I'm watching this Linus video and it got me thinking...I have a 12 bay HP Proliant DL380pG8 that only has a parity and two 8TB drives in it right now...what would you put in the other 9 bays to make it really fast?  Of course it's going to be limited by SATA, but I was thinking maybe put a bunch of drives in there and assign them all to a Windoze Server VM and create a RAID10 array out of them?...slap a 10G NIC in the thing and assign that to the server too?

I dunno.  Kinda just toying with ideas.  What would you do if you had 9 drive bays and a bunch of RAM to play with?  

 

Server specs:

HP ProLiant DL380p LFF G8

2x E5-2667v2, 16 Cores/32 Threads

64GB RAM

2x 8TB SATA drives

1x 8TB Parity

1x 480GB NVMe PCIe SSD (which I can not for the LIFE of me get to show up in BIOS...but that's another discussion...)

Edited February 5, 20206 yr by rmp5s

To build the fastest possible NAS, I would not go with Unraid but FreeNAS to use native ZFS.

I reckon the Unraid ZFS plugin would work but if I'm just gonna do ZFS for fastest possible storage then why go through hoops.

 

If no need for the "NA" in "NAS", I would just run Windows bare metal with Windows storage space + regular backup.

 

49 minutes ago, testdasi said:

To build the fastest possible NAS, I would not go with Unraid but FreeNAS to use native ZFS.

I reckon the Unraid ZFS plugin would work but if I'm just gonna do ZFS for fastest possible storage then why go through hoops.

Very interesting.  I'll look into the ZFS stuff.  Maybe I'll give the plugin a shot beings as I am already set up in unRAID.  Switching isn't really an option on this server at this point.

After getting my first unRAID server up and running, someone asked me why I chose it over FreeNAS.  Apparently FreeNAS has changed a LOT in the near decade since I used it last.  I had no idea it did most of the same stuff unRAID does.

Don't forget the major compromise to get fastest possible NAS i.e. RAID vs Unraid.

 

With RAID:

• RAID 0: you will lose all your data with a single failed drive
• RAID 1: you will lose all your data with 2 failed drives
• RAID 5/6: you will lose all your data if you have more failed drives than number of parity
• RAID 10:
  • best case scenario: you will lose all your data with half your drives + 1 fail.
  • worst case scenario: you will lose all your data with 2 failed drives

 

With Unraid: you will lose all your data only if all your data drives fail.

 

There are other compromises (e.g. RAM requirement, same-size drives etc.) but the above is THE reason I don't use RAID.

7 minutes ago, testdasi said:

Don't forget the major compromise to get fastest possible NAS i.e. RAID vs Unraid.

 

With RAID:

• RAID 0: you will lose all your data with a single failed drive
• RAID 1: you will lose all your data with 2 failed drives
• RAID 5/6: you will lose all your data if you have more failed drives than number of parity
• RAID 10:
  • best case scenario: you will lose all your data with half your drives + 1 fail.
  • worst case scenario: you will lose all your data with 2 failed drives

 

With Unraid: you will lose all your data only if all your data drives fail.

 

There are other compromises (e.g. RAM requirement, same-size drives etc.) but the above is THE reason I don't use RAID.

Hey, they always say "RAID is not a backup", right?  lol

That machine wouldn't be used for anything important.  It would mostly just be to play around.  Maybe I'll buy 9 of these things and assign them to a Windows Server VM.  With RAID10, I'd end up with a bit under 2TB of usable space which isn't too bad.

I dunno.  Would adding a bunch of drives like that speed up the unRAID array itself any?...or is it kind of a "weakest link" kind of thing where the slowest drive is the fastest it'll go...

Would adding a bunch of drives like that speed up the unRAID array itself any?

Not the array itself, what you can have is a big raid cache pool and work mainly there, that's what I do for one of my servers. 

 

 

 

Adding SSD to the array will only speed up anything that is written to the SSD.

A RAID-10 SATA should be faster than a single SATA but it obviously will be independent of your array.

 

I wouldn't play around with 10 SSD though. I would rather get an Optane or some fast NVMe. They are more fun.

1 minute ago, johnnie.black said:

Not the array itself, what you can have is a big raid cache pool and work mainly there, that what I do for one of my servers.

Got ya.  That's what I was thinking about doing...just having them all assigned to a VM.

1 minute ago, testdasi said:

I wouldn't play around with 10 SSD though. I would rather get an Optane or some fast NVMe. They are more fun.

I would too but I don't have enough PCI slots for that...I don't think, anyway...

 

So...thanks for participating in this little thought exercise, everyone.  lol  The server and/or unRAID has limitations...maybe it's time to build a new machine...hmmmmm...  

15 minutes ago, rmp5s said:

I would too but I don't have enough PCI slots for that...I don't think, anyway...

10 SSD would probably require an HBA which will occupy at least an x8 slot. That's enough for an Optane, and with mobo supporting bifurcation, 2 Optanes 😉

1 hour ago, testdasi said:

10 SSD would probably require an HBA which will occupy at least an x8 slot. That's enough for an Optane, and with mobo supporting bifurcation, 2 Optanes 😉

I REALLY need to figure out a way to shove a GPU in the thing...THAT is what I need to quit dragging my feet on.