OPTANE to improve RAID performance

[HDRony]

I would like to set up a NAS with 6x10TB HDD in a RAID 5 or 10 mode (not still quite sure of what to choose)

I have read that there is a rule of keep 1GB of RAM per disk TB, and I am wondering how I could use OPTANE to add some improvement in performance, if there are any, and avoid adding 60GB of RAM.

This RAID will store multimedia content to share with other devices and, because of the path that the data will follow (download from internet to a non-raid disk -> uncompressing then to the array) I thought I could add an OPTANE disk to use it as cache for the RAID.

So, what is the deal of the 1 GB of RAM per TB of disk capacity? Can I substitute it with Optane?

By the way, I pretend to use Windows 10 Pro for Workstations or a Server edition, which is better for my purpose? Can I use windows for a  NAS?

[Snipergod87]

Dont use RAID 5 only choices are between RAID 6 and 10 at that size.the 1GB of RAM per 1TB of capacity is more a of a thing for FreeNAS, if you are using Window than its handled differently.

I dont know if Optane can accelerate a RAID volume, and if using onboard (Intel RAID) RAID 6 is not an option.

 

You can use Windows Storage Spaces with the ReFS file system and setup mirrors/parity in Windows, and I believe you can add cache drives for storage spaces as well.  Not sure of Storages spaces ReFS support in the desktop environment but it is available in Server.

 

If you are going to use a NAS box like a Synology you could dump all the drives in there an use 2x SATA SSD's in RAID 1 for caching.

 

You should also look around as to what file system you want to use ReFS is nice due to prevention of Bitrot (BTRFS does this as well but for linux), FreeNAS's ZFS dones this as well, and offer some powerful dedup and compression settings.

 

UnRAID is another option if you want to look at that route as well, in general performance on UnRAID is pretty bad unless you use caching SSD's (again you will want 2 but can use only 1)  UnRAID handles parity differently than typical RAID configurations.

[HDRony]

I pretend to use the same case as workstation and NAS all together, so HDDs will go to the 6 SATA ports of the mother board ( any with z360 or similar) and use the intel raid controller for the nas, and set up another raid for two nvme m.2 disks as normal O.S., games, photo editing etc 

 

could add any benefit using windows instead of intel for my purpose?

I’m looking for reliability, performance and, in case of system failure, migrate my sata raid to a new pc.

[Helly]

unless you migrate the array to a motherboard with the same chipset it won't work and you will have lost the entire array. If you want to be able to do that you'll need a raid card.

[HDRony]

4 hours ago, Helly said:

unless you migrate the array to a motherboard with the same chipset it won't work and you will have lost the entire array. If you want to be able to do that you'll need a raid card.

As far I know, if I maintain a intel chipset, with the same raid mode, it would work, wouldn´t it? I don't have a practical experience, just theoretical.

[jde3]

I don't get the point. How is this faster than ram?

 

ZFS's ARC is extremely good at figuring out what needs to be in cache and it already supports L2 ARC on SSD or M.2 - I don't really see how Optane helps.

[Electronics Wizardy]

On 6/11/2018 at 4:36 PM, HDRony said:

have read that there is a rule of keep 1GB of RAM per disk TB

Thats mostly bs and greatly depends on your use. For a home media server, you can get away with much less.

 

On 6/11/2018 at 4:36 PM, HDRony said:

I am wondering how I could use OPTANE to add some improvement in performance,

Most storage and raid solutions have a ssd cache option. Id use a stanard ssd here, not optante as the extra speed really won't help you. The space is better.

 

On 6/11/2018 at 4:36 PM, HDRony said:

By the way, I pretend to use Windows 10 Pro for Workstations or a Server edition

Then you probably want storage spaces. They have a ssd tiering option, so just make a ssd your fast tier and it will be faster, but for home media use you really don't need a ssd at all.

 

17 hours ago, HDRony said:

intel raid controller for the nas

Don't use the motherboard raid, use software raid here unless you have a hardware card.

 

 

[HDRony]

17 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Then you probably want storage spaces. They have a ssd tiering option, so just make a ssd your fast tier and it will be faster, but for home media use you really don't need a ssd at all.

In fact, I'm trying to improve the performance of the raid because at certain point, I have to unrar the downloaded content to the raid array. Decompress the content to the same disk the data is located can be a bottleneck.

 

So I'l work on a M.2 NVMe disk to download (the same unit i will use for everything else such as OS, gaming, photo editing...) and then decompress to the raid unit, and I want to reduce the performance difference between the NVMe and the RAID. This is the reason I was thinking about Optane, but using SSD as you recomend can be a great option too, but a little bit more expensive, or maybe I could go for a bigger NVMe and use a partition exclusively for caching.

 

Anyway, I think the info you guys gave me is really helpfull and I'm going to start choosing hardware. Once it is done and the system running, I guess I will need more help about configuring windows 10 server, you have mentioned some words they scared me

 

thank you again, I will continue soon.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, HDRony said:

In fact, I'm trying to improve the performance of the raid because at certain point, I have to unrar the downloaded content to the raid array. Decompress the content to the same disk the data is located can be a bottleneck.

 

So I'l work on a M.2 NVMe disk to download (the same unit i will use for everything else such as OS, gaming, photo editing...) and then decompress to the raid unit, and I want to reduce the performance difference between the NVMe and the RAID. This is the reason I was thinking about Optane, but using SSD as you recomend can be a great option too, but a little bit more expensive, or maybe I could go for a bigger NVMe and use a partition exclusively for caching.

 

Anyway, I think the info you guys gave me is really helpfull and I'm going to start choosing hardware. Once it is done and the system running, I guess I will need more help about configuring windows 10 server, you have mentioned some words they scared me

 

thank you again, I will continue soon.

you don't need the iops of optane, go get a bigger ssd With storage spaces tiering you can add a 500gb or 1tb drive as a fast tier and it will make the writes that speed and move files to the hdd later.

 

Can't use partitions in storage spaces for caching.

 

 

[Mikensan]

6 disks in just a Raid 5 is going to net you... 400-500mbyte/s and maybe 120ish IOPS? Raid 10 should easily hit 300mbyte/s but triple the IOPS compared to raid 5 with 6 disks. For home use Raid 5 is fine - just backup stuff. At home you have all the time in the world to recover.

 

In either scenario - it's going to be fine for decompressing files. Decompression is going to be slow on any disk, SSD or Mechanical... Hard on IOPS and hard on the CPU depending on the algorithm used.

 

I wouldn't buy the optane unless you are going to be doing 4k r/w or doing sync. writes all day. Something like a SQL Server would benefit or a Hypervisor datastore would see the benefits. A normal NAND / NVMe SSD would be good a cache disk - but I don't think it works the way you're thinking.

 

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This is the reason I was thinking about Optane, but using SSD as you recomend can be a great option too, but a little bit more expensive

Optane is actually more expensive than NVMe, not quite sure what you mean by more expensive.