Does a 4 Disk Raid 10 Array saturate Gigabit Ethernet? NAS

[Jerizo]

So I'm considering getting a NAS because I work as a freelancer from home and need a storage solution to archive projects.

Now the most appropriate setup for this would seem like a 4 disk raid 10 array. I would likely use 4 2TB WD Red or Seagate NAS HDDs.

The question that popped up, was whether or not the aforementioned raid 10 setup would saturate a gigabit ethernet connection and if so, whether teaming 2 of them would lift the bottleneck.

I'm not sure if it is really as straight forward as plugging in 2 ethernet cables into the respective ports on my PC and the NAS but that's what i gathered from my research so far.
This is also assuming that I can directly hook up the NAS with my PC without a swtich or anything in between, which I'm not entirely sure on. To be clear, my system will be the only one connected to the NAS.


I'm currently also building a new workstation so the teaming option will affect the mainboard i choose because of the dual gigabit ports requirement.


Hope you have some advice, thanks for the time.

 

[hhhd1]

Yes, even a single drive should saturate the gigabit ethernet with more to spare actually, so, with RAID 10, assuming double the performance, then it should be fine.

In my experience, I have only been able to get 60~70% throughput of gigabit ethernet, unlike 100 mbps ethernet, where I always get close to 100% throughput, maybe the cables I have are bad, maybe it is by design, this may be important to you if you expect getting full gbps speed.

 

[Jerizo]

I will stick to this raid setup then and look into higher throughput pcie NICs in case I feel like the gigabit ethernet bottleneck bothers me. Especially in the future when i might consider expanding the array for extra capacity and performance.
Thanks for your reply.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

Can I ask why you're looking for a NAS if all you're doing is one computer?

To answer your first question, as hhhd1 stated, a singular modern hard drive can have enough speed to saturate the realistic bandwidth of a Gigabit Ethernet connection; but that's only if you are during highly sequential writes and reads. If you are not (as in, your files are less than 1GB or so), you will likely have a difficult time saturating even a 100 Mb/s link, if you are archiving to spinning platters, which I assume you would be.

Your question regarding teaming is a no. To have multiple connections going to a NAS, you have to have Link Aggregation (LACP). If you direct connect your computer to the NAS, you have to support LACP on the motherboard (some do, some don't, you'd have to check your NIC provider's functionality). Even then, the only benefit you'd get is failover (1 link fails, another link takes over). That's because most protocols used for a NAS do not support multi-channel functionality. SMB 3.0 (which is supported on almost all modern OS's), supports SMB multichannel, but neither QNAP, Synology, nor most other vendors are supporting it on their NAS's yet. That means unless you're doing an iSCSI link, you're stuck with the limit of a single gigabit port.

The real question becomes why you're wanting to do this method over a single USB drive? A USB connected DAS (Direct-Attached Storage) will have more bandwidth (5Gb/s vs 1Gb/s), be far simpler to implement, and likely give quicker access to files, especially if they're small, as the host connection of UASP on a USB 3.0 port is far more efficient than Host Device SMB Client -> TCP/IP -> Host SMB Server -> Hard Drives.

 

[Jerizo]

Can I ask why you're looking for a NAS if all you're doing is one computer?

Absolutely! I realize I have not made the full extent of this project clear, let me elaborate.

I'm intending to actually build the NAS myself, instead of getting a premade solution from the vendors you mentioned.
The reason is that I would also like to utilize the system as an auxiliary rendering machine for workloads that can be distributed to LAN machines.
To take advantage of network rendering I would have to use windows 7 as the operating system. This is begining to seem more like a regular LAN with a main machine and a render slave/ storage system rather than a traditional NAS situation right?

So this project is very much evolving as we speak but currently my plan is to build a ITX/mATX system, put a fairly beefy cpu in there and hook up an external drive rack to the pcie raid card of the system. Then directly connect this system to my main machine via ethernet and hopefully enjoy a good storage solution along with increased rendering performance.

Regarding the use of a USB drive, I have used those in the past but I would like to step up to a more sophisticated solution that features a decent raid configuration with redundancy and future upgradability for my professional needs. Another point is that I would like this solution to be modular, if that makes sense, as in preserving the ability to replace the drive rack or the system or the workstation for that matter independently from one another.


Like i said I'm not entirely sure on many of these points but I'd appreciate your opinion in terms of usability of this setup.

P.S. thanks for your input on nic teaming!