QNAP NAS Community Forum

Hi, a client has a TS-473A with 32 Gb RAM. They're using both of the 2.5Gb ports ganged/trunked into a switch that supports trunking, but because they're using a lot of CAD and rendering files, things are still bogging down. They currently have 4 WD RED PRO 6Tb drives in RAID 5, storage isn't a problem...throughput is.
There are no m.2 drives, so I was thinking of adding those and hoping that would add some cache support.
Don't know about adding more RAM, since they aren't running a lot of apps on the NAS..it's basically just storage. (ZFS file system)
I was thinking about adding the QXG-10G2SF-X710 network card and ganging/trunking those 2 ports into their switch (which has 10Gb SFP ports)
Each of their workstations has 2.5Gb cards and are connecting at that speed.

What's going to give them the best bang for the buck? All of the above? Something else?
Thanks in advance.

Unless you run QuTS, forget about cache (broken)

So where exactly is that bottleneck ? 2x 2.5GB per (non aggregate) not enough speed, or a the disks not fast enough ?

How much speed do you need ? I have switched an engineering client over to 10GbE (complete infrastructure) and they have no issues with CAD models or large pointcould assemblies (but they also have NAS units with more than 4 spinning disks)

Big REVIT models are bogging down pulling 3D rendered files. So far on the computers, network speed (transfers) seems to be the issue. Right now it's 2.5Gb end-to-end, but with 5 architects working on drawings over the NAS (ACAD, REVIT and toys) there's a lot of traffic. That's why I was thinking the 10Gb NIC on the NAS.

So upgrade the network to 10GbE and then use the NVMe as pure storage, have a working folder on NVMe and speeds should be fine.

Otherwise 4 spinning disks will not be fast enough. (I found good enough speeds on 8bay+ units if you want to go for spinning disks)