TVS-682T Qtier Setup

[q-nappy-pappy]

I am a professional wedding photographer working with very large raw files (.RAF Fujifilm GFX and .NEF Nikon D800) as well as big photoshop files. I looked into the TVS-682T as a versatile solution to directly connect for RAID 1 storage and have the ability to network it so I can access my files away from my office.

My plan for my set-up is to use the TVS-682T as a DAS via Thunderbolt 2 initially to consolidate my massive Adobe Bridge library and free up disk space on my Mac for better performance. Once I'm happy with how the files are organised, then I will look at utilising it networked to bring content to my website, i.e. home page slide shows, client access content, etc.

My setup is as follows;

2x M.2 SATA SSD Samsung 850 EVO 250GB

2x 2.5" SSD Samsung 850 EVO 250GB

2x Seagate IronWolf Pro 4TB NAS


I want to take advantage of Qtier to move archived files up to the faster drives when I want to work on them in PS and use the fastest drives (M.2 SATA) as a scratch disk. My questions are;

1) What do I configure the top level M.2 SATA SSD for fast performance, RAID 0 or JBOD? And how would I tier this or would I not want to, to then use it as a scratch disk and how would I do that?

2) Do I configure the 2.5" SSD as RAID 0 and enable Qtier?

3)Bottom level HDD set at RAID 1 for storage. Pretty confident this is what I want for a backup plan.


I'm sure this is how the TVS was designed for use for 4K video and photography. Anyone who could point me in the direction of a best practise guide, I would greatly appreciate it.

[storageman]

Any tier with RAID 0 is a no no as any failed disk and you've lost the entire pool.
m.2. aint that much faster than SATA.
I would only have two tiers for simplicity (KISS)
Also consider the PCIe NVMe SSD approach with QM2 card. They're 6 times faster on reads and 3 times faster on writes than standard SSDs.

[q-nappy-pappy]

Hi storageman,

Thanks for the reply. My models PCIe slots are occupied by the included thunderbolt 2 and the 10GBase-T cards. So the only choice for M.2 are SATA. I'm just looking for speed at the SSD level, not redundancy, and to assign the first pool as a scratch disk to be used by Photoshop instead of my local Hybrid SSD/HDD on my Mac. It has to be a possibility, otherwise why would QNAP gear this to high data transfer rate with levels of high capacity storage and RAID backup. Any thoughts?

Cheers,

[jds580s]

I would second what storageman warned against.

If you want the photos on your 2x Seagate IronWolf Pro 4TB NAS drives to be safe, and if they are going to be used with your 2.5" SSD's in Qtier, you need redundancy on all tiers associated with the main array.
Qtier doesn't copy files from the main HDDs to the SSDs in order to speed up access, it moves blocks of data. So if a block is on the SSD it is not on the HDD at the same time and would be permanently lost if there was a failure of just one SSD. Also note that since we are talking about blocks not simply files, other files on the HDDs would also become corrupt if they happen to have part of their information stored in the same block that was on the SSD tier, even if those files were not frequently accessed.

Here are some options for you.

Option 1
(HDD Tier) 2x Seagate IronWolf Pro 4TB NAS in RAID 1
(SSD Tier) 2x 2.5" SSD Samsung 850 EVO 250GB in RAID 1

(Separate array for scratch disk) 2x M.2 SATA SSD Samsung 850 EVO 250GB in RAID 1 or RAID 0 - if you select RAID 0 just be sure you don't put anything important on this array and use it only for scratch.

You may already have a good grasp on how Qtier works, but if not I wanted to clarify something. When you say

I want to take advantage of Qtier to move archived files up to the faster drives when I want to work on them

Realize that you won't have specific control of which speed tier files are stored on. It's automated based on access patterns. The more frequently you access a file the more likely it's block will be moved to a faster tier. If you need more granular control you could setup the 2.5" 850 EVO drives as their own independent array and share. Then when you want to work on a batch of photos move them there manually and back to the HDDs when done. Unfortunately I don't know how Lightroom (if you use Lightroom) handles moving files like that.

Option 2
Since the performance of both the M.2 and 2.5" 850 EVO drives is identical, a second option is to create a 4 drive RAID 5 array with the SSDs which should increase their read/write performance while still maintaining a level of redundancy in the event of a single drive failure. You could then use that array as the SSD tier for your Qtier setup. Then create a share on the that pool for scratch. This approach consolidates and simplifies everything into one usable pool with redundancy and Qtier which is nice and easy. Your scratch data will likely be written to the SSD tier first so it should remain snappy.

