Wanted: ZFS NAS + Thunderbolt i/o

[ibgb]

Gig E is not too bad, but for high(er) speed i/o, a storage appliance with thunderbolt would be perfect. Workstations/laptops could plug in with thunderbolt and get 10 times the speed of gigE. For backups and net access gigE would seem practical.

There are some boards with thunderbolt, and support is in some OSes and being added. I guess it is a matter of time. It would make a great storage appliance.

 

[GWestphal]

Assuming you're talking about 8 disk or less NASs with HDDs and not SSDs then you likely never see full 10 Gb throughput. In RAID0 that would be roughly 8*80ish=640MB per second. But throw in ZFS with any sort of parity and you're going to be talking 1/4-1/2 of that pretty easily depending on the features. Now if you're talking about a 250K SAN, yeah probably, but that has 100+ disks. With SSDs it would likely be possible as well.

Areca has an 8 drive thunderbolt/usb 3 device.

 

[greenhawk]

given how thunderbolt currently works, you can get some nice fast storage sub systems, but only having one device connected at a time is a bit of a killer when looking at sharing the data amount several people at once. But then, thunderbolt is not that common on hardware yet so while it is better on paper, it falls down in usability.

 

[Mfusick]

If rather build a server.

If you need local speed just RAID 0 two 3 TB HDDs and cache with an SSD.

Storage and performance are different.

anyone who needs raid hardware speed over thunderbolt it better off just installing locally.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Thunderbolt is locally. It's not a networking thing.

 

[beginner99]

Thunderbolt is locally. It's not a networking thing.

exactly so why not just buy a tower that fits all HDDs and use SATA?

Or use Gig E pairing. is available on most advanced MB and some mid ranges NAS boxes offer it too. You can easily reach about 150 MB/s with that. Already faster than most single drives (shows you how crappy they are).

 

[MarkLuvsCS]

10GigE is not too expensive and the support is already pretty widespread. I don't see the reason to prefer thunderbolt that isn't fleshed out yet, to a standard that is widespread and backwards compatible for all devices.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

10GigE is not too expensive and the support is already pretty widespread. I don't see the reason to prefer thunderbolt that isn't fleshed out yet, to a standard that is widespread and backwards compatible for all devices.

This.

If I wanted a NAS for backups, centralization, and home server duties, but also wanted really really fast access for certain reasons (whatever those may be) I'd probably just plug one of those cards into the NAS and whichever workstation was important, buy the last switch I'll ever need, and run everybody else one 1Gb or WiFi like a sane person.

Of course, it's up to OP to decide if spending >$1000 on networking gear is worth it just to break the 1Gbps barrier. (And as other people have mentioned, multiplexing 2-4 1GbE ports together is probably the more affordable option anyway.)