Bottlenecks: SSD vs HDD with 2 port LAN aggregation

[jpaul_johnson]

I'm considering buying a QNAP TS251+ and trying to aggregate the 2 LAN ports to improve my transfer and connection speeds. I think I would be able to get to approximately 220MB/s read/write, which would exceed the capability of a HDD (roughly 70MB/s?). So I'm considering installing a pair of Samsung 850 Pros (1GB). I'd like to NAS to be responsive and quick and will use it as a File Server and a Quickbooks data file server in a small office.

Am I on the right track with this thinking? I really appreciate any advice or comment. I've never tried this.

Thanks.

 

[L&LD]

You will get approximately that speed with a pair of SSD's, but not for any one client (they will still be limited by the single GbE LAN connection they have).

Multiple clients requesting different data from the NAS may be able to hit close to those speeds (with large file transfers of 1GB or larger, each) in total. But each one will still be limited to about 113MB/s when everything is optimal.

To get higher speeds to a single client you need something better than a GbE network (look for 2.5GbE, 5GbE and 10GbE capable NAS', switches, routers and clients to achieve your goal).

https://www.broadcom.com/products/ethernet-communication-and-switching/switching/bcm56228

https://translate.google.ca/transla...m-die-1-000-euro-1603-119799.html&prev=search

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B46AEE6/?tag=snbforums-20


If you want to stay on this track, bring lots of money.

 

[sfx2000]

a popular misunderstanding about LAG, esp. with those unfamiliar with it, is that it will double the speed.

not true... LAG is not RAID for networks - and it really comes down to a basic understanding of how IP works..

LAG binds two MAC addresses to a single IP at the switching/phy layer of the stack - but Applications use the network and transport layers (IP and UDP/TCP).

So even if you bind two ports, at the client side - you will not see any improvement in performance, as your client typically is not LAG'ed...

What LAG does help - with capacity and redundancy - think of a LAG'ed server as a virtual IP - so if we lose one or the other network interface, connectivity remains, as the other link is still part of the LAG set.

In some cases LAG might actually hurt performance - older Router/AP's might only have 1G, or best case 2.5G, internally on the switch fabric on the System on Chip, and that embedded switch is handling all the traffic, the LAN/WAN as well as the LAN to LAN traffic, so again - not much benefit.

On most consumer grade router/AP's - this is a checkbox feature for marketing.

On a business class managed switch - it's a bit of a different story, as most controllers there do have much more bandwidth across the ports and across the switching fabric of the chipset inside the router - but even then, the sub-$1000 USD class of switches, this is a checkbox feature for the most part...

Be happy where you are - adding complexity by trying LAG on something that really isn't going to meet your expectations is a short road to disappointment.

 

[jpaul_johnson]

Thanks for the help. I really appreciate the advice, and I'm going to take it. I'd love to have more bandwidth/speed on the LAN, but it's too expensive. I could put a 10gbe nic on the client and aggregate the NAS, but I see that I'd need a better switch, and I'd have to do all the clients. $$$. Thanks for setting me straight.

Is there an advantage (in speed) to using the SSDs (in the NAS) rather than HDDs in my GBE environment?

 

[System Error Message]

enough with the clients not doing LACP. LACP is useful to reduce bottlenecks if you have as many drives as you have NICs and you have multiple clients or your clients also use LACP. Pretty sure someone who plans to use LACP should be smart enough to know that the client also needs it for it to be faster or have multiple clients. Very likely the case will be multiple clients i.e. simultaneous wired and wifi clients. Even if you just have one wire and one wifi client and your NAS and switch support it you might as well use it. Even if you just have one client theres no reason not to use it, who knows you may have a need for it in the future like a LAN party or even more clients in the future so everything is already set up.

In order to use LACP the switch must support it.

Another way to use multiple NICs is to connect to multiple switches, but again a specific form of STP has to be support in order for the redundancy + path optimisation to work. It allows for segmentation from layers 1-3 too in this way.

