Fast NAS: Drive type conundrum

Hardware Hub
1

I have a NAS that currently just has spinning rust drives. I’d like to upgrade to something that will give me faster reads/writes.

I do a lot of photo editing, and my daughter does video editing.

I’d like to end up with about 8TB of fast storage.

We have fiber throughout the house, and all of the important workstations have 10G interfaces.

The NAS has an older dual Xeon CPU/motherboard, but I’d really like to use something newer and that draws a lot less power and generates a lot less heat.

The chassis has 16 drive bays, in addition to 2 drive bays for the boot drives. 8 of the drive bays can be used for U.2 NVMe OR SATA/SAS. The other 8 can only be SATA/SAS.

NVMEs make sense, since I can easily get over 10Gbps (assuming the CPU can handle it), but of course the limitation there is the number of PCIe lanes.

SATA/SAS SSDs would be quite a bit faster than spinning rust, but they cost basically the same as NVMe drives and aren’t as fast…

2

Id personally grab 4 Optane 905P U.2 drives and use them as a 2nd tier fast storage to a larger HDD. They are cheap for the 960GB models, and each one already saturates your 10gb connection. The latency will be nice but not necessarily needed, but more so the stability of long term storage. I would not ever want to use NAND for data that could be sitting on a network drive for years just being read from occasionally. If you use two 8-16TB drives in a simple mirror you get large enough capacity and those sizes are much better price/capacity now days, and you still get a fast “working area” where the SSDs can be used for incoming writes and recently used files.

3

I should have mentioned my total storage requirements are really in the 8TB range.

4

Look for something like this:

  • Easily maxes out 10gb network
  • Relatively affordable
  • Reliable
  • Simple (single drive, no complicated RAID setups required)