Server 2022 vs Win 11 for Workstations SMB performance

[beaker7]

I am currently using various pre-built NAS from QNAP and Synology in my home studio. I need a capacity upgrade and have access to various spare parts that I could turn into a server. Plenty of build experience so that is not a concern. This will be for high speed networking serving video editing workflows over 25GbE+

With Synology's move towards mandating their own drives they are obviously off the table.

I am considering larger QNAP vs built TrueNAS vs built Windows box.

My question is - on the windows side, is there a difference in performance purely from the SMB file serving side of things? I would be below the ~10? concurrent connection limit on Windows Client.

I know ReFS is available in 11 Workstation now too.

Have been happy with QNAP overall but their largest desktop-ish chassis holds 12x 3.5 and I'm looking for more, without getting into loud/hot rack mount gear.

 

[oneplane]

Get ZFS or BTRFS. ReFS is a joke, and so is Windows in most network contexts. As for Synology and their "we now sell drives" trick, it doesn't mean much, they just keep lists of 'certified' stuff, but that doesn't prevent any other drive from working. The difference between you building a system and plugging in some drives without anyone telling you it is or isn't "certified" and Synology doing the same is: none.

As for loud/hot: that's generally a factor of the drives, not of the chassis standards ;-) So if you put a bunch of drives close together they will generate plenty of heat and make plenty of noise on their own. You'll probably want some cooling as well, and fans make noise too.

What you could do is get a bunch of drive cages and 140mm fans and use that as physical mounting, but you'd still need HBAs and a PC to control it, and at that point you're basically building a server that might as well sit in a rack. Alternatively you could go the disk shelf route, this allows for more expansion but takes up space as well. Most consumer NAS manufacturers have them in desktop format, but everyone who makes them will definitely have racked versions. The bigger ones store the drives vertically in 4U height so you can pack around 60 drives in a single box. Of course that will mean more cooling, more vibration, more noise etc...

If you have a lot of available space, you can save on the noise by having multiple small disk 'pods' with 6-10 disks, and SAS expanders, because due to the low individual density you can use large low-RPM fans to cool the drives. But even then, if you have a lot of those you will still need to get the heat away from them. Even in a large-ish room that is a noticeable temperature difference.

Perhaps the best way forward is to give some information as to your usage (large streaming data sets? backups? archival? accessing individual files every now and then?), and growth expectations (swap individual drives vs. adding entire sets for example, but also hot spares and mirroring/parity counts). If you just want to store a few TB and mirror your data and never do major upgrades in-place (but rather transfer over to a full replacement) you could even go with windows and storage spaces. But that almost never works as well as something like TrueNAS or TrueNAS Scale or even Proxmox built-in storage manager.

 

[CyklonDX]

as above I would recommend ZFS (not even BTRFS)
(~ QNAP is fine, just won't have much ability to do stuff with it)

With ZFS you can have your slow SAS HDD's (4kn ones), add nvme as L2ARC cache, and lot of ram for cache.
In result you can have plenty of storage like 12x12TB giving you 144TB of space, 1-2 enterprise NVMe's with high endurance 1.6-1.9TB, and 256GB of ram giving you smooth write of around 8GB/s for up to 1TB at the time.
(I would recommend 2x e5-2690v4's as cheap cpu's more disks, devices, more threads are going to help)
You will also need to work out networking and potentially map threads to get full utilization of your nic/s.

In terms of chassis well all chassis i can recommend for business are going to be loud, and meant for rack. Unless you do jbod and are fine with 'homelab' quality - as in removing 2 psu's and velcro mounting normal atx psu inside; and replacing fans for noctua ones.