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NAS devices and reliability

G

gar598

Golden Member
Could something such as this ((4x500GB) support 50 users - with 20 or so reading/writing at the same time? It seems cheap, but there must be a catch.

How does it compare with Dell MD1000 SATA (8x250GB)a dell server (for 3k+ more) ?

It would mostly be for accessing word documents, etc. Very little media files.

Thanks.
 
Originally posted by: gar598
Could something such as this ((4x500GB) support 50 users - with 20 or so reading/writing at the same time? It seems cheap, but there must be a catch.
Click to expand...

First off, you linked a 4x250GB device, not 4x500GB. I don't know if you could even put 4x500GB drives in that thing, and you certainly can't use more than 4 drives.

If you don't need enormous amounts of bandwidth a low-end NAS like that would probably work fine for less than a hundred users.

How does it compare with Dell MD1000 SATA (8x250GB)a dell server (for 3k+ more) ?

It would mostly be for accessing word documents, etc. Very little media files.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

The MD1000 is an external SAS array connected to a server via PCIe -- it will scale up to bigger arrays, and you can use 10K/15KRPM SCSI disks with them. Also, the server can have way faster access, as you can easily saturate 1Gbps Ethernet with a 4-way RAID0 or RAID5 array. Note that this is not a NAS -- you need a server to attach this thing to (which may, but does not have to, act as a NAS server).

If you don't need the extra scalability (and/or 10/15KRPM drives, and/or much >1Gbps throughput to the server), this is way overkill.
 
This looks like a price without the server software. The operating system will not be cheap. Server + 20-50 user licenses?
 
That should work fine. Basic office-type data accessing isn't very intensive. Now, if you were serving up video (or even audio) data, you'd be in another category.

Another option to consider (this is what I used for my home NAS), is using a normal PC with a gigabit ethernet card and a hardware RAID card. Can handle data much faster than a NAS device, but not quite like one of those $5k Dell server.
 
How would a server with a GbE card and a Raid Card be faster than a true NAS? There are sveral different products listed in this thread each of which serve a different market, maybe you should determine your needs and possibility of future growth first then select a product that meets that. Having one of those 1-2TB non-enterprise SAN/NAS devices is fine if you never expect to go bigger then that size but I mean really they just released 1tb disks that are ~$500 so does it make sense to spend $1200-$2400 on 2 tb? when you could have a windows share that will provide that amount of storage for a similar price? If you are really serious about network storage, PLEASE stay away from dell (your asking for trouble there) and if you insist on a NAS (as opposed to a SAN) performance shouldn't be your primary concern as that is NOT a feature of NAS...
 
This report shows that the Buffalo Terastation Pro, with four clients, delivered about 4MegaBytes/second throughput. Expect a large difference in throughput between the Dell Server/SAS array solution compared to the Buffalo Terastation. It seems the Terastation is comparable to hooking up all your fifty users to something slower than a single USB 2.0 external hard drive.

Whatever you chose, be sure to plan for how you'll be backing up your data. Lots of folks don't take that into account.
 
4mb a second? LOL!!! That truly suxors! I work in the storage biz, our SAN's do line speed through 3 GbE ports simultanouesly which = 300MB/sec to the array (slightly less to disk) and scale linearly which is nearly 25x that per port, if your going to get a san/nas don't waste THAT much money on a few TB for 4mb/sec it would be much more advisable to take 3 or 4 1tb disks at ~$500 a piece for 2 g's and turn it into an iSCSI san box which can be done pretty cheap with linux.
 
Originally posted by: RebateMonger
This report shows that the Buffalo Terastation Pro, with four clients, delivered about 4MegaBytes/second throughput. Expect a large difference in throughput between the Dell Server/SAS array solution compared to the Buffalo Terastation. It seems the Terastation is comparable to hooking up all your fifty users to something slower than a single USB 2.0 external hard drive.

Whatever you chose, be sure to plan for how you'll be backing up your data. Lots of folks don't take that into account.
Click to expand...

I'm always a little skeptical of performance studies paid for by a direct competitor.

Also, they list "raw throughput (Mb/sec)", and the Terastaion is around 75-125. Then there is an (unexplained) "throughput score", which is the one that peaks at 32 (based on AT's results below, this may be the max throughput seen by a single host, but they just don't say!) And there is little description of what kind of workloads they were actually running.

Anandtech actually reviewed this device (or a very similar one in the same line) a while back in a NAS roundup. They found that it is painfully slow (yes, around 4MBps) for writes, but is better (though still on the slow side) for reads.

I must say that is significantly worse write performance than I would have expected even from a "cheap" NAS device. It might be that it's limited in the bandwidth it can take from a single host.
 
Originally posted by: oynaz
Well, 4 mb/second is enough for 50 users using office documents and the like, isn't it?
Click to expand...
It could be. It'd really depend on how folks are using the storage. If they just open up "normal" MS Word documents, work on them, and occasionally save them, then it could be "OK". Occasionally it'll slow down while two or more folks try to do something on the drive. Just don't try to copy any big files or folders....

Anybody know if the Terastations require special drivers to be loaded on the client PCs?
 
If it does, I would seriously consider another solution. If they cannot make a simple file-server work, they probably cannot make the hardware work probably either. My Synology NAS simply has a Samba server.
 
Originally posted by: Matthias99
I'm always a little skeptical of performance studies paid for by a direct competitor.

Also, they list "raw throughput (Mb/sec)", and the Terastaion is around 75-125. Then there is an (unexplained) "throughput score", which is the one that peaks at 32 (based on AT's results below, this may be the max throughput seen by a single host, but they just don't say!) And there is little description of what kind of workloads they were actually running.
Click to expand...

I would be willing to bet that the 75-125MB/sec is actually the throughput that the device can handle between the host and cache. This can easily be tested by using a tool like iometer and telling it the disk you are writing to is less than a given amount (i.e. less than the size of the cache) and will yield similar results. We routinely have customers do this to verify their network infrastructure can handle the demands of an iSCSI based SAN (Although our numbers to a single array is much more like 330MB/sec NOT Mbps) and the "Throughput score" is probably what is actually being written to disk (beyond cache) which seems to be about right for a NAS. A SAN should (if designed properly) should be able to write 80% of it's bandwidth to disk. In our case we can easily handle line speed or 115MB/sec per port which means we can (and routinely do) handle writes down to disk at ~80MB/sec sustained. A NAS (which has more overhead because of the filesystem involved) will do slightly worse on performance and assuming you have an adequate NAS head you should get AT LEAST %60 of line speed down to disk.

All this being said if your going to get network storage at LEAST get something that scales, that terrastation is NOT designed to scale and will be nothing more than a PITA when it comes time to add more space, you should really just beef up the servers that have "storage" cheaply now (maybe think about 2 1TB disks for now and use them solely for user data) and plan on spending MUCH more to get a real SAN/NAS.... but thats just me, we have TONS of customers coming to us a year later after they have essentially done what your doing now and asking how to get all the data off their "old" equipment (usually only 8-12 months old) and onto the new and usually it ends up being a restore from tape because of how much bandwidth it would suck up trying to just copy it from the actual device that the users would be complaining. Do yourself a favor and start planning on a real SAN now....

 
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