Creating all-SSD NAS and syncing with upstream remote NAS

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ullbeking

Active Member
Jul 28, 2017
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Hello all,

I would like some advice regarding construction of a "home node" NAS. The motivation is to have a NAS at home, as quiet as possible. The clunking and whirring of spinning drives on my current NAS is very annoying.

I am thinking of one, or a combination of, of the following solutions:
  • all-SSD NAS
  • NFS's fs-cache using SSD's (although I'm thinking of changing to CIFS/SMB due to many strong recommendations by helpful users in these forums)
  • rack-mounted chassis would be ideal if possible and acoustically friendly; I have a few other rack-mountable chassis that I use for different purposes. They are very quiet and have no moving parts.
Currently I have a U-NAS 800 with 4x 8 TB WD Red HDD's configured as one RAIDZ2 ZFS vdev, and that is the entire pool so far. I plan on creating another pool, also with 4x 8 TB WD Red HDD's. I will do further experiments, and I foresee several options
  • keeping two vdevs, each as its own pool
  • recreate the NAS as a single pool
In either case, this core NAS is working OK so far. This is the one that I currently have at home, which is working fine, and annoying me with the typical sounds of spinning HDD's. Therefore I want to move it to a remote upstream location.

I'm thinking of getting 4x Samsung PM983 4 TB NVMe SSD's so that I have a lot of storage at home. The point is that we need to be able to throw data at the NAS without having to worry (too much) that we'll fill it up soon. I would configure these into a RAIDZ2 pool or RAID10 pool in ZFS.

The idea is to regularly synchronize this mini-NAS with the upstream, remote, bulk NAS over the network. The would happen by using the ZFS send/recv, or NFS fs-cache.

For completeness I also have the following:
  • 5x Intel (Oracle) 1.6 TB NVMe 2.5" SSD's
  • 4x Samsung PM953 1.92 TB NVMe 2.5" SSD's
  • About 12-16x Intel 400 GB SATA 2.5" SSD's
However, I do want to keep some large SSD's (4x) for a workstation I have recently been starting to use. These 4x SSD's will be mounted locally in that workstation and used for local work (they won't serve files to the network).

In fact, I was thinking that I could even build two mini-NAS'es (in the same chassis) for home use, using two sets of 4x SSD's.

The SC116 and SC216 series appeal to me, and my idea is to use one of these plus one (or two) AOC cards: AOC-SLG3-4E2P | Add-on Cards | Accessories | Products - Super Micro Computer, Inc. .

I have been told that the slightly older SC216 chassis can be got for quite cheap. The main issue with the SC116, that I can see so far, is that it only allows for one expansion card.

As you can see, I do like Supermicro hardware. But now I'm also wondering if some other combination of chassis might be appropriate.

Any help or considering would be greatly appreciated. (I've got other questions regardig some SAS drives that I have but I think it's best to keep things focused on the immediate problem for now.)

Please let me know what you think! Have I missed anything crucial? Thank you!!

Kind regards,

@ullbeking
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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Hi, your post kind of throws a lot of information around and a lot of 'could do this' 'maybe this'... unsure what we're supposed to reply to \ help out with?

maybe you can narrow down your requirements \ questions to be a bit more specific?
 

ullbeking

Active Member
Jul 28, 2017
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Hey @T_Minus, thanks for that useful feedback, seriously.

You see, when I was originally trying to explain what I am trying to do to, folks were getting VERY confused. So this message is actually a distillation and a more concise versions of what I originally had.

So this is helpful information from you because it means that I'm still far from properly specifying what I am trying to do. It's clear in my head and in my intended workflow, but obviously:
  1. I'm still explaining it very badly; and/or
  2. What I'm trying to do is really weird that trying to explain it is inevitably going to be difficult.
I'll work on my proposal some more and update it. This is a very good exercise because I bet that by the time I'm able to explain it properly, I will have rubber ducked my self into a solution. Thanks again!!
 
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EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
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(Not trying to bring this one back from hibernation just yet if it's still up in the air but thought I'd add my £0.02 from what I did see)

Is the noise of the hard drives really such an issue...? I've got a bunch of the 10TB WD Reds in use and they certainly don't clunk very much... even when seeking they're barely audible over the noise of the (admittedly not very quiet) 80mm fans in my MS08.

I've got an NSC-800 full of Toshiba 6TB N300s and that's quieter still, although the seek noise is audible during high random IO (RAID syncs, etc).

Is it possible you've just got a duff drive or two? How much silence are you looking for? Going all-SSD is certainly not going to be cheap; over the years I've kitted out my workstation to be all-SSD (about 8TB in all, no RAID) but I'd certainly need a few swigs of whisky before splurging on an all-SSD NAS...
 

ullbeking

Active Member
Jul 28, 2017
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Got money then something passive from somebody like these guys could work. Have to still use low power drives etc to keep heat to minimum be that spinning disks or ssd

A-Tech Fabrication - World's Finest High-Performance Silent Computers

Lots of others but these guys have some options with more than just a couple of disks.
Never used then just dreamed :)
Whoa, now these look seriously cool... I wonder if they really hold up in practice, or if they stress the drives...

I'm wondering, for example, about this: Mass Storage 2500

It's a DAS/JBOD that holds 4x 3.5" or 8x 2.5" disks. If I had that I would want to put 8x 2.5" NVMe U.2 SSD's in there and then connect to it from another controller (for example). But NVMe SSD's get quite hot, don't they? Is this going to be enough to stop 8x NVMe SSD's from overheating?
 

Evan

Well-Known Member
Jan 6, 2016
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Heard and read they do a good job but think lower power red drives when using 3.5” or sata ssd.

Some enterprise NVMe ssd are crazy hot I would think simply no chance for enterprise models. Some Samsung retail models would probably be fine.