Please recommend me a NAS with minimum 6x2.5" bays and no FAN

[DC1MC]

OK, time for an update, it's not an April fools joke but rather a sad joke, underlining the extreme "cheapification" of the SSD devices, combined with bait and switch tactics, now happily embraced by the brand-name manufctureres as well.

Exibit A: CRUCIAL by Micron BX500 120GB SSD The Memory & Storage Experts (TM) (Product of China)

So let's do a quick search: this well known hardware review site say it has Micron branded 3D flash chips and shows up even a picture of the PCB with nice Micron logo:

 
OK then, I've used Micron memory, it shouldn't be that bad, the reviews are very polarized, either OK or extreme crap, oh well is just 25,99EUR at Saturn (large German retailer), let's get one and see how it goes.
Step 1: staying idle connected on an external USB3.0 adapter: after 1/2hour it feels warm to the hand, ca. 30-35C outside temperature, the case it's full plastic, no metal around except for the screw inserts.

Step 2: Does it cooperate with my JMicron chip usb adapter and smartmontools ? Yes it does, and the SSD is known already in the smartmontools database, cool, let's have a quick look and long offline test, all OK, but the highest temperature logged is 42C with practically no activity.
All other logged values and test results show a veri virginal device with just two power cycles .

Step 3: Good bye warranty, hello similar miserably partitioned case as in the SanDisk situation and a very similar looking PCB, can you spot the difference in the attached picture ? (Hint the Crucial is the one on top).
Good, let's do a quick read test and "finger measure" the controller and the flash chips:
dd if=/dev/sdc of=/dev/null bs=4k
Going..., going..., done: 485MB/s, not too shabby but the controlled feels uncomfortably hot, I estimate ca. 60C, smartmon agrees, highest logged value 58C, the flash chips are barely above their idle temp.

Step 4: OK then, what about an intensive sustained write test:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=4k

Going, go... AUCH, HELL IT BURNS  , turn it off, turn it off now, shit it doesn't react to Ctrl-C, the system log starts spewing SATA errors, out of the USB socket, reboot the machine.
Aftermath: device recovered after cooling, the smart data is not so virginal anymore (there were logged some interrupted write commands, no shit Sherlock), and the highest logged temperature 73C !!!.
There is no way the poor guy would have survived in its plastic case inside a laptop  .
Strangely enough, the flash chips were barely a bit warmer during the 30sec it took for the whole device to do its thermal runaway, this is strange to have the controller getting so hot because from the data transfer pov it should have been even lower than when reading, I do hope that the encryption algorithm (if any) it's CPU power symmetric for encryption and decryption and the surrounding little LDO regulator and whatever little PMIC chips were totally cool ?!?!

Oh well, let's look a bit closer to these Micron chips, than of course the shenanigans appeared immediately, I have found the EXACT same situation like these people:

https://twitter.com/pana_junk_pc/status/1071719728672989185

https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/a4uwag/spectek_flash_without_logo_grade_marking_low/

Executive summary, the The Memory & Storage Experts (TM) put inside this model some flash so crappy that even their failed-wafers recycling company didn't dare to put their name & logo on it !!! Actually it doesn't have ANY name or logo on it, like the most miserable Asian junk made in the 3rd shift  !!!
Of course the devices send to the established hardware review sites had Micron chips, that probably  worked reasonable, if not stellar, and then when the device got a bit of reputation (not a speed demon, but it works), they've switched with the bottom of the junk-barrel crap  .

Well, most likely the situation is similar in this capacity and price range, so I'll happily skip the WD Green and Kingston, and to make thing worse, one really needs to put individual little radiators on the controller and flash chips if wands to have at least a minimum of reliability. Because of course the chips surfaces are not same level and there are hich cpacitors and other passives protruding even higher than all the ICs on the PCB.

 My solution for this is:

Radiators for the controller:
https://www.ebay.de/itm/Aluminum-Kuhlkorper-Heatsink-fur-GPU-VRAM-IC-LED-10-Pack-11-11-5mm/113324638608

Radiators for the flash:
https://www.ebay.de/itm/Aluminum-Kuhlkorper-Heatsink-fur-GPU-VRAM-IC-LED-5-Pack-35-10-10mm/113324638717

Thermal glue:
https://www.ebay.de/itm/Silverbead-Warmeleitkleber-Thermal-Glue-fur-Heatsinks-LED-VRAM-VRM-CPU-GPU-10g/111972697722

The Asian suppliers have them a bit cheaper, but I don't want to wait another 3-4weeks.

So yes, if you want to fool someone buy them a Crucial BX series SSD, they will never forget you 

 Cheers,
 DC1MC

PS: I understand somehow that low capacity SSDs are competing in a price sensitive market, but why must EVERYONE be crap, it's not like the 120GB miserable crap it's 7 times cheaper than a good 960GB disk ?!? 
 



 

[rdl]

Are you actually considering use of bottom-end entry level SSDs in a NAS?

[DC1MC]

Are you actually considering use of bottom-end entry level SSDs in a NAS?

Uhmm, actually no, don't know where did you get this idea from my postings, but I was considering to use for the boot and system disk one of this bottom-end SSD and I was actually curious what makes them bottom-and and if there are some small improvements that could switch them to mediocre.
I was imagining that of course some low speed flash will be used, maybe lose more performance due to DRAM-less controllers and also some reliability on repeated write erase operations that didn't matter so much for a NAS OS disk.

