NAS Drives - 5400 rpm or 7200 rpm?

[TheBear]

Will I get more Ethernet throughput to my Asustor AS704T If I use 7200 rpm drives instead of 5400 rpm drives?

Also, any increased throughput for adding memory from 2 gb to 8 gb?

thanks

 

[pete y testing]

Will I get more Ethernet throughput

what throughput are you getting now ? as 117MB/s is pretty much the speed the gigaethernet will go at b4 capping out , if your not getting that from the Asustor to any single ethernet connected client now there is prob something wrong


prob best to explain what you are trying to achieve as ram will add capacity and faster hdd will give you faster read/write times but both are faster than the giga ethernet that any one client can download at anyway

 

[TheBear]

what throughput are you getting now ? as 117MB/s is pretty much the speed the gigaethernet will go at b4 capping out , if your not getting that from the Asustor to any single ethernet connected client now there is prob something wrong


prob best to explain what you are trying to achieve as ram will add capacity and faster hdd will give you faster read/write times but both are faster than the giga ethernet that any one client can download at anyway

Thanks for the quick reply.
I don't have the NAS at this time. I am debating whether to purchase a NAS device for my gigabit Ethernet network. Presently I have a WD mycloud NAS. I get about between 200 and 250 Mb/s on an uncompressed backup with Macrium Reflect. I am quoting uncompressed throughput to put the speed in perspective.
I am hoping to get much more with a 4 bay raid 5 NAS. The Asustec is just an option for conversation sake.
Mostly I will use it for backups of my PC's and some light audio streaming. However, I want to afford a solution that will speed up that backups as much as possible and still be cost effective.
Do you know what throughput I can expect from the asustek nas and how much increased memory or faster drives will affect the throughput.
I am rather a newbie at this.
thanks

 

[ColinTaylor]

You can't draw any conclusions just by saying 5400rpm vs. 7200rpm or 2GB vs. 8GB. There are too many other aspects that have much greater influence on speed. What processor does the NAS have? How efficient is the software? What is the speed of the disk interfaces? How are the disks configured? What is the native filesystem? What network filesystem are you using? Does the NAS exploit the full potential of the disks? etc., etc., etc. You get the idea.

At the end of the day you can't really predict overall performance just on an individual component. And small differences like RPM have little overall impact. The exception might be RAM, which won't help write performance but can help read performance if you are re-reading the same information more than once.

The best thing would be to read the reviews on SNB and base your decision on that.

 

[TheBear]

You can't draw any conclusions just by saying 5400rpm vs. 7200rpm or 2GB vs. 8GB. There are too many other aspects that have much greater influence on speed. What processor does the NAS have? How efficient is the software? What is the speed of the disk interfaces? How are the disks configured? What is the native filesystem? What network filesystem are you using? Does the NAS exploit the full potential of the disks? etc., etc., etc. You get the idea.

At the end of the day you can't really predict overall performance just on an individual component. And small differences like RPM have little overall impact. The exception might be RAM, which won't help write performance but can help read performance if you are re-reading the same information more than once.

The best thing would be to read the reviews on SNB and base you decision on that.

Thanks. I appreciate the input.

 

[thiggins]

Most any NAS today is limited by the bandwidth of a single Gigabit Ethernet connection. Unless you move to a 10GbE connection, you will not see throughput improvement by putting in higher performance hard drives. You would have to go to SSDs to see any appreciable difference. But capacity drops and price goes up and there is still that Gigabit port limitation.

This is why the NAS Charts top out around 110 MBytes/sec. 125 MBytes/sec is the most you can get from a Gigabit Ethernet connection. And this is for moving large files. Once you start moving folders of smaller files, throughput drops drastically due to the overhead of network file systems.

More RAM can help if you are serving multiple users with frequently accessed files. But a lot depends on how smart the OS is about caching.

 

[System Error Message]

when buying drives, the rotation speed doesnt dictate the drive speed as they've gone back to using many platters. The more platters a drive has the faster it is even if it a lower RPM (just look at todays WD blacks, arent they heavy and full of platters?).

The lower the rotation speed, the less power has to be consumed and the better the reliability (at higher RPMs, the velocities that the outer parts of the platter move at are insane)
The CPU and ram (drive cache) matter too. All drives have electronics to drive and and process commands.

When doing file servers with more drives, its better to use the lower rpm drives because of less vibrations which is very useful. The more restricted a drive is in mounting when experiencing vibrations, the slower it gets.

a fast computer CPU allows lots of small files to be transferred fast but if the software is also set to simultaneously send many files. Theoratically a gigabit ethernet tops out at 250MB/s if you include the fact that it is full duplex and you can cheaply chain multiple ports together for more bandwidth (go for static bonding here instead of LACP if you want a consistent use of bandwidth across multiple links for more bandwidth).