TS-h1886XU-RP Confiuration advice

[freshiz]

Hi All,
Hoping someone can give me some feedback on my proposed setup and poke any holes in it.
I need speed working with 4K+ camera files as my main work.

Was thinking to populate the rear 6 bays with 6x2TB SATA SSD's configured as their own Raid 0 volume that would be cleared on probably a daily basis to make room for new footage. I have separate storage as an initial archive.
12 front bays would be a 2nd storage pool probably with 16TB drives raid 6 (on the fence with ZFS or not).
NAS connected via 25G SFP28 to a Ubiquiti switch with ideally only one work station accessing the SSD volume.
Operating system on a Raid 1 PCIE m.2 x2 expansion card.

Is this all kosher?
Any thoughts on what speed I could get migrating from the Raid 0 volume to the Raid 6 spinning disk volume? I'd be happy with anything over 700MB/s. Also my initial archive storage would be connected to the switch via 10G. As I need double backups, any issue migrating from that storage to the Raid 6 volume while simultaneously working on the Raid 0 production volume (switch limitation, cpu limitation, etc...)? All migrations are checked with MD5/xxHash.

That's pretty much the basics. Any feedback is appreciated.

Cheers

[dolbyman]

Have a read through this:

viewtopic.php?f=25&t=167256

That unit is a bit (2-3x) more powerful than yours (Xeon W vs Xeon D) but the rest still stands... single 12 disk HDD volume for the data, with the system on some SSD's in the back

[freshiz]

Have a read through this:

viewtopic.php?f=25&t=167256

That unit is a bit (2-3x) more powerful than yours (Xeon W vs Xeon D) but the rest still stands... single 12 disk HDD volume for the data, with the system on some SSD's in the back

Yeah but the 1886 has the unique configuration for the 6 SSD bays in the back giving it a theoretical read bandwidth of 3000MB/s where the 1288 has 4 of those bays dropping it to 2000MB/s. I wouldn't be doing any virtualization, just strictly I/O so would hope the Xeon D would be up to the task. TB3 DAS units like Accusys run on 2gb ram and probably some tiny ARM chip and chug along at 1000+MB/s.

Also thinking after I posted, should be able to restrict the SSD pool to the 25G connection only and run the spinning disks on only the 10G so no shared bandwidth between the two? Assuming the motherboard will allow it given the PCIE lanes being used.

[dolbyman]

The QTS system has a lot of (unnecessary) bells and whistles, so QNAP ARM systems are notorious to not reach promised speeds (e.g. the 932PX)

But anyways, you could stick 8x600MB\s SATA SSD's into the 1288X as well, far exceeding the 25GbE threshold there for sure .. if you actually need it.
You cannot really restrict pools to networks, but you can always add sepperate networks via subnets

e.g.
10GbE network (192.168.10.0/24) is used to mount the HDD pool share
25GbE network (192.168.20.0/24) is used to mount the SSD pool share

This way you would have the theoretical full bandwidth for each of those pools.

I would still keep the system pool and actual storage separate, plenty of writes will wear the SSDs out faster, certainly never put the system pool on RAID0 as this will kill all installed apps upon failure (default install location is the system volume)

[freshiz]

My particular context I need around 140TB of archive storage. I'm getting by with TB3 DAS solutions for now just fine, just would be nice to have stuff on a network so it can be accessed by multiple workstations if needed. Also dual power supplies is a nice feature.

The networking, I figured something like that could be done. Thanks!

[Bob Zelin]

Hello -
am I late to the party.
I install QNAP TS-h1886XU-RP now all the time. Great product, and great price - cheaper than the TVS-h1688X.
When I set these up, you stick two 500 Gig SSD's in the back (slots 1 and 2) - storage pool 1 RAID 1 configuration - and this is your QuTS operating system.
You now plug in your 12 7200 RPM SATA drives (I use Seagate EXOS), and you create this as storage pool 2, RAID 6. You will get 1000 MB/sec over a 10G connection to a modern Mac computer over 10G, or any Win 10/11 PC using a 10G PCIe card (like a QNAP QXG-10G1T, or QXG-10G2TB, or ASUS XG-C100C).

