Is there any cheap SSD suitable for a NAS?

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Octopuss

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That's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure I'd want to go that way since I already have TrueNAS set up and running and spent money on the HBA.
NVMe would be great, but unfortunately there are no free slots.
I wish I decided to build the server at least a year later; motherboards would be a little more evolved then, I think. I have Supermicro X11SHC-F, and it only has two PCIe slots. One is occupied by the network card and the other by the HBA. Both M.2 slots are used by the system itself. One is where the VMs are stored and the other will soon have a small SSD where ESXi will be installed (currently running off USB stick which I don't like).
 

Octopuss

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I've been going through ebay, random reviews etc. for the past two hours, and it seems like SSDs are just not doable within any reasonable price range.
The 2TB ones are still pretty expensive, and the resulting capacity would be half of that I currently have with HDDs.
The other option could be to buy more 1TB ones, but I'd need five of those instead of three to get to approximately/slightly under 4TB worth of storage, and the price would likely be higher anyway, so it's not a solution either.

I guess I will start searching for noise levels of SAS disks just to get an idea.
Speaking of SAS, does the full duplex vs SATA's half duplex make any significant difference in performance?
 

ReturnedSword

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My two NAS use Red and Red Pro, and I can confirm that they are indeed chattering loud when the heads are hammering away. But there’s no other way of having a large amount of storage for a reasonable price. I can never get enough storage. The bigger NAS is in my garage so it doesn’t bother me much, but the smaller one can wake me up if I fall asleep in the office.

Your total usable storage requirement as of the moment isn’t that high so you may make due. Even used flash will incur a much higher cost through. Have you thought about something like a used Synology FS1018? It’s their all flash model. It was discontinued last year, and people seem to be hanging onto theirs for dear life, though you can find them slightly used here and there on eBay.
 

itronin

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Nov 24, 2018
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Speaking of SAS, does the full duplex vs SATA's half duplex make any significant difference in performance?
Do you think it will make a difference to your use case(s)? If so I'd say have at it. If streaming is your primary objective then maybe if you are serving up an awful lot of concurrent streams from multiple producers to many many consumers. IMO High quality used SAS drives seem to be less expensive than used High Quality SATA drives.

I'm not saying you are, but sometimes folks also talk full duplex but mean dual ported. for the latter I'm not sure chasing a dual ported configuration will do much for you other than rabbit hole.

Not clear to me whether you are looking at 2.5" or 3.5" spinners now. Given your current drives I'm thinking 3.5" but I'll put a word of caution around some of the very inexpensive 2.5" spinners (600-1.92TB)... some of these are coming off Vantara storage arrays and are not being properly off-boarded. You will bang your head against the wall if you buy those (as many of us already have).
 

Octopuss

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Do you think it will make a difference to your use case(s)?
I have no idea! I never had to think about storage from this perspective, and I know nothing about SAS stuff besides it's server technology.

Vast majority of the NAS really is just a big pile of torrents that are being seeded. The rest is various installation ISOs that are pointless to keep on my PC, and the last bit are the daily backups of three PCs. That's it.
There can be lots of random reads depending how active the seedbox (different VM obviously) is, but the writes are in the minority, and when there are any, it's typically hundreds of MBs to tens of GBs (low tens, and not very common occurence anyway since I am not a hoarder anymore and I've seen all the stuff that's sitting on the NAS anyway) sequential ones.

No idea what dual ported means in this context, but my only understanding of full duplex is data moving simultaneously in both directions. Half duplex just sounds like a significant limit from logic standpoint (and my extremely limited knowledge).

I am definitely not looking at 2,5" drives since that's notebook stuff in my mind, with all the limitations. Good question anyway.
 

itronin

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I have no idea! I never had to think about storage from this perspective, and I know nothing about SAS stuff besides it's server technology.
@Sean Ho has already been by in your thread. The folks (@JDMWAAAT ) have a nice set of resources that you may want to take a gander at if you have not already been there.

