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new solid state drives for NAS / router testing

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pete y testing

Very Senior Member
hi guys

to improve my testing of both routers and nas type devices im looking for a few solid state drives to use for testing etc to remove and hdd issues while testing

they dont have to be big in size wise just fast and perform well under load with multiple threads

thanks

pete
 
hi guys

to improve my testing of both routers and nas type devices im looking for a few solid state drives to use for testing etc to remove and hdd issues while testing

they dont have to be big in size wise just fast and perform well under load with multiple threads

thanks

pete

What are you asking for, exactly?
 
Samsung is currently a leader in this area. Their 850 EVO line of products is stable and pretty good performance-wise. To get anything much better you would need to move to the m.2 or PCI-Express interface, which aren't an option in a NAS (yet).

However you need to see what type of TRIM support your NAS offers. TRIM is always tricky with a RAID environment.
 
There are some manufacturers who use proprietary methods to avoid needing TRIM. OWC comes to mind.
 
For home/SOHO users, I can't see using SSDs in a NAS due to cost per megabyte. There could be special cases were SSDs in a NAS make sense (other than as cache). I use only Samsung.

I use an SSD in my two desktop PCs and in my laptop. The largest is 500GB, used in my consulting work. All computers' disks are auto-backed up to the NAS. And the NAS is backed up three ways.
 
There are some manufacturers who use proprietary methods to avoid needing TRIM. OWC comes to mind.

And I liked Sandforce's implementation (I still have a few Sandforce-based SSDs in use at home), because their on-the-fly compression greatly reduces write amplification issues.

Too bad their third generation controller will be 12 months behind schedule. By the time it comes out, it will be on par with existing mid-range products unfortunately (unless they increase the published specifications).
 
For home/SOHO users, I can't see using SSDs in a NAS due to cost per megabyte. There could be special cases were SSDs in a NAS make sense (other than as cache). I use only Samsung.

I use an SSD in my two desktop PCs and in my laptop. The largest is 500GB, used in my consulting work. All computers' disks are auto-backed up to the NAS. And the NAS is backed up three ways.

He's trying to limit disk bottlenecks when performance testing various routerNAS and NAS setups.

Although in a lot of cases, I would think the CPU would be the first bottleneck, rather than the drives.
 
If he uses standard drives and no CPU intensive RAID he may not have a CPU problem.

I am using one of the Intel 530 SSD in my laptop and it works well. I like the Intel SSDs.
I had my Microsoft WHS2011 server OS loaded on one but it turned out I did not need as it really made no difference so I put it in my laptop.
 
For a beefier NAS, sure. But there's still a lot of SOC NAS' out there. Plus he mentioned routers too, which would all be some kind of SOC.
 
thanks for the feedback

Samsung is currently a leader in this area. Their 850 EVO line of products is stable and pretty good performance-wise.

i already have one of these so prob a good idea to get a few more

However you need to see what type of TRIM support your NAS offers. TRIM is always tricky with a RAID environment.

its a synology ds 514+ , so not sure will check it out

He's trying to limit disk bottlenecks when performance testing various routerNAS and NAS setups.
the sdd'd are for the test comp and nas drive only but i will prob also use one for usb 3 router testing even though i have no real interest in it with regard to nas type usage , and yes the idea is to ensure the drives used are not bottlenecking performance during testing

If he uses standard drives and no CPU intensive RAID he may not have a CPU problem.

in general im performing testing on the router and its wifi throughput , the NAS and test comp are the tools and just want to ensure the tools dont bottleneck the results :)

RAMdisk works well and is cheaper than SSD.
i havnt looked at ramdisk before , thanks i will have a read

end result is that both test comp and nas can achieve 110MB/s or there abouts being the max the 1000M ethernet can achieve in both directions eg read / write so that any throughput result below those known benchmarks will be down to the router or wifi performance

atm my current setup gets about 100MB/s read and 70MB/s write speeds from the nas to the comp both being connected by giga ethernet to the routers
 
However you need to see what type of TRIM support your NAS offers. TRIM is always tricky with a RAID environment.

TRIM support under linux is odd in any event - and the aforementioned Samsung 850's exposed a bug in the linux kernel with regards to Queued TRIM commands - a few months back there was a whole ruckus about that (ended up being a Linux kernel bug, not Samsung)... so the question for the NAS vendor, did they pick up the patch or not - if not, there is potential for data loss...

RAID with SSD's - either RAID0 or RAID1 - RAID5/6 writes a lot of data that typically is useful for spinning HDD's, but can lead to excessive wear for SSD's - whether Sandforce based or other controllers...
 
RAMdisk works well and is cheaper than SSD.

With many NAS, good idea, but many don't allow this via their GUI - since Pete is also considering Routers in his testing, most Routers do not have enough RAM to make a useful tempfs partition that is large enough for testing...
 
in general im performing testing on the router and its wifi throughput , the NAS and test comp are the tools and just want to ensure the tools dont bottleneck the results :)


i havnt looked at ramdisk before , thanks i will have a read

end result is that both test comp and nas can achieve 110MB/s or there abouts being the max the 1000M ethernet can achieve in both directions eg read / write so that any throughput result below those known benchmarks will be down to the router or wifi performance

atm my current setup gets about 100MB/s read and 70MB/s write speeds from the nas to the comp both being connected by giga ethernet to the routers


With a 5 bay NAS in RAID5 almost any hdd's you use will not be a bottleneck either. That may not be true of your client devices though (an ssd would be beneficial there). This will be true as long as you're testing with large files. Small files (~1MB or less) will be drastically slower on a hdd.
 
Depends on the NAS and how the Samba is tuned... perhaps not a blanket statement there...

Sorry for the confusion, I meant for the clients with a hdd.
 
Sorry for the confusion, I meant for the clients with a hdd.

No worries - HDD or SSD, small file transactions are a benchmark onto their own, and generally it's client/server - useful test as WiFi is half-duplex vs. going to the wire on ethernet..

Depends on the test objectives...
 
Depends on the NAS and how the Samba is tuned... perhaps not a blanket statement there...
The small and mixed file benchmarks in the charts always show significantly lower throughput. Some is due to drive activity. But network overhead also is a large factor.
 
Fixed overhead per file: such as create new file in PC, NTFS, samba, LAN, samba, extfs in NAS. And vice-versa.
Big file, one overhead, then lots of data streaming.

Many small files, well, you see the issue.
 
The small and mixed file benchmarks in the charts always show significantly lower throughput. Some is due to drive activity. But network overhead also is a large factor.

Small files - always a bit more overhead - with NAS boxes, they tend to tune the network stacks a bit different than Router/AP's - different use cases...

For a Router/AP, it's mayo on the hotdog... for NAS, it's the bun... it's all about tasks and priorities...
 
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