The Situation:
- People need to move large amounts of data (up to 1TB at a time) to and from the NAS from Windows 10 Client computers.
- Clients have fast SSDs.
- NAS (TS-435XeU) has 3 HDDs in a RAID 5.
- Network (Managed Switch, NAS NIC and Clients NICs) is 10Gb.
After upgrading the network to 10Gb, the bottleneck is now at the HDD drives on the NAS. Specifically, writes are really slow.
Reading around, I know that it's possible for me to get better performance with a different RAID config, or a faster NAS, but I'm looking for a solution that doesn't involve rebuilding the RAID or getting yet another new NAS.
The Solution?
- Since they're moving files to and from a limited set of project folders, I am contemplating creating a new RAID Group / Volume on the NAS consisting of two M.2 SSDs in a RAID 1 (I have the M.2 slots available).
- Active project folders can live on this new fast Volume. They will use the fast volume when working on a project. Delete it from there when they're done.
- I expect write speeds to increase dramatically for them.
- I will also set up a one-way sync of this folder via HBS3 to the existing volume on the slow HDD RAID Group, so that whatever they're writing quickly to the SSDs will be replicated in due time on the HDDs (and in turn get backed up on the regular schedule)
I'll have to spend another $800 or so on big SSDs for this to work, so I want to make sure I'm not barking up the wrong tree.
- Will this even work?
- Is this just dumb? Can someone think of a more elegant solution.
- Is it ok for a fast volume to be replicating to a slow volume? They are not constantly writing, so there should be sufficient time for the sync to catch up, I think.
Thanks!