 

[sfx2000]

enough with the clients not doing LACP. LACP is useful to reduce bottlenecks if you have as many drives as you have NICs and you have multiple clients or your clients also use LACP.

Enough with check box features - most consumer grade Router/AP's can't handle it if enabled...

And this sets users down the path of painful disappointment...

I totally get LAG - and it's useful in some situations - but in this sector, not very useful at all...

 

[L&LD]

Is there an advantage (in speed) to using the SSDs (in the NAS) rather than HDDs in my GBE environment?

There should be.

But the only way to know is to actually try it with the specific NAS and use case compared to the same NAS and HDD's.

For example, when I setup a 6 Bay QNAP NAS and the customer asked if SSD's were supported (in a workplace similar to yours), they were pleasantly surprised that they were.

This particular installation involved 2x 6 Bay NAS units (identical) and 16x 4TB HDD's, but the customer had a couple of 'spare' SSD's so we tested with those SSD's as cache drives on one NAS and all HDD's on the other. While the NAS with the SSD's was noticeably faster, it was not that much difference from the 4x HDD's in RAID5.

The customer rightfully decided to stick with HDD's until he could replace all with SSD's. Not only was there a smaller capacity (3x 4TB HDD RAID5 + 1x SSD cache vs. 4x 4TB HDD RAID5) with the SSD cached NAS, but the performance was much more variable too (you could tell when the SSD cache 'kicked in').

In your case, if you could use high capacity SSD's in all the drive bays of the NAS, I think the performance will be worthwhile. Just make sure you enable TRIM on those drives, or the speeds will become worse, given enough time and use.

 

[jpaul_johnson]

There should be.

But the only way to know is to actually try it with the specific NAS and use case compared to the same NAS and HDD's.

For example, when I setup a 6 Bay QNAP NAS and the customer asked if SSD's were supported (in a workplace similar to yours), they were pleasantly surprised that they were.

This particular installation involved 2x 6 Bay NAS units (identical) and 16x 4TB HDD's, but the customer had a couple of 'spare' SSD's so we tested with those SSD's as cache drives on one NAS and all HDD's on the other. While the NAS with the SSD's was noticeably faster, it was not that much difference from the 4x HDD's in RAID5.

The customer rightfully decided to stick with HDD's until he could replace all with SSD's. Not only was there a smaller capacity (3x 4TB HDD RAID5 + 1x SSD cache vs. 4x 4TB HDD RAID5) with the SSD cached NAS, but the performance was much more variable too (you could tell when the SSD cache 'kicked in').

In your case, if you could use high capacity SSD's in all the drive bays of the NAS, I think the performance will be worthwhile. Just make sure you enable TRIM on those drives, or the speeds will become worse, given enough time and use.

Thanks. This office is a 2 PC office and we're putting in a QNAP TS251+, mostly just to handle the Quickbooks data, which is pretty small. I doubt they'll ever use more than 500GB (famous last words), so we were thinking about putting 2 Samsung 850 Pro 1TB drives in it. Quick response is important to the owner. From what I've read, it appears that the LAN might push about 110MB/s with overhead, and a HDD about 70MB/s. The Samsung was evaluated near 120MB/s, so I thought this might be the solution for my best speed.

I gotta say, reading these responses really shines a light on my ignorance, and the superb generosity and expertise of the forum members here. I'm very grateful.

 

[sfx2000]

The customer rightfully decided to stick with HDD's until he could replace all with SSD's. Not only was there a smaller capacity (3x 4TB HDD RAID5 + 1x SSD cache vs. 4x 4TB HDD RAID5) with the SSD cached NAS, but the performance was much more variable too (you could tell when the SSD cache 'kicked in').

One of the very useful applications for the SSD caching on the QNAP (and perhaps others) is when hosting a database (mysql/postgres/perhaps mssql now that they have linux support) - there - the SSD cache is huge benefit, and it works nicely with the tiered storage - whether it's iSCSI mounted from a faster server or hosted natively on the NAS...

