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Replacement NAS
David Hess:
--- Quote from: nctnico on April 15, 2024, 03:43:53 pm ---
--- Quote from: David Hess on April 15, 2024, 02:58:49 pm ---I tested booting and operating from 4 SATA SSDs in hardware RAID10 and it was not any faster. It doubled the storage and added redundancy, but had other disadvantages. The hardware RAID controllers are not fast enough to take good advantage of SSDs.
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No surprise there ;D . I have a 4 lane M.2 PCIe SSD in my PC. It shows a transfer rate of 1GB/s when reading. I doubt there are any cheap RAID controllers which support that kind of throughput. IMHO RAID as in having disks in parallel is only useful to increase throughput from hard drives (with spinning disks).
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I should have said that my 20 year old hardware RAID controllers, which were fast for the time, cannot take good advantage of the speed of SSDs. More recent hardware RAID controllers can definitely take advantage of SATA/SAS SSD speeds. NVMe SSDs are another thing entirely.
--- Quote from: Berni on April 15, 2024, 04:12:27 pm ---Yeah hardware RAID controller cards are not a very good idea anymore.
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They still have their place, like if you want to boot from a redundant volume.
--- Quote ---They are just another potential point of failure, and when they do fail you are in for a world of hurt getting things running again. The striping on your drives might not be just simply compatible with some other RAID card you might have laying around, so you better swap it with an identical one. Then you have to set it up correctly to recognize the array correctly again, if you do something particularly stupid and have it attempt an array rebuild with wrong configuration it might even nuke your data...etc
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I have not had any trouble moving my RAID sets between my different Areca cards, but that is one reason I like them. I have been picking them up on Ebay for cheap, and refurbishing them for my own use.
--- Quote ---And what do you get for using a RAID card? Usually it is performance. However these days drives have evolved and CPUs are much more powerful, so in a lot of cases it is actually SLOWER to use a hardware RAID card. You can get very good performance from software RAID solutions these days. Just buy a simple SAS HBA card and throw a ZFS array at those drives on a modern CPU and you will be getting plenty of performance. No hardware configuration needed either, the HBA card can be replaced with any other HBA card by just sticking it in and booting the machine up, as long as the OS can find the drive it just works. All of this is performant enough to saturate a 10G connection.
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That is what I thought and why I ran performance tests using my old workstation. TrueNAS was faster than Windows Storage Spaces by a little bit, but my old Areca hardware RAID controllers were faster than TrueNAS. I only ended up using Storage Spaces because of the Samba problem that I mentioned earlier, and Storage Spaces being more flexible with swapping and upgrading drives.
SiliconWizard:
--- Quote from: Halcyon on April 15, 2024, 11:28:25 am ---
--- Quote from: unseenninja on April 15, 2024, 10:14:12 am ---Most people experience bit flips as random blue screens of death and put it down to micros~1's software quality.
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To be fair, usually when things fuck up, it's usually Microsoft's fault. I've been chasing weird and wonderful issues for weeks.
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Yes. The above was actually quite funny. The probability of a "bit flip" due to cosmic rays crashing your machine is thousands of times lower than a software bug.
nctnico:
--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on April 15, 2024, 06:42:06 pm ---
--- Quote from: Halcyon on April 15, 2024, 11:28:25 am ---
--- Quote from: unseenninja on April 15, 2024, 10:14:12 am ---Most people experience bit flips as random blue screens of death and put it down to micros~1's software quality.
--- End quote ---
To be fair, usually when things fuck up, it's usually Microsoft's fault. I've been chasing weird and wonderful issues for weeks.
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Yes. The above was actually quite funny. The probability of a "bit flip" due to cosmic rays crashing your machine is thousands of times lower than a software bug.
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You can make fun of cosmic rays and it could be classified as far-fetched but radiation isn't the only possible problem. A poor power supply / power distribution design or slightly flaky memory will cause mysterious problems as well. When I first got my previous PC, it would trip up when doing a longwinded (30 minute) compilation run every now and then. Sometime it would compile OK, sometimes not. In the end I let memtest run with the most extensive tests for a good part of a day until it did find a memory failure. After some more runs and specifying the test and memory area, I managed to pinpoint it to a faulty memory module. After exchanging the memory module for a good one, the compilation process succeeded every time. Needless to say my current PC has ECC memory.
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