Should I choose all flash nas?

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Hi guys,
My group is trying to build a new NAS for following needs:

  1. 10GBE network(maybe BCM57412 for RDMA);
  2. iscsi for esxi to support about 10 to 15 people working on there own virtual desktop;
  3. nfs for those virtual machines;
  4. For our daily work, it’s mostly will be coding, PCB layout, simulation and etc. They are almost all small files so maybe the random 4K performance is most important?
    We’ve decided to choose TrueNas Scale for host OS because our limited budget but still not sure what we should choose for storage devices: All U.2 NVMe SSD or HDD data vdev + SSD special vdev for metadata or even HDD only is good enough? If we choose the second choice, should we add slog devices?

Thanks a lot!

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How big the capacity do you need?

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Do you want a NAS or do you need compute?

Since it sounds like you are running a business of this thing, and data is mission critical.
So, why not have 2 devices instead:

  1. Compute and fast Storage
  2. Backup (using HDDs)
3 Likes
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about 50T

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Budget will dictate what you can do and what is your backup plan as remember Raid is not a backup

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Price up a SFP28 network. For a production system the price difference shouldn’t be too much, and you get 2.5X the speed.

I’d suggest at least having an SSD pool for VM / or C:\ drives and for working with current projects. HDDs will likely be fine for archiving / bulk data.

NFS may not be the best storage solution, take a look at iSCSI. At the very least benchmark both.

Are you using virtual desktops currently? If not you should do a test with local storage to work out if it’ll work for you.

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iscsi over nfs is bit better, but more in the past, not much gain now, just complication. Smd is all ok and top speed.
as for network a 10gb is very anemic at only 992meg of transfert. at bare minimum go with 25g to at least get a matching speed of the disk.
For disk. go with intel / solidigm : real entreprise drive. no samsung stuff or consumer.

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thanks!