I didn't imagine for a moment that the enclosures are designed so thermal management hostile, that the established flash vendors in the market will use "anonymous" ultra low grade memory and that the controllers will thermally self-destruct instead of throttling the transfers or going in a safe mode. But hey, at least they carefully log: "Maximum Temperature error > 75C, you should change the disk...". And this is the lucky situation if they're not crapping out completely.

In any case, I've seen that cooling them properly helps a bit and I will do it, and for the data disks I will use the high-end devices, no way around it  .

 Cheers,
 DC1MC

[Berni]

But aren't good quality MLC flash SSDs still insanely expensive for 1TB drives?

[DC1MC]

But aren't good quality MLC flash SSDs still insanely expensive for 1TB drives?

Eh well, in my naivety I believed  that there is a "middle class" in between absolute crap and rich bastards, but actually there isn't any. I mean for a home NAS I don't need an "Extreme Ultra Enterprise SSD" and I've thought that there are some things that could be made to improve the low-end drives, like better thermal and stuff like this, assuming that inside were honest flash and controllers, not just leftover garbage.

For a long time I was hearing that the industry has to deal with an over-abundance of flash and doesn't know what to do with it, actually it seems that it has to deal with a lot of miserable crappy flash that can't be pushed in the phones and other gadgets so the last dumping place is the cheap SSD, that has so many * and ** and *** to the already miserable characteristics that practically means nothing in reality, it's practically a place of dumping electro garbage.

The average and hi quality flash is eaten like crazy by the mobile industry, googles and aws and other data vampires. And the "cheap" shit, it not even so cheap actually.

It was an enlightening experience to open those cheap guys and see how they're done and play with the firmware and stuff, totally recommend if you want to be convinced to buy hi-end stuff for everything, no experience like personal experience.

 After the 8x controllers will arrive and I'll be done with the NAS infrastructure I'll get some EVOs and open them out of curiosity.


 Cheers,
 DC1MC

[ogden]

Eh well, in my naivety I believed  that there is a "middle class" in between absolute crap and rich bastards, but actually there isn't any.

There is middle class indeed. Just for example Kingston:

Kingston A400: home users, 3year warranty or ~300x TBW*
Kingston UV500: "middle class", 5years, ~500x TBW
Kingston DC500: enterprise (server SSDs), ~2000x TBW, 5years

* lifetime Total Bytes Written, example: 1TB disk guarantee is over when more than 300TB written

Your Crucial BX500 is cheap end, more or less similar to Kingston A400. I would stay away from this class.

Those high density MLC/TLC/QLC NAND flash chips are inherently bad BY DESIGN, w/o heavy error correction and decent amount of spare blocks they would be completely useless for storage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_cell

Low cost SSD's are getting cheapest to manufacture chips. Kinda you get what you pay for - obviously.

[rdl]

Uhmm, actually no, don't know where did you get this idea from my postings, but I was considering to use for the boot and system disk one of this bottom-end SSD and I was actually curious what makes them bottom-and and if there are some small improvements that could switch them to mediocre.

I guess I didn't see any other reason for you testing them as you did. For boot and or system drives in a basic NAS, pretty much anything will work. My FreeNAS machine boots from a pair of Sandisk flash drives. System logs and such are on a really cheap Kingston flash drive, because with a lot of logging it will wear out in a year or so.

This morning I was getting some new drives set up - nice, cheap spinning disk drives. After copying over almost 200 GB of data to the new drives without a break, they had only increased about 6C in temperature. That's with only a single low speed fan in the box which I can't hear at all from 2 meters away.

Some nice big, good quality SSDs would be great to have, but I just don't see them being cost effective yet.

[Berni]

The MLC flash technology is usually a good middle ground for a decent SSD. The SLC drives are out there, but they are so expensive that they are only really viable for the enterprise costumers. On the other end TLC and QLC flash are what is in the cheap bottom of the barrel consumer drives where the write endurance and data retention becomes terrible.

The problem with flash for long term storage is that "bit rot" is quite rampant with it. If you only read a area of flash or let it sit unused for a long time the charge in the cells starts to leak and eventually flip the state of a cell. High capacity flash always has ECC bytes in there for this very reason as it would be way too unreliable otherwise, but at some point it overwhelms error correction with too many bit flips and the flash just spits out its best guess for that sector. This is probably where using FreeNAS is a good idea for SSD storage since it has the ZFS filesystem that has extra error correction built into it to detect and fix things like this.

I use a PC server running Unraid with 12TB worth of spinning rust in it that is cooled by a single 120mm fan via 3D printed air ducting. You can only really hear the fan if all the drives are spun down, but the 4 mechanical drives inside do need a little airflow to keep them cool. Stopping the fan has them rise above 40°C and that's not good for longevity. Also i run VMs on the server so the CPU does also sometimes need some airflow over its big ass heatpipe heatsink to keep it happy, but when doing only NAS tasks it can actually run fan less.

[mariush]

Still plenty of SSDs with MLC

ADATA SU900, Premier Pro SP900,
Samsung 860 Pro, 970 Pro
Corsair MP500, Neutron
Crucial MX200
Plextor M6e , M8Pe
PNY CS1111
Kingston SSDNow E50
Intel S3520, 900P series (Optane)
HP M700
Teamgroup Dark L3
Transcend SSD360, SSD370 (Premium Series), MTS400, MTS600, MTS800
etc etc