You have probably also visited things TrueNAS but if you have not then you might take a look.
Vast majority of the NAS really is just a big pile of torrents that are being seeded. The rest is various installation ISOs that are pointless to keep on my PC, and the last bit are the daily backups of three PCs. That's it.
There can be lots of random reads depending how active the seedbox (different VM obviously) is, but the writes are in the minority, and when there are any, it's typically hundreds of MBs to tens of GBs (low tens, and not very common occurence anyway since I am not a hoarder anymore and I've seen all the stuff that's sitting on the NAS anyway) sequential ones.
Sounds like for the most part your IOPS are going to be limited by the external ingress/egress speeds to your LAN, so think about worst case with your local streaming, file serving load and what's headed out (or in).


No idea what dual ported means in this context, but my only understanding of full duplex is data moving simultaneously in both directions. Half duplex just sounds like a significant limit from logic standpoint (and my extremely limited knowledge).

I am definitely not looking at 2,5" drives since that's notebook stuff in my mind, with all the limitations. Good question anyway.
half duplex can be very limiting if your IO (IOPS) is very demanding. See above for thoughts about basics to look at. My guess, is that SATA is fine.
 

Octopuss

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My guess, is that SATA is fine.
Most probably. But at the same time, there is endless supply of SAS disks on Ebay, and with some luck and caution (like always demanding S.M.A.R.T. stats, avoiding disks with production date further than five years ago...) I can get stuff in perfectly good condition that cost half as much as new SATA, but with theoretically better stats. If I understand correctly, SAS drives should have a lot higher longevity than SATA.
And if something fails, the financial damage would be really small. I can also buy like two extras initially to have a reserve at hand, whereas if I RMA a disk under warranty, it would take up to a month before I get a new one. Yes, I don't keep a spare currently, which is probably a bad idea :D
 

itronin

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Most probably. But at the same time, there is endless supply of SAS disks on Ebay, and with some luck and caution (like always demanding S.M.A.R.T. stats, avoiding disks with production date further than five years ago...)
You can demand. Might piss the seller off, might annoy them, in the case of OBO you'll probably lose out. STATS are nice but this is my advice:
DONT'T TRUST THE STATS. Test your drives (whether new, used, been in use by your trusted friend) by running multiple passes of "badblocks". Use @BLinux's script if you want it nice/easy and handy dandy.

If you already know this or its common sense don't read further.

If you aren't familiar with BB you can find it here in this forum, TrueNAS forum, other places too. Do that as soon as you get the drives. Return any that fail. If eBay make sure you test immediately to return them in the seller's return window. Don't trust the STATS. Buy from sellers that have "friendly" returns. Use your common sense and judgetment about rese

I can get stuff in perfectly good condition that cost half as much as new SATA, but with theoretically better stats. If I understand correctly, SAS drives should have a lot higher longevity than SATA.
And if something fails, the financial damage would be really small. I can also buy like two extras initially to have a reserve at hand, whereas if I RMA a disk under warranty, it would take up to a month before I get a new one. Yes, I don't keep a spare currently, which is probably a bad idea :D
I think folks here are divided about shelf spares. I do it, even with SSDs.
If you shelf spare then IMO you should test a shelf spare the same as drive you are deploying and concurrently.
Read up on bathtub curve failures.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I'm off to family things.
 
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Octopuss

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After some more searching, it seems like I should prefer to look for 4kn drives, but these seem to sell for a LOT more than the rest, so maybe I will have to give this idea another thought.

If you aren't familiar with BB you can find it here in this forum
I'm just looking at it. But how do I run that when the only HBA is in the server, and configured as passthrough device for TrueNAS, with other disks already connected to it?
 

Octopuss

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I found one seller with 4kn 4TB HGST Ultrastar 7K6000s in packs of five for $200. That's an awesome price and would give me two spares at the same time.
It's in the U.S. so returns are mostly out of question from logistics standpoint, but it seems like a good source, because the seller accepts returns and even pays for the shipping back, which is reassuring.
I'm tempted...
 

Octopuss

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I found one seller with 4kn 4TB HGST Ultrastar 7K6000s in packs of five for $200. That's an awesome price and would give me two spares at the same time.
It's in the U.S. so returns are mostly out of question from logistics standpoint, but it seems like a good source, because the seller accepts returns and even pays for the shipping back, which is reassuring.
I'm tempted...
Ok so these disks have 440-ish hours on the record. Supposedly manufactured in late 2016.
That's roughly 10000 hours. Considering the basic Reds I have have up to 25000 and show no signs of age, I guess these should last much longer than that, right?...

Would you grab them for this price? It comes to $40 per piece.