SoHo NAS With Good Network Throughput? 517
An anonymous reader writes "I work at a small business where we need to move around large datasets regularly (move onto test machine, test, move onto NAS for storage, move back to test machine, lather-rinse-repeat). The network is mostly OS X and Linux with one Windows machine (for compatibility testing). The size of our datasets is typically in the multiple GB, so network speed is as important as storage size. I'm looking for a preferably off-the shelf solution that can handle a significant portion of a GigE; maxing out at 6MB is useless. I've been looking at SoHo NAS's that support RAID such as Drobo, NetGear (formerly Infrant), and BuffaloTech (who unfortunately doesn't even list whether they support OS X). They all claim they come with a GigE interface, but what sort of network throughput can they really sustain? Most of the numbers I can find on the websites only talk about drive throughput, not network, so I'm hoping some of you with real-world experience can shed some light here."
Dlink DNS-323 (Score:3, Insightful)
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with DLINK other than I stock some of their goods
How automated is your testing? (Score:3, Insightful)
If your testing is highly automated, I can't help you as I don't have a lot of experience with high speed networking.
If your testing is reasonably manual, consider storing your data set on removable hard drives which are manually plugged into one computer, data is copied, then disconnected and moved to the other. A USB 2 interface will give you the most compatibility given the wide variety of hardware you're using, but perhaps there may even be hardware that does hot plugging E-SATA properly if you're willing to pay a premium.
Remember, for really high bandwidth physical media being shipped from one location to another is still a solution which should be considered.
Roll your own (Score:2, Insightful)
Your best performance is likely to come by rolling your own. Off the shelf SOHO devices are built for convenience, not throughput.
Grab a PC (need not be anything top-of-the-line), a good server NIC, a decent hardware RAID card (you can usually get a good price on a Dell PERC SATA RAID on ebay), and a few SATA hard drives. Install something like FreeNAS or NexentaStor (or, if you want to go all the way, FreeBSD or Linux and Samba).
Re:HP Media Vault may work out for you (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate to point this out, but 5G in 15 minutes is about 5 megabytes per second.
GigE peak theoretical throughput is like 125MB/s.
Consumer grade hard drives can average throughput in the 60MB/s range.
If this is the fastest NAS solution they tested and CNET is thrilled with their blazing 5MB/s sustained throughput to the NAS - I don't want one.
I'm going to have to suggest going with a cheapo 2.8GHz HyperThreaded P4 based 'server' w/ GigE, 1G of RAM and a few SATA drives on a RAID controller. Use whatever OS you're familiar with, set it up as shared space and get the bandwidth your application needs.
Re:SMB (Score:3, Insightful)
Well it looks like SMB is your best bet for compatibility.
OS X doesn't support NFS? Linux doesn't support AFP?
Besides which, don't the better NAS boxes support pretty much everything, all at once?
Re:Cmon people... (Score:5, Insightful)
If they have a windows machine for "compatability testing" and the rest of the units are Macs, you know damn well this guy couldn't "build his own"!
For what it's worth, I have worked in a place that almost exactly matches that description -- ton of macs, some leftover Windows PCs (rarely if ever used), and I ran Linux.
Everyone in that office could have built their own, if they had a reason to.
It is possible to actually like a Mac and not be technically illiterate / incapable of assembling a PC.
Never underestimate the bandwidth.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a guy carrying a bundle of removable hard drives around the office.
Or a station wagon loaded with hard drives.
Nothing can beat them.
Yes you want software RAID and lots of memory. (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, you dont want any RAID card, because it limits your upgrade and recovery options. Any modern CPU is not going to have any problems doing memcopy and XORing required for RAID.
You do want as much memory as you can afford, especially that memory is cheap now.
My little home server has 8GB of memory, it can sink huge write transfers very quickly. It uses 3 laptop SATA HDDs in RAID5 so it can take it's sweet time to write the data to HDD later because it effectively has 8GB disk cache.
OP: "off the shelf" (Score:5, Insightful)
See, the problem with responses like this is that they ignore the request of the original poster, and, while being valid instructions for a home-built, it is only a good solution if the time of the OP has zero value. Your instructions involve eight steps: Order (multiple) parts, wait for delivery, assemble, learn how and then install OS, learn now and install three other packages. The OP is looking for three steps: Order one thing, wait for delivery, plug in and use.
Your post has value to the DIY crowd, certainly. But for someone looking for a product recommendation, it totally missed the boat.
