very fast NAS 4GBe or DAS USB3

[frank10]

I need a storage device on pc that I can use in Raid0 for uncompressed video at very high transfer speed, at least 350MB/s.

I saw some QNAP or Synology NAS 4bay with 4x1Gb ports capable of 450MB/s (the 10Gbe it seems too much at the moment).
In the NAS settings, which trunking method should I select to get the max speed?
From here:
http://docs.qnap.com/nas/4.1/SMB/it/index.html?network.htm
Should it be good with this pcie card?
http://lx2rv.com/eu/?id=psvN&url=ht...%3DLH_DefaultDomain_3%26hash%3Ditem27fe7a9634


But I could prefer some DAS with USB3. I saw lot of Thunderbolt2 DAS, but very few with USB3. The point is in pc we lack TB, there is only one Asus pcie card and only in very limited MB... it's a shame!
So I saw a Drobo USB3, but the speed are ugly also with 4HD. They did in Raid5, so in Raid0 it should be better, but I didn't see any review testing this raid0... Do you know some performance test in raid0?
Other DAS USB3 with speed > 350MB/S?
Thank you

 

[sfx2000]

At the data rates you're looking at - TB or 10GigE is probably the right course, and you're well beyond most NAS/DAS boxes - might consider a SAN with 10G... spendy...

USB3 ain't gonna cut it - might be for a single user, but not in a Production environment.

 

[frank10]

Well, let's think of a single working user. I can't consider a SAN.
In this case USB3 (max 600MB/s theoretically) should be fine. Of course TB/TB2, but the problem is on the lack of the pc diffusion.
The NAS I could use is not thought for more pc simultaneously in network but only because I've not found *any* good USB3 DAS. So it should be thought a DAS with network interface, more than a NAS...

So, I'm searching for a good 4bay DAS USB3 or a 4bay NAS 4x1Gb.
In particular, I've not found any DAS with these spec.
Is it normal there is no good performance DAS for pc these days?!

 

[stevech]

DAS - NAS
Apples and oranges.

 

[frank10]

I don't think your post is of any help.

I explained how I could look at a NAS in *my* particular case: as a single user unit connected to a single computer through LAN instead of USB3. To me it seems like a DAS.

I only want to access video files at a great read speed with raid0 and a minimum of portability.
Is it possible both with "NAS" or DAS? If yes, your comment isn't that good...
The fact I can't find any good USB3 DAS, put me on the road to look at some NAS to be used like DAS...
Of course I could be wrong, but for sure your comment isn't explanatory of why not.

 

[Trexx]

Whether 4x1GbE will benefit you depends on whether you switch/PC supports 802.3AD Link Aggregation. The main use case for the link aggregation is for the NAS to support multiple clients access it across a larger # of ports to improve overall bandwidth.

On the PC side you are generally dealing with NIC teaming. You also have the ultimately limitation of your NAS disk's I/O limits which are affected by HD choices, NAS choice, I/O profile (read vs. write, sequential vs. random, and even i/o block size).

 

[frank10]

Thank you, Trexx.
Is the LACP usable bypassing the switch? Connecting directly the QNAP 4port to the Intel pcie 4port ?
In this case, should I configure also the pc some way with that NIC teaming, or should it be configured only on the QNAP settings?
Of course there are the HD choice, and their settings on the NAS, but I think if I choose a QNAP/Synology 4Gb-port with 4xHGST NAS HD, configured on max read sequential files, large I/O blocks, I should go well.

 

[kamina]

You have to understand that the multiple NIC's can't be used to benefit unless you can actually split the stream into multiple pieces that each go through a separate NIC. If you are transferring one file (even with LACP) it will be going through one NIC, so the bigger benefits come from the ability for multiple clients to simultaneously transfer the files at fast speed.

SMB3 (windows 8 / windows server 2012) introduces a concept of multiple channels that significantly speeds up certain transfers by splitting it up into separate streams. The biggest benefit here seems to come from the fact that it can use a stream per cpu core to better benefit from current multi-core systems. I guess in theory at least it would also be possible for it to benefit from LACP and use separate interfaces per stream, don't know if even Windows would do it though. However here it's important to understand that in Linux the SMB support comes via the Samba project and for them it can take quite long to implement new features that Microsoft introduces (especially of this magnitude). Also companies like QNAP can't necessarily jump and take huge changes to Samba directly, rather then can require a lot of testing and validation to ensure backwards compatibility. For this reason even when SMB3 features are added (I believe QNAP did this), it's one feature at a time and as far as I know this is not there yet.

