Raspberry Pi vs ASUSTOR NAS Head-to-Head Part 1 - Hardware

i have a problem my nas or network attached storage where i put all my old projects and back up all my computers is this 2011 mac mini it made a valiant effort but it only has usb 2.0 so when i copy over a 20 gigabyte video project it copies at a leisurely 35 megabytes per second it's been 10 years for this thing this mac lived a good life but it's time to move on but to what well the answer came in the form of an email after seeing my video on the raspberry pi satan s i set up late last year a representative from asus store emailed me and said hey jeff i like what you're doing with the pie how about we send you one of our nas's and you can compare it to the best pine ass you can build i asked more about it and he clarified no sponsorship dollars no strings attached we just want you to try out our nas and see what you think compared to a pine ass so i took him up on the offer and he sent me this this is the asus store locker store for as6604t and it has a lot of features it has a quad core processor intel based it has three usb 3.2 ports two m2 slots for caching and speed up or you can use them for extra storage it has a dual 2.5 gig ethernet jack and it has a three year warranty which is always nice when you're paying for something and it even has an hdmi out port so you can use it as like a media player and if you look at the spec sheet there's tons more details there's a lot of different things that this thing can do it has a lot of features i'm not going to get into everything because this is not a review of this asus store device this is talking about how this compares to a raspberry pi based nas setup so let's get the thing open and it comes with an accessory box here and and i don't need that giant box or that here's the actual unit so one of the nice advantages of getting an out of the box nas like this is the fact that everything is self-contained it has four drive bays and it includes a screen on it and some buttons for managing the nas and it has an on off button up here and some status lights all the hard drives have leds just a lot of nice features and going around to the back side it just has the ports that we need so those two 2.5 gig ethernet jacks two usb 3.2 ports an hdmi 2.0 a out port a giant fan to keep everything cool and this nas has a really cool feature that i won't be able to replicate on the pi at least not the pi that i'm going to be setting up today you can use one or two nvme drives like these two guys and use them for caching for caching read data and caching write data that's going to make your nas be a lot lot faster so i'm actually going to install these two really quick here all right external case pops off another thing that this board has that the raspberry pi does not is expandable ram you can actually put eight gigs of ram inside to speed up io operations which is nice i'm not going to do that upgrade today but it's something that i could do if i wanted to this is the part that i'm interested in there's a riser card here it's a pci express i think it's a four by slot right here it goes into a riser with two m.2 slots one on the front and one on the back so if i take this off i can put my m2 cards in and and add to the performance of the whole mass by letting it cache reads and writes so you can see i might even be able to get this working on the pie if i wanted to but i would need a pci switch to be able to get both of them working i'll install these two drives and this is a wd black sn750 i got this on sale on amazon so i'm gonna stick it in and see how it performs uh it's 500 gigs and then this is an xpg sx 6000 light 128 gig nvme drive this is a little smaller so i'm not even sure if this will use one for the read and one for the right or if it uses both for both or how how that works but if you only have one installed it'll only let you do read caching but if you have both it'll do read and write okay so i have both of the two nvme drives installed one on either side of this board and i can put it back into the device in that slot and you can see it's a by four slot and this is the main board of the device it has a battery for for real-time clock it doesn't have hardware rate or anything like that on it but it is a worthy little computer in its own regard a little bit faster than the raspberry pi but it's not going to win any speed records compared to something like a full desktop pc and while we're inside the case you can take a quick look it does have a nice large cooling fan which i always like that means it's going to be a little bit cooler or a little bit quieter than having a bunch of small fans all the case is constructed out of metal parts which is nice just for stability one downside is that also creates a little bit more noise in terms of the echoes and amplification inside the case but it should work out all right it looks like a pretty well constructed case it feels pretty solid so let's get that cover back on all right so we got our two caching drives installed and next up is one of my favorite parts of any new device we're going to remove these plastic little protective covers some people never do this i don't understand those people it's one of the most satisfying parts of buying a new piece of equipment and