OK, you want crazy fast speeds, and you want the 25G card - this is my strong advice to you. You buy a QNAP QM2-4P-384, and you stick four 2 TB Samsung NVMe drives on this card, and create Storage Pool 3 - RAID 0. Now, you can plug in your 25G card to your PC (it's just a Mellanox card), and now you will get 2200 MB/sec.

AS for your Ubiquiti switch (Oh - how I love those switches) - Ubiquiti has the Enterprise XG24, which is a 24 port 10G switch with two 25G SFP28 ports, and a Aggregation Pro for $899, which is all SFP+ 10G, but has four 25G SFP28 ports. You know, you can't find an Enterprise XG24 anymore. So if you use that switch, you don't get that many 25G ports. QNAP makes the QSW-M5216-1T, which is a 16 port SFP28 25G switch for only $1200 !!!!!! (what a deal !) -

but the bottom line here, is that you will not appreciate 25G direct connection until you have NVMe drives (or U.2 NVMe drives in the more expensive TS-h1290FX, or similar) - so the cheapest way to pull this off is with the QM2-4P-384 in your wonderful TS-h1886XU-RP. You aint' getting these speeds from 7200 RPM SATA drives.

Bob Zelin

[freshiz]

Hey Bob,
Thanks for the reply. I know, both those 25G switches you mentioned seem too good to be true. Never thought I'd be able to venture into that world and would be stuck with TB3 DAS for all my stuff until I saw those. Amazing.
8TB is a little low for what I wanted for my raid 0 pool but wasn't sure if putting my OS on the PCIE expansion card as raid 1 instead was a little sketchy and then using those 6 2.5 bays as my raid 0 to get 12TB. I know for general PC Windows use it's not recommended.

What kind of speed do you think I can expect writing to those 12 bays using 16TB SATA drives in a Z2 configuration over 10G? As I said in the OP, if can consistently get 700MB/s writes that would be fine for my purpose. It's strictly for daily backups and would only be an emergency if I had to actually work off of that pool.
Also is QNAP ZFS just straight ZFS or do they sprinkle anything in there? My reason for asking is that if the QNAP dies, can I take those drives to any other 12 bay system able to accept ZFS or does it need to be another QNAP or am I SOL and has to be that exact QNAP unit? I'm talking about something catastrophic like a motherboard failure or something.
I'm still trying to educate myself on the file system but from what I understand, if configured correctly from the beginning all the parity is stored on the drives themselves and they are HBA/Motherboard independent. So can pretty much take them anywhere. That seems like a big plus over standard Raid 6 and would be worth a bit of a performance hit if not too extreme.

Cheers

[Bob Zelin]

Your Z2 will get 1000 MB/sec with a good 10G card (any Intel X550, X710, Aquantia based QXG-10G1T, 2TB, Asus XG-C100C, etc - even TP Link).

QNAP ZFS is not generic - you cannot plug these drives into another 12 bay system. You want to plug into another 12 bay system - make it another QNAP 12 bay system. Many of us have been in catostrophic failure situations - you buy the same model, plug in your drives, and go back to work. This was exemplified with the nightmare QNAP TVS-872XT.

Bob

[OneCD]

Slightly off-topic: anyone see the announcement about QNAP's new 100GbE card? https://www.qnap.com/en-au/news/2022/qn ... -flash-nas

[dolbyman]

Well if you have the need for speed and a NAS with a Gen4 x16 slot (with all Flash Storage) .. then go go go

If anyone needs that much speed it's probably Bobs customers shuffling around raw footage between production machines

[OneCD]

If anyone needs that much speed it's probably Bobs customers shuffling around raw footage between production machines