High Bandwidth Home NAS

[coxhaus]

Does anybody own a consumer or home based NAS which will saturate gigE? What model is it and how is it configured?

 

[PrivateJoker]

Here are Synology's performance tests. With a 2-bay 713+ model in RAID 1 they come close to saturating GigE w/ a massive file size. Also it's interesting in the footnotes they specify the use of MTU 1500 setting in their tests.

http://www.synology.com/products/performance.php#tabs-2

I have a 212+ in SHR mode (far from the highest performing model line) that can maybe hit half or a little better of that speed on large file transfers over the LAN.

 

[stevech]

Need a destination other than a PC or some such, so that the slowness of the destination file system and disk don't constrain the throughput.

Or make the destination /dev/null or the windows equivalent.

 

[PrivateJoker]

Need a destination other than a PC or some such, so that the slowness of the destination file system and disk don't constrain the throughput.

Or make the destination /dev/null or the windows equivalent.

That's a good point, the Synology #s I linked to above mention in the footnotes the following PC specs in their tests: "For All Testings: Intel Core i5 750 2.67GHz; 4GB DDRIII; SVP200S3 (60GB) SSD x 2, RAID 0 ; Intel Gigabit CT; MTU 1500; Windows 7; Transfering single 10GB file (For Link Aggregation); Ubuntu 9.10; Apache v.2.2.12 (Web Server Responsiveness Testing)" (* I didn't quote their link aggregation #s, but they are on that page).

They are not insane over the top specs, but even 2 x consumer grade Kingston SSDs in a RAID 0 configuration is going to be pretty quick, even using a M/B's built in RAID. And that's a pretty everyday $35 PCI-E NIC.

 

[coxhaus]

Whatever it takes to saturate the gigE. I am trying to focus on the NAS not so much the clients.

My server takes 3 or 4 beefy client PCs not laptops to max it out.

SSDs are definitely going to change things.

 

[PrivateJoker]

Whatever it takes to saturate the gigE. I am trying to focus on the NAS not so much the clients.

My server takes 3 or 4 beefy client PCs not laptops to max it out.

SSDs are definitely going to change things.

Playing around on my own LAN last night, hitting my NAS w/ clients that had SSDs had it huffing and puffing more than mechanical spinning drives, so some of the NAS performance does actually focus on what's attached to it. In the Synology tests w/ link aggregation on the NAS they were getting 200 MB/s sustained reads on a 5GB file (on a NAS with spinning drives). So I think you'd need LACP and multiple clients w/ SSDs doing big transfers to come close to wringing out all the theoretical bandwidth of 2xGbe (250 MB/s theoretical?).

I'm just extrapolating my scaled down observations and making some inferences, so maybe there are others with more first hand raw #s. But I'd be glad to share some of my performance monitor screenshots if it'd help.