if you buy used you never really get to do this some people leave the zone until they get all bubbly and nasty but i like to take them off very nice and that is as clean as that will ever be all right so the next step is we're going to put some drives into this thing and i actually talked to talk to the person who sent me this asa store nas and thanks again so much to asistor for sending this to me they got me in touch with somebody somebody from seagate who decided that they would also just send me with no strings attached and no sponsorship dollars or anything but they did send me these drives which i'm counting as sponsorship that's why there's a little badge on this video seagate sent me their ironwolf nas eight terabyte drives and they sent me four of them so depending on the raid type that we that we make we could have a 16 terabyte raid 10 array or we could have a 24 terabyte raid 5 or raid 6. but these drives are made for nas devices specifically and one of the nice things that seagate has done in the past few years is make it very clear which of their drives use cmr versus smr and i'm not going to get into the details on this but cmr is a conventional magnetic recording and smr is shielded magnetic recording and the two differ in the way that they the read and write heads put data onto the drive and there was a big to do in the in the hard drive industry last year because i think it was western digital was selling some nas rated hard drives to consumers that had smr and it's not good for a lot of write activity it makes things a lot slower the hard drive has to do more garbage collection so that was a big uh a big issue last year and so seagate makes it very clear that these are cmr they're going to be good performing drives for a nas and everybody in the world has their own anecdotes about which hard drives are the best which ones fail all the time i know a lot of people have mentioned that these old these are like five or ten year old green power drives by western digital these things will probably blow up in my face and that's probably true but i bought them because they were 20 a pop versus these guys which are 200 bucks a pop i was using those for testing i'm using these for actually testing out the performance of a good nas like this but no matter what you should try to get hard drives that are suitable for the use case that you have if you're an enterprise storage person that's trying to get tons of terabytes of high speed high capacity always online data you're probably going to want to use sas and maybe sas nvme drives like i talked about a couple videos ago but if you're building a home or small business nas or something like this nas drives like this are great for that because they're built for the moderate use case they're not going to be going 24 700 but they might be going a lot and and you want a good hard drive like this so thanks again to seagate for sending me these drives these are the eight terabytes i believe that their their entire line of the ironwolf nests the four two four eight and ten i think they might have 12 16 they have a lot of different capacities now all right so i'm going to open up these drives and put them into the cages and that is a lot of hard drive there this is let's see eight hundred dollars just worth of hard drives and i know that that's a little much the nice thing about a nas that has multiple bays like this or even with the raspberry pi is depending on the type of raid you set up you can actually add or remove hard drives over time and that way you don't have to spend 800 bucks right on the gate if you want this much capacity and this much performance you could start out with two four six or eight terabytes and expand from there so these drive trays let's see here you push the button and it slides out these drive trays are kind of a blend there's a plastic jacket on the outside that blends to a metal tray which is nice because the metal tray is going to be rigid and hold things together well and do a good job just making sure that the the drive is secure inside of the all metal case so i'm going to put these in and there should be i hope some screws there are screws in here and the quick installation kit these are for 2.5 inch hard drives and these are the ones for the 3.5 inch hard drives like these guys these drive trays do let you put in 2.5 inch drives like most most ssds but we're going to be putting in these 3.5 inch drives [Music] so now i got them all in their trays and i'm going to slide them into their slots in here and that's upside down so let's do it the right side there we go there's one [Music] two three and four now it got considerably heavier at this point because now there's four massive hard drives with a lot of drive platters in there um luckily this desk which was the cheapest one i could find on amazon is still holding up let's power it on and see what happens this power supply that comes with it looks like it's uh what is the output it's a 12 volt 7.5 amp slash 90 watt power adapter so that's that's going to give it a lot of juice if it needs it i also have my kilowatt here and i'm going to use it to measure how much power this nas actually takes while it's running and i'm going to compare that to the pi with its hard drives connected as well so