Re:DIY is Your Best Bet (Score:2, Insightful)
Stability is SUPERBE --- system has NEVER crashed --- only downtime is when the power goes out or I go on vacation.
Speed is satisfactory --- everyone seems happy with the network. It just works.
Compatibility is GREAT --- 1 Windows VISTA , 1 Windows XP, 3 MacOSX and 1 Ubuntu 8.04 machines all use it. (even my DD-WRT based router has a share on the server.)
Cost is ridiculously low --- I probably couldn't give the hardware away without paying someone to take it... it's that old.
I've been wanting to upgrade my server to something newer and sexier, (why?
Re:SMB (Score:2, Insightful)
Saying "Gigabit ethernet" means nothing. For instance, Intel SS4000-E comes with "dual gigabit ethernet ports". Wow. This must mean that it supports up to 2Gbps, right?
Wrong.
First, the two ports don't support link aggregation, they're independent. Second, instead of a real-world performance of about 50-70 MB/sec on a gigabit link, this unit gives you... wait for it... 5 to 10 MB/sec.
That's right, no typo there. Its CPU is so sleezy that that's all it can manage on small files. Large files get you up to 15MB/sec.
Re:NAS Charts (Score:1, Insightful)
This implies to me "make your own NAS" in answer to the original question. The top ones were 50MB/sec in general (the one showed 75MB writes but wasn't even up to 50 reads.. odd results indeed.) You can get pretty high read/write speeds to any recent disk. On a traditional PCI system, make sure the disk controller and gigabit are not on the same bus, gigabit's enough to max a PCI bus. I would balance these out for a PCI Express system as well but it shouldn't be as crucial. If you get a fast enough disk you should be able to max out a gigabit link, if the remote machine is fast enough to handle it.
Software? For ease of administration, I would either 1) Find some distro that just runs a NAS. 2) Put on Ubuntu, you go to some admin menu and turn on file sharing (samba) and file sharing (nfs). Not literally "out of box", but easy enough so you could screenshot every step and have literally anyone do it. This helps persuade people who want out-of-the-box but can't have it, that it won't take some awful voodoo just to recreate the box later.
Yes it will (well, crap SOHO cpu/network). (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, wrong.
This guy is talking about SOHO type NAS boxes, their cpu and network throughput is their bottleneck.
If he was talking about 'real' NAS, then that is very different (although it is still trivial to get a NAS that can saturate GBit for many workloads).
Our 16/32 drive Raid6 SATA raid arrays easily sustain 400MB/sec locally for moderately non-random workloads - there are workloads for which this of course does not apply, but since he is apparently moving around GByte lumps, it would not be his case.
SOHO NAS devices normally run out of grunt at around 6MB/secish, even for long linear reads, some do better at up to 25.
I am thinking your workload is TPC type database loads, dont assume everyones is (we have a mix of video files and software development, very different..). TPC type disk loads are a corner case.
We also love ATAOE but that is DEFINITELY not what he is looking for.
Re:To this whole chain of comments, I would like (Score:4, Insightful)
... to say that software RAID is almost invariably a poor solution. It is woefully slow compared to even a slow hardware RAID implementation.
Spend a few bucks and get the right hardware. It is not expensive these days.
This may have been true years ago, but it's not anymore. Modern CPUs can handle parity computations without a problem. As long as your controllers can support the throughput needed, there is no need for hardware RAID. After all, we have ZFS.
Storage is undergoing a massive paradigm shift and folks like EMC are being caught with their pants down. Their spindle cost and price per GB is just too high.
Re:To this whole chain of comments, I would like (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong. Go do your homework.
Re:Already been extensively discussed... (Score:4, Insightful)
What the hell? Is this the new quarterly NAS discussion?
Yes, I hope it is. Maybe not quarterly, but I have no problem "revisiting the classics" periodically. Technology marches on, best practices come and go, so it is useful to cover the same ground every so often. Seven years ago the coolest story ever was covered here: build a Terabyte fileserver for less than $5,000!!! [slashdot.org] (Note to visitors from the future: it is late 2008 and you can buy an external terabyte hard drive for a little over $100. Call it $125. That same five grand could buy you FORTY terabytes today. You probably got a 1TB USB jump drive in your cereal this morning.)
Plus, not everyone has been around as long as you and I. Won't somebody please think of the n00bs?!? :-)
Re:I just bought the 4t WD... check it out (Score:2, Insightful)
What misses in the specs is which processor is inside. I've got a MyBook World Edition that also has GigE, but the processor is so underpowered it barely reaches 10MB/s