red Pro) can saturate a 1Gbps link at ~110MBps over SMB 3. But that comes with the heat and potential reliability issues of spinning disks.

I have seen consumer SSDs, namely Samsung 8xx EVO drives have significant latency issues in a RAID config where saturating the drives caused 1+ second latency. This was on Windows Server 2019 using either a SAS controller or JBOD + Storage Spaces. Replacing the drives with used Intel drives resolved the issue.

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

#84

Post by jrockway »

lostlogin wrote: post #62
geerlingguy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

2.5Gbps is selected for price reasons. Not only is the NIC cheap, but so is the networking hardware.

But yeah, if you want fast storage just stick the SSD in your workstation, not on a mini PC hanging off your 2.5Gbps network.

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

#86

Post by doubled112 »

HappMacDonald wrote: post #82
stoltzmann wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm curious if it would make sense for write caches in RAM to just include a CRC32 on every block, to be verified as it gets written to disk.

Don't you have to read that data into RAM before you can generate the CRC? Which means without ECC it could get silently corrupted on the way to the cache?

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

#87

Post by sorenjan »

Is it possible (and easy) to make a NAS with harddrives for storage and an SSD for cache? I don't have any data that I use daily or even weekly, so I don't want the drives spinning needlessly 24/7, and I think an SSD cache would stop having to spin them up most of the time.

For instance, most reads from a media NAS will probably be biased towards both newly written files, and sequentially (next episode). This is a use case CPU cache usually deals with transparently when reading from RAM.

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

#88

Post by op00to »

sorenjan wrote: post #87

Is it possible (and easy) to make a NAS with harddrives for storage and an SSD for cache? I don't have any data that I use daily or even weekly, so I don't want the drives spinning needlessly 24/7, and I think an SSD cache would stop having to spin them up most of the time. For instance, most reads from a media NAS will probably be biased towards both newly written files, and sequentially (next episode). This is a us…

Yes. You can use dm-cache.

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

#89

Post by sorenjan »

op00to wrote: post #88
sorenjan wrote: post #87

Is it possible (and easy) to make a NAS with harddrives for storage and an SSD for cache? I don't have any data that I use daily or even weekly, so I don't want the drives spinning needlessly 24/7, and I think an SSD cache would stop having to spin them up most of the time. For instance, most reads from a media NAS will probably be biased towards both newly written files, and sequentially (next episode). This is a us…

Yes. You can use dm-cache.

Thanks. I looked it up and it seems that lvmcache uses dm-cache and is easier to use, I guess putting that in front of some kind of RAID volume could be a good solution.

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

#90

Post by gorkish »

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 there is some sort of conspiracy to not allow anything smaller than a full size ATX desktop to have anything faster than 2.5gbps NICs. (10gbps nics that plug into NVMe slots are not the solution.)

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