Option 3
Lastly as storageman said you could purchase the QM2-2P10G1T card. You mentioned that you don't have any open PCIe slots, but this card includes a 10GB network port so it would replace your existing 10Gbe card. It supports NVMe SSDs which will be 2-3 times faster than your existing SSD's and it expands your NAS with two additional drives so you can keep the 4x SSDs you currently have. The NVMe drives could be your Qtier drives instead of the 850 EVO's, or set them up as a standalone array for scratch / cache if you prefer.

[Trexx]

Just to clarify, with QTier in the 4.3.4, you WILL have some control over it as you can designate shared Folders to be "promoted" to higher levels in qtier. From what I can tell in testing, this doesn't promote the entire folder, but appears to give extra WEIGHTING to it for promotion.

Your best guarantee though for having stuff in SSD is creating a designated pool/volume. Also for performance consistency, Bob Zelin always recommends using 10GbE over Thunderbolt. Search the board for his post for much more 'real-world" design recommendations for heavy video processing usage.

[q-nappy-pappy]

Thanks for the valuable info jds580s and Trexx. Like anything, I suppose there is a learning curve here. So I can appreciate the insights. I've been doing a bit of testing as of my first post and have set the M.2 sata drives along with the 2.5" SSD up in RAID 10 then set Qtier up with the 4TB Seagate HDD.

I copied over only one folder with sub folders of varying file types from my Adobe Bridge library, btw jds580s I'm accessing folders through Adobe Bridge with the NAS visible as a drive and Bridge/PS/Lightroom function just fine. I then opened a file up in Photoshop and left it open for a few hours. After some time having the file open I checked the "Manage Qtier" option in control panel and could see the data was moved up to the Ultra-fast SSD array. Subsequently I closed the file in PS and left it to stew and Qtier automatically moved the data back to the HDD. Magic!

I can see now how not having the SSD tier in RAID 1, 5, or 10 and with how blocks and not necessarily 'files' are moved up to the faster drives could be detrimental to my archive if I set the SSD to RAID 0. So having a clearer direction for my intended use I'm faced with one more decision for my setup.

Purchase another 2x 2.5" Samsung 850 EVO's, they will live in the two empty bays, and set them up as RAID 10 my two exisiting 2.5" SSD, Qtier to the 2x Seagate IW Pro HHD in RAID 1

This would free up the M.2 SSD to be used as separate RAID 1 array that I could assign as a scratch disk in Photoshop or ssd caching. Photoshop allows you to map to a different scratch disk. Is this even worth doing though as I will be moving all of my files off my Mac to the NAS?

[Don]

I would use RAID 5 over RAID 10. It is faster and provides more storage.

[AndyChicago]

Hi "q"
I'm a professional photographer as well. Just bought my 1st NAS. The QNAP TS-453BT3. I plan to keep that one at home and buy something like the one you have for the studio. I'm very interested in what you find out as it sounds like we might have some similar needs!

[q-nappy-pappy]

Hi Andy,

Since my last post I have sorted out my current setup and it works great! After hours on these forums and trials of my own, I decided what best suits my needs. In the end I set both my Samsung EVO 850 SSD's and my Seagate IW Pro HDD to RAID 1. I set these to Q-tier automatically but may change to manually setting them to tier data at a time when I know I wont be working with them.

I chose to set my 2x Samsung EVO 850 M.2 SSD to RAID 1 and to use cache acceleration, although I have been reading mixed opinions if there is a benefit to setting them to cache acceleration, I can see there is activity during read/write and believe it has increased performance in my setup overall.

I pulled all my data off my macs onto the NAS and 1TB took about 3 hours to write to the NAS. I was getting about 540mbs/sec out of the SSD as expected.

I actually considered the model you have purchased, but at the time it wasn't released yet. One thing that was a deciding factor with going for the TVS-682T was that I have another two bays available that I plan on setting up for a surveillance system.

So far, I have been able to clear off my macs and have all the added performance increase with those and have massive reliable storage on the NAS. When I open a file in PS there is no lag. I would go so far to say everything, PSD, PSB, RAF, and NEF files opened in Camera raw, all open quicker now then when they were stored on my local HD.

[AndyChicago]

Thanks and glad to hear you've got things running so well! How are you backing up your QNAP externally and/or remotely? I'm going to do some experiments this weekend but would be interested in what you think works well.