(SSD cache plus RAID10 on fast drives - even better)

just as an fyi/sidebar comment..

 

[L&LD]

Thanks. This office is a 2 PC office and we're putting in a QNAP TS251+, mostly just to handle the Quickbooks data, which is pretty small. I doubt they'll ever use more than 500GB (famous last words), so we were thinking about putting 2 Samsung 850 Pro 1TB drives in it. Quick response is important to the owner. From what I've read, it appears that the LAN might push about 110MB/s with overhead, and a HDD about 70MB/s. The Samsung was evaluated near 120MB/s, so I thought this might be the solution for my best speed.

I gotta say, reading these responses really shines a light on my ignorance, and the superb generosity and expertise of the forum members here. I'm very grateful.

With the 2 bay NAS model you are considering, I would configure the NAS for each person to access the same QuickBooks data from one LAN port each. This is effectively LAG without the added complexity.

The Samsung SSD must be rated higher than 120MB/s? I would guess closer to 500MB/s, at a minimum.

In any case, the 3TB WD RED is also capable of 140MB/s or more.

http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_red_nas_hard_drive_review_wd30efrx

In any case (hdd or ssd), with only two users on QuickBooks, I don't see anything slowing down for either of them.


With a setup like this where uptime is very important (access to the QuickBooks data), I would suggest the following as a better alternative for a little more money but much better dependability and availability.

A 4 bay NAS (possibly the TS-451+) configured as follows.

Two arrays of RAID1 consisting of 2 drives each (3TB WD RED).

The main array will hold the NAS' os. The second array will hold the users data.

When (not if) a drive begins to fail from either array, it can be removed and replaced without affecting the QuickBooks access that is required (most likely continuously or at least multiple times a day).

Don't forget to have spare drives available for the above situation and also an external USB drive or two that you can backup (at least weekly) this NAS' data to and store offsite as needed.

 

[sfx2000]

With the 2 bay NAS model you are considering, I would configure the NAS for each person to access the same QuickBooks data from one LAN port each. This is effectively LAG without the added complexity.

Could be dangerous here - run the risk of collisions if both workstations are working on the same elements (e.g. customer specific files) and data consistency - check with Intuit first before going down that path...

In any event - I'm not seeing a problem with keeping them on the same port - Quickbooks is pretty light on read/write.

Big thing is make sure there is a backup strategy for the NAS box since the files are centrally located - probably a nightly on schedule (QNAP's backup station supports scheduled jobs, just do it in the evening)

 

[L&LD]

Could be dangerous here - run the risk of collisions if both workstations are working on the same elements (e.g. customer specific files) and data consistency - check with Intuit first before going down that path...

In any event - I'm not seeing a problem with keeping them on the same port - Quickbooks is pretty light on read/write.

Big thing is make sure there is a backup strategy for the NAS box since the files are centrally located - probably a nightly on schedule (QNAP's backup station supports scheduled jobs, just do it in the evening)

Should be no problem if the users are accessing the main database in 'multi-user' mode (it is built for this type of use). Within the data file, each user must be working on unique sections though (as you suggested).

https://quickbooks.intuit.com/qb/pr.../faqs/pro_premier_faq_section6_multi-user.jsp

With a single 'company' file that QuickBooks uses (and those files can grow to be very large), using both ports to access the data would be beneficial, imo.

 

[sfx2000]

With a single 'company' file that QuickBooks uses (and those files can grow to be very large), using both ports to access the data would be beneficial, imo.

Within Quickbooks, if I recall - there is a way to break out old data once reconciled (e.g. EOY/EOQ), but we're getting well beyond the scope of SNB here...



OP needs to confirm with Intuit before deploying a solution, otherwise things could turn into an ugly block of unrecoverable bits.

 

[L&LD]

No way to 'break out old data' that I know of. You simply make a backup at specific and special times during the year. But the historical data is carried forward (in detail or in summary, your choice).

I don't see anything to confirm here? That link states that the program is built to be used in exactly this way. Install the company data in 'server mode' on the NAS and access it with as many as 30 users, provided they each have a license and you have the correct version level of QuickBooks.

