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SSD's in a NAS??

mcveigh

mcveigh

Diamond Member
Are there any issues using a SSD in a NAS?
Several years ago I setup a Qnap NAS using WD RED RE3 drives for a friends small business. It has performed flawlessly. I may not be able to help him in the future, so I was thinking a SSD RAID1 array may be a better option for reliability.

Are there any pitfalls to this?
 
Instead of SSD RAID1, I'd just go SSD, and use an external platter drive as backup. In my case I use a second NAS as a network backup, and an external eSATA drive as local backup.

I don't see SSD being any more reliable though. Well, at least not consumer SSD.

And yeah, cost will be high for any sort of large storage.
 
Depending on usage and speed needs, SSD is probably overdoing it. The SSD NAS mainly offers a smaller footprint of the actual NAS when compared to typical 4 bay or larger NAS units.


Speeds, you will be limited by network first most likely.


But if the need is there you could go all SSD, the QNAP 451S and 453S look great. If you don't want to halve useable storage with RAID 1 or similar you can go cheap external and/or Amazon S3 at $0.03 per GB stored and also take care of offsite backup.
 
I'm not concerned about performance so much. Mainly it is about four computers accessing a database folder. My thought is preventing a physical hard drive failure.

I was thinking of looking for lower level professional drives. I think 200GB would be enough space.
 
I think there is a market for huge but slow SSDs. I'd buy six 2TB SSDs and fill up my NAS with them. As long as it could reach 100 MB/s I couldn't care less about speed in my NAS due to GigE bandwidth constraints.
 
mcveigh said:
I'm not concerned about performance so much. Mainly it is about four computers accessing a database folder. My thought is preventing a physical hard drive failure.

I was thinking of looking for lower level professional drives. I think 200GB would be enough space.
Click to expand...

RAID is not a backup. Also at least for sequential speeds, it is possible to reach 100 MB/s just using a single non-RAIDed platter drive.
 
I know it's not a backup. The NAS serves a public folder on their intranet for one application. The bakcup is handled elsewhere.
I'm just thinking with SSD's there is a lower risk of disk failure.
 
Really depends on need and your network throughput (and cost).

If you for example have a single Gigabit link, then SSDs will help with concurrent connections in a way, but once the Gb link is saturated you won't get any more than 112MB/s.

Even if you Team 2 or more Nics a 5 bay NAS could still give read performance of over 400MB/s with mechanical disks.

Then you could look at reliability. If a disk fails you replace it. The same is true for SSDs. Does it matter if a HDD fails after 3 years or an SSD after 4 or visa versa? You still need to replace the disk. That's why NAS boxes implement RAID so you don't have downtime or data loss from a disk failure (or multiple failures).
 
This is just a 2 bay NAS with a gigabit port to a switch. the speeds are fine. I'm just hoping that on paper a SSD would give him a few more years before a failure than a mechanical drive. I'm also wondering if there are any issues with an SSD in a NAS box.

E.g are there certain chipsets or OS's that don't play nice with SSD's for whatever reason.
 
mcveigh said:
This is just a 2 bay NAS with a gigabit port to a switch. the speeds are fine. I'm just hoping that on paper a SSD would give him a few more years before a failure than a mechanical drive.
Click to expand...

No. With a drive population of 2 it's pretty much a "be prepared for anything to break tomorrow without warning" scenario regardless of design. Gently used hard drives can last a loooong time, same for SSDs, theoretically.

I'm also wondering if there are any issues with an SSD in a NAS box.
Click to expand...

Nah, shouldn't be.

E.g are there certain chipsets or OS's that don't play nice with SSD's for whatever reason.
Click to expand...

Nothing that would be in a fairly recent NAS box. They might not support TRIM or all of the possible performance goodies, but with a network bottleneck, it won't matter anyway.
 
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