QNAP NAS Community Forum

I'm looking to upgrade my existing 4 bay NAS to one that can allow read speed to saturate a 10Gbps link in RAID6 with spinning disks. This appears to be not achievable with a 1U rack mounted solution because it only have 4 disks, right?

My understanding is RAID6 with 6 disks provides 4 x read speed of a single drive. So it appears we can say the following?
6 x ST2000NE0025 (2TB each at 195MB/s): 780MB/s with 8TB usable
6 x ST2000VN004 (2TB each at 180MB/s): 720MB/s with 8TB usable

This isn't enough to saturate a 10Gbps connection so if we step up to 8 disks this provides 6 x read speed of a single drive and we have:
8 x ST2000NE0025 (2TB each at 195MB/s): 1170MB/s with 12TB usable
8 x ST2000VN004 (2TB each at 180MB/s): 1080MB/s with 12TB usable
8 x ST1000VN002 (1TB each at 180MB/s): 1080MB/s with 6TB usable, which is $480 for 8 disks of $60 each.

Just to compare if we use larger and less SSDs which allows us to buy a smaller NAS but the disks themselves are cost prohibitive.
4 x ZA3840NM10001 (3.84TB each at 560MB/s): 1120MB/s with 7.68TB usable, which is $3908 for 4 disks of $977 each.

It appears 8 bay NAS with regular spinning disks is the most cost effective solution to achieve the goal of being able to provide read of roughly 10Gbps? Are there any benchmarks done to support this?

titusc wrote: ↑Thu Mar 14, 2019 11:14 pm It appears 8 bay NAS with regular spinning disks is the most cost effective solution to achieve the goal of being able to provide read of roughly 10Gbps?

Yes. Bob Zelin that work with many professional video edititing users have been saying this many times here in the forum. Search for his posts.

I am not about to get technical, but I believe I am saturating the Thunderbolt 2 interface with my NAS. I have a Raid6 setup with 6 x 10TB HGST UltraStar DC HC510 (249/225 MB/s). In addition I have a read/write cache using 2 x Samsung SSD 970 PRO 512GB NVMe SSDs (3,500 MB/s) in Raid1.

Using Thunderbolt 2 between my Mac Pro and my NAS I get;

you are not about to get technical ? Why not ? This is a technical forum. You are getting just over 1000 MB/sec on a Thunderbolt 2 to 10G interface. That is GREAT. You are not going to go any faster than this on a Thunderbolt 3 to 10G interface to a 10G NAS from a single workstation. I see in your profile that you have a TVS-872XT. This is a great small low cost NAS for video editing. You can easily do 4K and 6K workflow on this unit with Adobe Premiere, Davinci Resolve, FCP X and AVID Media Composer.

I would always use EIGHT drives for a config like this, but if you have six drives and you are getting this - well, you should be very happy.
OH - this is bokr71's system - not titusc. Sorry -
Mr titusc - you are over thinking this - I am not sure of what your application is - but you are correct. The most cost effective way of building a super fast NAS system is to get EIGHT 7200 RPM drives, in a single static volume RAID 5 or RAID 6 configuration.

I can't believe that they are still making 1 and 2TB drives.
I just did a google search on Seagate Ironwolf 1TB drives - and they are 5900 RPM drives. DO NOT GET THESE. You MUST get 7200 RPM drives if you expect to get wonderful speeds as you see in
bokr71's system above.

The smallest Ironwolf that is 7200 RPM appears to be the 4TB model. These are $165 a piece on Amazon. This will give you 24 TB of usable storage, and you will get great performance.

Bob Zelin

LOL - I know it is a technical forum, but what I mean by "not getting technical" is;

I have no idea what the calculations are to derive the optimum transfer rate in a Raid. I don't know what the max through-rate is on a Thunderbolt 2, Thunderbolt 3, GigaBit, or 10 GbE connection. Also, I have no clue what effect my cache has on the test.

What I do know, is that I transfer files to/from my NAS, and I edit multiple files in various applications, with absolutely no problem, just as fast as had I stored the files on my Mac Pro. It is long since that I was the speed limitation on anything I do on my computers...

listen bokr71 -
we know that you know exactly what you are doing. I "thought" I was talking to titusc (who has yet to respond). You have a great TVS-872XT (and great speeds) - I would not be so proud of my 42mm iWatch, as this will be obsolete in less than 3 years, and Apple will require up to buy an "update". In the old days, you spent $350 for a watch (or more) and you used that for the rest of your life. Today - in 2021, it goes into the landfill. Well NOT ME !
I have my (fake) Bell & Ross, and you know what ? I can tell what time it is without my reading glasses - so to me - that is a SUCCESS ! And it's NOT going in the garbage in 2021.

Of course, now waiting for titusc to respond.

Bob Zelin

does this help?

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