Toying around with the Lenovo M600 tiny as a NAS

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Feb 21, 2022
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I was kinda bored and wanted to build an abnormal config for a Truenas box. I didn't have the right parts on hand so I just slapped something together with what I had. Currently it has a Pentium N3700, 8GB DDR3, 480GB Intel SSD, and a flash drive for the boot drive. I wanted to throw in an NVME drive in the M.2 slot, but it only has support for SATA M.2 drives sadly. I think the ideal config would be a small SSD in the M.2 slot for booting and get a cheap 4TB SSD assuming the unit would support one that big.

One issue I ran into was the unit would have problems with large transfers over a long duration of time. When trying to transfer 16GB of files starting towards the middle of the transfer it would randomly dip from the 100MB/s down to as low as 9MB/s. I haven't been able to figure out why though. I thought it was thermal throttling so I tried turning the fan around. I tried disabling speed stepping. I tried disabling compression on the dataset. I might try finding a compatible M.2 drive to install Turenas on to see if that matters.

Overall it exceeded my expectations. I was shocked that it only drew 8-12W from the wall. I wasn't sure if it could saturate gigabit, but it did just fine. The cost to build one of these out compared to a prebuilt NAS with spinners is bad. It has inspired me to try building a more powerful model of tiny to try something even more abnormal though.

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BoredSysadmin

Not affiliated with Maxell
Mar 2, 2019
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My humble (I'm not a ZFS expert) but once you saturate S3500 (small) SLC buffer, the speed is expected to drop. According to this review:
Intel SSD DC S3500 Enterprise Review more specifically this chart:


S3500 SSD at 4k 100% write gets about 12.5k IOPS, which is about 51MB/s. Falling lower than that could be down to anything else from incorrect truenas tunables, CPU, or NIC driver/settings.
Turn off zfs SYNC if you want to experiment to somewhat remove the small SLC limit
 
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Feb 21, 2022
32
4
8
Feb 21, 2022
32
4
8
My humble (I'm not a ZFS expert) but once you saturate S3500 (small) SLC buffer, the speed is expected to drop. According to this review:
Intel SSD DC S3500 Enterprise Review more specifically this chart:


S3400 SSD at 4k 100% write gets about 12.5k IOPS, which is about 51MB/s. Falling lower than that could be down to anything else from incorrect truenas tunables, CPU, or NIC driver/settings.
Turn off zfs SYNC if you want to experiment to somewhat remove the small SLC limit
Thanks for the tip I will give it a shot. You are more of an expert than me. ;) I found a compatible M.2 drive from a thinclient I am going to try as a proper boot drive. I may borrow a 1TB 870 EVO to try instead of the S3500. I wish I was doing more than tinkering for the fun of it. I wonder how a 4TB Crucial MX500 would do, but don't want to spend $385 just for funsies.
 
Feb 21, 2022
32
4
8
So figured out the issue. The generic SSD in my laptop was the bottleneck :rolleyes: Used a faster laptop with NVME and it didn't randomly dip in speed. I was able to put everything back to stock settings. My next idea is to try putting a 3.5" drive in it. That will require me to remove the motherboard and run it open air though.
 
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