Homelab storage upgrade

[Splash]

Ok, I'm looking to upgrade my homelab storage as the CPU in my Nexenta Microserver is just a tad underpowered, and I'm running into performance issues. Happy to build my own box (disks can be reused from the MS as they're only around 9 months old and haven't been heavily used) to run something like Nexenta on but I'm pretty tempted by the Synology + range (needs to have iSCSI or NFS, preferably both) due to their expansion boxes (I quite like the idea of being able to add another 5 or 10 spindles down the line, or possibly even an SSD array).

Budget is £850 max (again, I have the disks already) - I know there are some Synology and QNAP users here and would be keen to hear what you think of your units - are they hamstrung by the relatively small amount of RAM?

[DanceswithUnix]

Is this on an HP microserver? That already has more cpu than the ARM/Atom based nas boxes out there. I think to make any real impact over that would require quite a beefy quad core CPU upgrade. An FM2 Athlon II if you want cheap with low power usage, an AM3+ Asus board if ECC ram gives you a warm fuzzy feeling, Xeon if you really like spending money

What sort of performance problems are you having?

If you are not getting enough IO/sec then it might be you just don't have enough spindles for what you are trying to do.

[bytejunkie]

you've got good money to spend, you considered doing something daft like this?

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NetApp-FAS...item2ebb3efcd7

theres a shelf on there for another 117, to drop your disks in (maybe).

so its all about the price of the licenses...

[abaxas]

Before you spend money, find out exactly where the bottleneck is.

99.999999999999% of the time it is on writes (due to raid). So you'll need a proper raid controller with battery to fix that.

[bytejunkie]

anyone played with the drobo range at all? I've read up a little about them, but would like to hear opinions from users.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Drobo-DRDS...item3a7dfba4bc

[bytejunkie]

kev, buy this

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/8-Bay-Drob...item2a2edcc3de

[DanceswithUnix]

you've got good money to spend, you considered doing something daft like this?

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NetApp-FAS...item2ebb3efcd7

theres a shelf on there for another 117, to drop your disks in (maybe).

so its all about the price of the licenses...

And the noise!

anyone played with the drobo range at all? I've read up a little about them, but would like to hear opinions from users.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Drobo-DRDS...item3a7dfba4bc

£40 more than new from Ebuyer, another ebay fail

People seem to like their Drobo units, but again without understanding the performance problem we can't know if this would actually help.

[Splash]

Lul, a FAS3020 would be nice but the missus would definitely kill me. I'd not actually looked into hardware RAID as I thought I'd struggle to fit it in, but now that I've done some digging I think a P410 should fit, and there's a few on eBay at around the £100 mark - might well be worth a try at that price.

[bytejunkie]

And the noise!
People seem to like their Drobo units, but again without understanding the performance problem we can't know if this would actually help.

we dont need to understand the performance problem... kev does and he seems pretty settled on it being a cpu issue. he also has the money to make the change. so lets help him make the change.

good spot with the pricing though. i always forget to cross reference ebuyer!

[bytejunkie]

Lul, a FAS3020 would be nice but the missus would definitely kill me. I'd not actually looked into hardware RAID as I thought I'd struggle to fit it in, but now that I've done some digging I think a P410 should fit, and there's a few on eBay at around the £100 mark - might well be worth a try at that price.

cheap case, motherboard and a chip, bit of ram lying around, jobs a good un. but then you're still worrying about noise.

i've got a 2850 i cba to build in the office, you can have it if you wanna fill it with disks and run that?, but again, it'll probly be noisy.

Matt

[Splash]

I've plumped for a P410, if it doesn't help I should be able it shift it on for pretty much what I'm paying and I'll be no worse off. Bottleneck does rather seem to be writes rather than anything else (I'm comfortable that it's not network, there's a quad port Intel NIC setup as 2 LAGGs. Disk-wise there's 5 300Gb Velociraptors which are about as fast as I can go based on the form factor of the chassis - my logic on the CPU is that the raid is done in software the relatively lowend CPU is likely to be the bottleneck.

I'll need to switch the NIC out for a dual Intel variant in order to fit the P410 in, but that should still be plenty for a relatively small homelab (3 nodes)

And ta for the offer Matt, but again you're talking noise and heat generated from something like that just being too much for the tiny flat I live in. Until I move somewhere with a garage that I can put a rack in, at least...

[bytejunkie]

£40 more than new from Ebuyer, another ebay fail

think you might be looking at something different. im not seeing it on there for less money. twice the price actually.

[DanceswithUnix]

I've plumped for a P410, if it doesn't help I should be able it shift it on for pretty much what I'm paying and I'll be no worse off. Bottleneck does rather seem to be writes rather than anything else (I'm comfortable that it's not network, there's a quad port Intel NIC setup as 2 LAGGs. Disk-wise there's 5 300Gb Velociraptors which are about as fast as I can go based on the form factor of the chassis - my logic on the CPU is that the raid is done in software the relatively lowend CPU is likely to be the bottleneck.

I'll need to switch the NIC out for a dual Intel variant in order to fit the P410 in, but that should still be plenty for a relatively small homelab (3 nodes)

And ta for the offer Matt, but again you're talking noise and heat generated from something like that just being too much for the tiny flat I live in. Until I move somewhere with a garage that I can put a rack in, at least...

Why sell it on? If you end up getting more CPU grunt, you might still want the raid controller.

Only down side would be if your NAS software of choice is using Raid-Z as that seems to like direct access to the disk drives.

think you might be looking at something different. im not seeing it on there for less money. twice the price actually.

Perhaps, I just googled the model number and got a hit on EBuyer, perhaps there was some detail I missed. I was really trying to find what CPU/RAM configuration it had inside but gave up.

http://www.ebuyer.com/452085-drobo-d...FUNO4QodQGAA_w

[DanceswithUnix]

we dont need to understand the performance problem... kev does and he seems pretty settled on it being a cpu issue. he also has the money to make the change. so lets help him make the change.

good spot with the pricing though. i always forget to cross reference ebuyer!

You might (or might not) be surprised just how many people think their filer isn't powerful enough, when in fact their storage is the problem.

The budget would allow for 3x 500GB SSDs, for a 1TB SSD raid set, eliminating seek time and reducing noise, but making the CPU a bottleneck for sure.

OTOH a cheap quad core CPU should be enough to manage 5 spindles. Lets see:

£63 cpu http://www.scan.co.uk/products/amd-a...he-100w-retail
£68 motherboard with 7x6Gb/s sata ports and 4 memory sockets http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...hdmi-micro-atx
£56 8GB of ram http://www.scan.co.uk/products/8gb-%...nbuffered-cas-
£20 Cheap passive G210 graphics card http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1gb-e...ink-dvi-i-hdmi

So up to ~£207, still needing a case with plenty of drive bays and a PSU.

[Splash]

Just to confirm: putting in a P410 controller has mostly resolved the issue. I'm now getting pretty decent rates, though large writes to the Nexenta VM are still largely CPU bound (ie a vmotion). Once data is on the disk I'm pretty happy with the datastore performances (2 datastores now each comprising 4 spindles, with a small SSD for cache)

[Moby-Dick]

is the SSD for ZIL and L2ARC?