Moving from Xpenology. Looking for advice

[Johnfc]

Hi all,

I just found this web community and it looks great. A lot of useful information. However, I did not find any specific information about my issue. I hope you can give a hand, so here is my post.

I have been using Xpenology for a while, but as the project is practically abandoned, DSM6 is getting older and possibly vulnerable. Besides that, my home-lab test server (NAS) has been turning into my actual college and work data store server. I am now concerned about the potential data loss because of using this unofficial NAS OS.

The issue comes when trying to find an OS that offers a similar performance as DSM does. My current hardware configuration is an Intel 6700K CPU, 32GB RAM, LSI HBA 2308 controller, 6 x 3TB disks RAID6 + 2 x 250GB Mirror read/write cache, and a 10gb/s optical fibre network adapter. The actual performance when copying a file is about 1GB/s for the first 5GB, and about 400MB/s for the remaining data. I use this NAS for storing general home/office like data. So, from simple Word documents to 10GB video clips. No data bases or any other stuff that requires specific features.

I have already tried with TrueNAS, Ubuntu, Debian, Windows Server, FreeNAS, OpenMediaVault, and probably some other. However, and unfortunately, I haven't been able to get close to the copy speeds gotten with current DSM setup. With those systems, I used different packages and/or/of software-based RAID. I tried configuring the RAID Cache when possible, and also tried different RAID types. All results with inferior performance than DSM.

I hope some of you have tried configuring a similar setup and have good news. Thank you!

 

[Rand__]

I am quite surprised that XPEnology is the fastest of the lot... i mean I have not used it in ages to be honest, but Synology never registered as fast in my memory - o/c that might be caused by the fact that when I was using it it didn't have cache drives yet [that i remember]

So basically what your tests show is that as soon as the cache is full (weird its only 5G of the 250g you provided, maybe some massive overallocation) its writing with 400MB which sound like about 3 disks worth.

I have no clue re OMV (nor unraid), but for the other OSs there are a couple of options - pure software raid (mdadm, windows), hardware raid (you'd need to obtain) or a ZFS based system (where memory is being used as cache {faster}, but then the data is potentially written sequentially to a single drive {slower})

Software raid does not have caching at all, which is why its slow in comparison. You can run HW raid with a 1/2 (or even 4) GB cache size but then are down to whatever raid level you run too.

I never heard of an (ready made, not hardware related) OS that has a similar behavior as DSM (hybrid raid + cache), but I am sure you can build something in linux... but if thats what you want to do I don't know.

You also could just spend some money on an older Syno Model that you can replace your software implementation with?
Not sure if you want switch for free, or as cheap as possible, but your set of hardware that was working fine with DSM might not be suited to get the same performance on other SW....

/me personally would look again at FN/TNC/Napp-It, try to optimize memory there (run less extra services so you have more for cache) since thats where your data will be as safe as it can get - if data safety is now the #1. If speed is still the primary goal, then maybe not the ideal candidate (unless you spend some cash on different hw, eg for a ssd mirror or so).

 

[zer0sum]

What do you mean when you say "copying a file"?

Are you reading from the NAS to your PC?
Are you copying from your PC to the NAS?
Are you copying the file on the NAS to another folder?

I am surprised as well that XPEnology would beat all of those others if they are all configured with cache drives.
They do all use cache drives in different ways though, so you need to keep that in mind

 

[Johnfc]

I am quite surprised that XPEnology is the fastest of the lot........

Hi, thanks for responding.

I don't plan (and I wouldn't like) to spend more money on hardware. I am actually using my last's PC hardware for this, and I am pretty happy with this processor's performance.

Regarding an actual Synology hardware, I already got one and I don't consider the performance/cost balance affordable. A Synology's hardware performance comparable to the server(PC) I have right now would cost probably $$$ thousands. So cheap as possible applies.

I am not too skilled in Linux. I mean, I am not too skilled on terminals of any system, so a system with a GUI or a web-based GUI would be desirable.

 

[Johnfc]

What do you mean when you say "copying a file"?

Are you reading from the NAS to your PC?
Are you copying from your PC to the NAS?
Are you copying the file on the NAS to another folder?

I am surprised as well that XPEnology would beat all of those others if they are all configured with cache drives.
They do all use cache drives in different ways though, so you need to keep that in mind

Hi,

In my case, it means a yes for the three questions you made. Those are the usual things I do to/from my PC and NAS, and also to/from folders in the NAS.

This built-PC-based NAS is available on my 1Gb home network, and it's also directly connected to my desktop by a 10Gb NIC.