Best configuration for my hardware?

[supercar]

I just assembled a ts-431be with 4, 8TB WD White drives shucked from WD elements external drives, the QM2-2P10G1TA PCI card with 10G-BT and 2, 240GB SSD drives installed and the RAM upgraded to 16GB. This is my first NAS device, so I am interested in other's configuration opinions.

I had thought I would put the 4, 8TB drives in a RAID5 or RAID6 configuration with the 2, 240GB NVMe SSD drives used as cache. However, it may make sense to include the 2 SSD drives in the RAID Storage Pool and turn on Qtier to keep the most used data on those drives.

This is for home use. I plan to move any/all important data onto this drive, so it is all in one place and not spread across computers. I don't currently serve much entertainment (music/movies), but may in the future. I do some photo/video editing and it would be nice to have the performance to do that directly from the NAS.

Let me know your opinions on the best raid/cache configuration and how I would set that up in the software.

Regards,
Dave

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

from what i understand, these shucked drives you COULD change the TLER setting somehow to enable it for raid purposes. I think by default it's turned off.

if you check reddit data hoarder there should be some info there about it.

Enabling TLER limits error recovering to 7 seconds. What are the chances to recover bad sector during 30s when it did not work during 7s? When you have RAID it's probably better to return error quickly than stall and risk causing lag or even RAID failure (admittedly, RAID failure is extreme example which should not happen anyway).

I would rather have drive return error in timely fashion, so ZFS can override it from mirror/RAIDZ (which might allow disk to remap bad sector).

Using TLER does not negate benefits of RAID. And "all the hits" is extremely small chance of multiple disk failures in RAID and simultaneously this being type of failure that disk can recover in 10-20s, but not in 7s.


I already stated that probably I would not enable TLER in non-RAID environment.

On the other hand, TLER in RAID is standard - even disks for RAID come with TLER enabled.

You might have some specific requirements that means disabling TLER is better for you, but it's not universal.

Hi,
Please use a PC to change TLER setting on WD drives. In QNAP's system, it is not posssible to change TLER setting.

Best Regards,

Jason

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/co ... _before_i/


that said many have had success using shucked hdds on their qnaps from i read.


https://www.qnap.com/en/how-to/knowledg ... ick-volume

https://www.qnap.com/en/how-to/tutorial ... t-practice

https://blog.qnap.com/10gbe-walkthrough-en/


not sure about qtier since i don't really use it.

240GB NVMe SSD drives used as cache.

the capacity size is way too small to be of any meaningful use for caching. with the current prices, you can get a 1tb ssd for roughly 99 USD. i would recommend that. If you want cheaper there is of course the 512gb ssds.


instead of using the ssds for cache, you could instead set it for use as your cachedev1 aka where you install qts and your qpkg apps.

however doing that, i don't think the raid pool for the hdds will benefit from it, since it won't be using cache. But you could probably get more ssds then use that as cache pointed at the hdd raid array. based on the 10gbe setup guide, that is recommended in order to achieve max thoroughput speeds.


as for raid5 vs raid6 for 4 hdds with those very high capacities, i'm honestly not too sure about that. if it were perhaps 6 hdds, i'd say go raid6 for sure. but you are using 4 hdds...

Raid5
*Usable Storage: 16.4 TB / 16763.8 GB

Raid6
*Usable Storage: 10.9 TB / 11175.9 GB


using raid5 calc for 4x 6tb hdds

The probability of successfully completing the rebuild is 99.8%

http://www.raid-calculator.com/default.aspx

https://www.servethehome.com/raid-calculator/

http://www.raid-failure.com/raid5-failure.aspx



so based on that, my vote is for raid5

although i still recommend backups
https://www.reddit.com/r/qnap/comments/ ... _a_backup/

or raidz1 when qts hero comes out
https://www.qnap.com/qts-hero/en/

[dolbyman]

backups for sure..if stuff is moved from other media (deleted on the other media) then backups are a must