Question Are these 4TB SSDs fine and reliable enough for a Raid 10 array in a NAS

[Fallen Kell]

In terms of speed/performance, you still won't get the performance of NVME with RAID on SSD's. The only place you will gain the benefits is when the file/data being accessed is large enough to span across the multiple disks (so all the small file I/O that games benefit from will not really happen). The place that RAID will give you benefits will be with sequential large file reads/writes (that and some protection from hardware failures).

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Not planning any hardware RAID. Just software RAID.

Can software RAID cross 2 controllers if I need to add ports.

How many SATA SSDs will be able to saturate 10Gbe in RAID 5 or 6 without being too much faster than the 10Gbe connection so its not a waste.

I mean do 2 SATA SSDs in RAID0 saturate 10Gbe already?

RAID 5 and 6 add overhead but are safer. RAID 1 is redundant but wasteful.

RAID 10 can speed things up but also somewhat wasteful.

2 SATA drives will probably saturate 10GbE, or close to it.

But a single m.2 SSD in a PCI-E slot adapter will saturate 10GbE easily without any of the RAID futzing.

 

[Fallen Kell]

2 SATA drives will probably saturate 10GbE, or close to it.

But a single m.2 SSD in a PCI-E slot adapter will saturate 10GbE easily without any of the RAID futzing.

Not really. Even if the controller and the drive hit max theoretical performance, a single drive will only provide 4.8Gbps. I wouldn't count on actually hitting the max theoretical performance of the drive, so in reality you need 3 disks in RAID 0 (or 4 in RAID 5, 5 in RAID 6, or 6 in RAID 10), to really ensure you hit the max. And again, that still all depends on the drives truly being capable of hitting that level of performance.

You will also need large enough data so that it will actually strip across all the drives. So you need to know what the strip size is for your setup (it can sometimes be as large as 4MB), and then the data needs to be large enough that it is X times larger than that stripe size such that "X" is the number of disks above needed to saturate the network speed. Reading/writing smaller data will result in just a portion of the drives being used to perform the operation.