NAS Benchmarking

[Cleston]

Good morning (or evening depending), 

 

I am trying to plan a NAS - mostly for media streaming but also for backing up data, and I was wondering if there are any benchmarks for NAS use cases? For example, if I want to store and stream media is there a way to gage what kind of performance to expect with a given CPU and RAM combo. How do onboard graphics compare to an older GPU. Is benchmarking like this even a thing that makes sense? I have been trying to find a tool to understand the performance I can expect with certain configurations, but I have not been able to find anything so far. 

 

Thanks!

[ToboRobot]

Nothing like this currently exists.

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

What speed network are you working with? Unless your working with >10gbe basically any modern cpu will be fine.

 

For gpu do you need to do media transcoding? If not the gpu won't matter at all, if you do basically any modern gpu with hardware encoding will work fine.

 

You really don't need much cpu power for a nas.

[LIGISTX]

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What speed network are you working with? Unless your working with >10gbe basically any modern cpu will be fine.

 

For gpu do you need to do media transcoding? If not the gpu won't matter at all, if you do basically any modern gpu with hardware encoding will work fine.

 

You really don't need much cpu power for a nas.

This

[m9x3mos]

27 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

This

Depends really on how the setup will be used. On my nas I run plex on a windows vm on the machine so I can also run hand brake on it. 

If running local vms it can access at 10gb speeds. You can benchmark the storage access locally to the nas to check disk throughput but that depends on what platform is being used. Linus and his team have done that with a number of the projects they used crazy nas builds with. 

[LIGISTX]

5 minutes ago, m9x3mos said:

Depends really on how the setup will be used. On my nas I run plex on a windows vm on the machine so I can also run hand brake on it. 

If running local vms it can access at 10gb speeds. You can benchmark the storage access locally to the nas to check disk throughput but that depends on what platform is being used. Linus and his team have done that with a number of the projects they used crazy nas builds with. 

Sure, all of my VM’s have virtual 10gigabit+ NIC’s, but for home media server use, the harddrive array speed really isn’t much of a concern.

 

There are few “media and backup” workloads, if any at all, that would require anything beyond gigabit. Seeing as your networking backbone is more or less always the bottleneck, especially for home use, the rest of the system is not much of a concern.

 

I ran my homelab on an i3 6100 for YEARS, that’s 4 total threads… and under ESXi I had multiple Ubuntu server VM’s, truenas, windows LTSC, home assistant, and some docker containers. Everything was perfectly happy, and my performance was above what I needed for gigabit physical networking anyways. Also something to remember, the harddrives in the NAS array are going to be your next bottleneck. So even if you do throw money at unneeded CPU power… and you did have a workload that for some reason actually needed to access the array at higher then gigabit speed, now your harddrives will be the bottleneck. 
 

All of this to say, for the simple home use case of media streaming, backup of PC’s, some download and upload streams, you can use just about any CPU that has 4+ threads that has come out since either the core 2000 series on Intel, or Zen 1 on AMD. Would it make more sense to try and find something like a i5 4400, i3 7100 or something as opposed to going back to 2000 series, sure. But the point is more just “you really don’t need to worry much about CPU speed for this workload”. Once you do need to worry about CPU performance and start running into limitations on networking, RAM, array speed, or CPU speed, you will know it, and you will likely have a better understanding if your use case and workload, have learned more about “homelabing”, and can then iterate on your deployment(s) and address the issues you face.

 

TLDR; OP, don’t worry much about CPU performance. Any CPU made in the last 7-8 years will be fine, and use 16GB of RAM. Intel CPU’s are typically a better option since you can use their iGPU more easily for things like transcoding, although ideally you don’t want to transcode anyways since it reduces quality. Transcode should be used only when your streaming remotely and your internet upload speed can’t keep up. 

[Cleston]

Thank you everyone!

[Bersella AI]

Although no benchmarking software intended for NAS exists, there are actually plenty of workarounds indicating performance in specific scenarios. For example:

• Processors can be compared using scores from PassMark (or others);
• Actual throughput performance can be touched by copying large files;
• Transcoding performance (with or without GPU) can be tested using Jellyfin and a browser, which can show transcoding frame-rates when playing a movie from Jellyfin.