i'm going to plug that in before i plug it in i also want to make sure that i plug in the network and this has 2.5 gig networking i'm going to do a whole video talking about 10 gig networking and 2.5 gig networking soon i have a one gig network for my whole house so i'm going to connect this to that for now but i'm going to do some performance testing connected directly through my 10 gig network to my mac and see how it performs the nas comes with a couple cables i believe that these are just cat 5e let's see yeah cat5e cables these are rated up to 2.5 maybe they could probably even do five gig networking they might even be able to saturate a 10 gig network over a short distance i have a little drop and a network switch over in the corner here and i'll plug it into the back here and then i'll plug in power there goes the power adapter and i'll plug in power after i turn this thing back around oh got a lot heavier with those hard drives now it has power and one of the other nice things about this enclosure i already can see it compared to the pi that i'm going to build is that everything is self-contained it's all nicely packaged i don't have to 3d print any custom cases that hold things together and it has one button here that's going to turn it on another thing i just noticed is that these two drives spun up first and now it's spinning up these two drives so it does that to prevent a huge power surge when all the different motors on the four hard drives start spinning up at the same time so this is doing its boot up process it'll probably take a couple minutes and at the end of it it should beep and i believe that this will tell me the ip address of the system which i would pay 10 or 20 bucks just for that feature on any nas just to have a little screen that shows its ip address so i can find it on the web ui immediately with the asus store you buy it open the box install some drives and turn it on building a raspberry pi nest though can be a little overwhelming if you just want to nas you might be better off buying an ass but if you want to experience building an ass making lots of little decisions and customizing the setup to your exact needs then you might be better off building an s with a raspberry pi or even a full-fledged mini itx pc if you want to get the best performance and still have a small package there's a third group of people though who don't need an ass at all they just want to watch me suffer through some painful experiences building my own and that's okay too when you build an ass with a raspberry pi you run into some problems right out of the gate how are you going to connect drives to the pi and how do you power them will you use software like open mediavault to manage your nas or configure everything from scratch for networking will you rely on the pi's built-in gigabit ethernet or try to upgrade to a faster 2.5 gigabit connection there's an immediate level of complexity asus store already solved by building the whole box for you and you pay a small premium for it but that premium is worth it if you aren't in it for the experience or extreme customization anyways i decided i'd try setting up my pineapps using a compute module 4 i o board with a pci express switch that connects to a 5 port sata card and a 1 port 2.5 gigabit ethernet card check the description for specific parts and links along with a blog post detailing the hardware setup i'll talk prices soon but for now know that this setup was about 350 bucks all in compared to 550 bucks for the asus store on paper this setup has some specs similar to the asus store nas they both have a quad core cpu and 4 gigabytes of ram they both have 2.5 gigabits ethernet and they both have four sata hard drives but the devil's in the details which we'll talk about later and i could use a dual 2.5 gig network card on the pi for link aggregation but i already know the pi is bandwidth constrained from earlier videos so i'm going to limit it to a single 2.5 gig interface so now how is it building a pine ass so this was nice and simple you just put the four drives and plug the thing into power everything works great now let's look at what it takes to get a similar hardware setup not the same hardware setup but a similar hardware setup on the raspberry pi and i'm going to use the raspberry pi compute module 4 which also has a quad-core processor and it has usb but it's usb 2 built-in you'd have to add your own usb 3 card it has gigabit ethernet built in so we're going to have to add in a 2.5 gigabit ethernet card through this pci express slot and there's a few things that we'll have to be concerned about though one is that the power connector on here can power maybe one or two cards through here if we use a suitable power supply but it's not going to power the hard drives themselves so we have to power them separately and these hard drives these iron wolf nas drives use .85 amps per drive so to be safe we'd want a power supply that has at least five amp supply on the five volt bus for these four drives otherwise they're not going to spin up properly and they're not going to work well these older green power hard drives that i used in some of my other testing only needed 0.65 amps so i could run them off of a 2 amp supply okayishly i wouldn't recommend doing that but