So currently a 10Gb NIC is your best bet. Your second best bet is waiting if some of the next NAS devices launched support newer hybrid standards like getting 2.5Gb out of cheaper hardware (Synology used chipsets where this is supported but still just put 1Gb NIC's so you won't benefit). Your third bet would be hoping this support comes to Samba quickly and matures fast, but until it's there that really is betting.

 

[frank10]

Interesting.
I think I'll leave the NAS at this moment.

It remains DAS.
I saw only Drobo with 4bay USB3, but its performance with 4HD Raid5@about 200MB/s are ugly.
Of course in Raid0, 4HD should be capable of more than 400MB/s, but should a Drobo put them out of USB3?
Any other DAS capable of this?

 

[kamina]

I'm not seeing a lot of DAS devices with good speeds over USB3... Anandtech has tested some NAS devices that have a 10Gb NIC as both directly attached and over the network, from a quick look it seems that would be the way forward (or then Thunderbolt if you can get it for your Windows machine).

Other option is SSD / internal drives with RAID and then just get the NAS for sharing... 1TB SSD drives are not that expensive any more and have quite good performance.

 

[frank10]

Yes, Kamina I've not seen any USB3 good speed, too.
I saw an old Lacie Quadra with 4 disks in Raid0 declaring in the spec *only* 270MB/s!
Here the bottleneck is the conversion interface for sure, not the array of disks.
USB3 should reach quite 5-600MB/s...

Yes, TB2 or 10Gb.
Also internal drives/SSD are good, but you loose the portability.

 

[kamina]

I have not really had any need for USB3 and speed so never looked into it, but at least USB2 used to be quite heavy on the CPU and in the real world it would never get close to theoretical max speeds like Firewire would. I don't know if USB3 is similar, at least from my testing with SSD drives on an external USB3 controller it seemed like I could never get over 100MB/s through USB3 while the drive connected via SATA would give over 500MB/s. I know other people have had external USB boxes that would give significantly higher speeds, so it would point to the USB controller being a very strong bottleneck to what speeds you achieve.

 

[frank10]

Yes, there is also the CPU thing.
Also a 4bay DAS with an eSata connector @6Gbs could be good if I could find one...

 

[stevech]

I'm not seeing a lot of DAS devices with good speeds over USB3... Anandtech has tested some NAS devices that have a 10Gb NIC as both directly attached and over the network, from a quick look it seems that would be the way forward (or then Thunderbolt if you can get it for your Windows machine).

Other option is SSD / internal drives with RAID and then just get the NAS for sharing... 1TB SSD drives are not that expensive any more and have quite good performance.

I wonder if USB3 (directly attached) is graded on speed with the overhead of NTFS on a big drive - or do people run FAT32 by default on such USB3 connected drives? Perhaps neither file system can be as fast as the file systems in NAS's.

 

[frank10]

NTFS cannot be the bottleneck, because the same filesystem with 4 Raid0 internal disks give extreme high speed. But also with TB2 unit.
NTFS could be slower compared to some NAS filesystem but that could be very limited speed difference, not huge limiting as those bandwidth reported. That's not the problem with USB3 DAS: the problem is the poor conversion hardware.

 

[sfx2000]

I wonder if USB3 (directly attached) is graded on speed with the overhead of NTFS on a big drive - or do people run FAT32 by default on such USB3 connected drives? Perhaps neither file system can be as fast as the file systems in NAS's.

Directly attached to a Windows box?

USB3 with NTFS is pretty handy and relatively fast...

 

[L&LD]

USB3 is useless if performance is compared to an internally connected SATA3 or higher connection.

eSATA and the latest Thunderbolt options are the only ones to consider (with 4 drives in a RAID10 configuration for speed and redundancy) for raw video editing.

 

[stevech]

yes, but I'm lazy, so USB3 for big transfers just runs longer. eSATA is a PITA.

 

[frank10]

eSATA and the latest Thunderbolt options are the only ones to consider (with 4 drives in a RAID10 configuration for speed and redundancy) for raw video editing.

With eSATA, one must check also if it's at 6Gbs, because I've seen all of them at 3Gbs and so they are useless, as they are limiting the real bandwidth at about 270MB/s... and that's similar to USB3 (even if USB3 should be faster as it is 5Gbs). The 3Gbs eSATA could make sense with single or dual external drive, but not with 4 or more.
Do you know of any DAS with eSATA at *6Gbs* ?

 

[L&LD]

If you don't move to a Thunderbolt solution like this here, or similar, you will not get a USB3.0 solution that offers real performance benefits above eSATA.

This link shows how bad USB3.0 storage use can be. And is still useful to consider even if the actual review and product is from 2012.

I have not run across a DAS with eSATA with SATA3 specs. I would be looking at a Thunderbolt solution myself or something like this which has 10GBe ports x2 ready for use and would be far more useful than a simple DAS would be, imo.