 

[sfx2000]

Maybe I'm thinking about the old-school peachtree stuff...

 

[Dennis Wood]

If you're looking for fast quickbooks access, consider a 10Gbe NIC on both workstations (note the last paragraph in this post!) , and sharing the database on SSD from one of them. We run QB over 10Gbe (data files on a dedicated INtel 530 series SSD good for 500MB/s read/write on Windows Server 2012R2) and you'd think it would be crazy fast under that scenario, and it's not. I've carefully optimized the database and configured the clients as per QB recommendations for performance, but load times are still 6-10 seconds, and occasional lags still exist. The server is happy delivering out 800MB/s over the 10Gbe connection, so I'm pretty sure QB is simply not set up to be much of a rocketship where network access is concerned.

If it's only 2 PCs, then the power user should have the local SSD, and the 2nd user access over the network. Honestly, I'd try this first over 1Gbe.

Windows 8.1, 10 and Server 2012 all use MS SMB3 which is much more efficient for network speed, particularly 10Gbe. The 7 part blog series on 10Gbe I wrote can be found here: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tags/10GbE

Windows 8.1 and up aggregate LAN ports seamlessly under SMB3 Multichannel,..and you will see a speed increase for a single connected user. The inexpensive way to connect the the 2nd client to the 1st is using a dual or quad port intel PCI card, providing they are both windows 8.1, or windows 10. Two ports connected this way over 1Gbe will give you 240MB/s transfer speed, four ports, close to 500MB/s. The blog post dealing with that "magic" is here: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanw...ssions-of-a-10-gbe-network-newbie-part-4-smb3

Two Intel Pro cards ($100) and an SSD (assuming Windows 8.1 or better) and you're done. Use the NAS for backup!

 

[L&LD]

If you're looking for fast quickbooks access, consider a 10Gbe NIC on both workstations, and sharing the database from one of them on an SSD. We run QB over 10Gbe (data files on a dedicated SSD in Windows Server 2012R2) and you'd think it would be crazy fast under that scenario, and it's not. I've carefully optimized the database and configured the clients as per QB recommendations for performance, but load times are still 6-10 seconds, and occasional lags still exist. The server is happy delivering out 800MB/s over the 10Gbe connection, so I'm pretty sure QB is simply not set up to be much of a rocketship where network access is concerned.

If it's only 2 PCs, then the power user should have the local SSD, and the 2nd user access over the network. Honestly, I'd try this first over 1Gbe.

Windows 8.1, 10 and Server 2012 all use MS SMB3 which is much more efficient for network speed, particularly 10Gbe. The 7 part blog series on 10Gbe I wrote can be found here: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tags/10GbE

Very interesting. Thank you!

I knew QuickBooks wasn't setup for speed (no accounting software is), but this puts things in further perspective.

This is why I recommended using hdd's instead of ssd's too in my post above. Over a network, not much difference between them.

 

[Dennis Wood]

Quickbooks doesn't recommend NAS for company data file storage, as I believe they prefer their database manager running to monitor the data file. We run the database manager on Server 2012. SSD drives are always going to be better IMHO, as their seek times are so much faster. Database look ups won't generally saturate a 1Gbe connection on a small QB installation, so the much faster seek times for SSD will make a difference. I generally use SSD drives wherever I can these days...we use a few in our 10GBe NAS for security capture and a few virtual machines.. along with 5x4TB drives for storage.

 

[sfx2000]

generally use SSD drives wherever I can these days...we use a few in our 10GBe NAS for security capture etc. along with 5x4TB drives for storage.

FWIW - When I was running data center apps, my Operations folk were pretty much against SSD's in production, but now that we have some numbers, they're no less reliable than spinning rust...

(these are the same folks that pushed back hard on virtualization - took a lot of effort there to convince them - never got the primary functions moved over, but at least I was able to move the management/OA&M stuff over to VMWare)

I'm in a better place now, lol...