that's what i did so do as i say not as i do you're also going to need to mount the hard drives so there are external enclosures for multiple hard drives that have sata connectors and things a lot of those are pretty expensive so i chose this which is a lot cheaper and we'll do a cost comparison at the end of this thing but these cages kind of slide into each other you can put on as many or as few as you want and you could integrate them into some other form of case but so the first thing that i'll do is pop all these drives into the cages so that we can have them at least not hanging out here ready to fall over all right so the hard drives are all wired up well they're not wired up but they're wired in uh the next thing that i'm gonna need to do is have a sata controller so the raspberry pi can talk to the hard drives and this one uses a marvel chipset on it and it has actually five sata ports so i could put on five five drives but i'm just going to be doing the four today and one thing that you might notice is that the the slot right here the the pin out for it is by four and this is a by one slot so i'm not going to be able to plug it directly in there so i'm going to need to use an adapter like this one which lets me plug this card into this slot but we have another problem here i wanted to get 2.5 gig ethernet and this on-board ethernet which uses the chip on the pi up here is only one gigabit so i want to use this card which is a 2.5 gigabit ethernet card and it actually does fit nicely in that slot but it's not going to work with both cards at the same time because we don't have any way of plugging two cards in so i'm also going to need a pci switch and this is a pci switch using a texas instruments switch chip on it and it has two slots and it has an external power connector to power the the boards that are plugged into it so i'm going to try this out i haven't tested this before but hopefully it'll work and hopefully that will let us get both four sata drives connected and 2.5 gig ethernet so we'll plug all this in together and we'll see what happens you can already see that it's a little bit less of a clean slate than that nas and if i really want to build this to be production ready i'm going to have to build a custom case for all this and probably use a different adapter than this one so that i can have different uh different things set up in it but now that we have those things plugged in i'm going to start plugging in the hard drives themselves so i got these these plugged in and then i'm going to plug them into the controller card all right then i'm going to need to power this pci switch so i actually have a power supply for it and i'll have to just leave this hanging off for now which is a bit janky but that's the way it's going to be i also need to keep everything nice and cool so i have this noxio fan and the pwm or pulse width modulation controller that lets me control a fan speed on it so i'm going to set this over here and plug it into the raspberry pi's fan connector so i got that set up this setup i'm going to need to power all the hard drives so i also need to plug them into a power source which i'll do like this all right and at this point i'm going to need to power these and i'm going to use a pc power supply for that just because that's going to provide me enough power to power up all four of these high-powered hard drives separately from the raspberry pi itself so i have this pc power supply and one annoyance with a lot of these pc power supplies this one is fully modular is you have to have a way to turn on the power supply it has an on off switch on the back but that switch doesn't actually put power to the outputs you have to short the ps on to ground which this connector does and that will turn on the power supply and give it output through all these different modular plugs which i can then use to power the hard drives so i'm going to plug everything in here and see how that works out and i should note that this power supply says that its 5 volt rail supplies 100 watts um and the 12 volt rail supply is 696 watts and 15 amps so it should be enough to power these hard drives we'll see if that's true or not in just a moment so all right so the hard drives all seem to power up okay through this power supply one thing to note is that i could use this power supply to power the pi and to power this external card as well but just to keep things a little bit safer since one time i accidentally shorted something in here and caused some some problems so i have this wired up through a separate molex power supply and i'm going to power the pi through a 5 amp 12 volt power supply using this barrel plug so i'm going to turn on the pci switch using that so now these cards should have power and i'm going to turn on the raspberry pi itself after i plug in the network interface so this is just going to do one gigabit networking for now and then i'll switch to 2.5 gigabits when i want to do my performance testing after i get the software sorted out so let's see what happens all right so everything turned on i'm actually going to switch the network jack to 2.5 gig card and see if it's actually working to get a link looks like it is this is all good signs what i'm going to do now is go over to the computer and see if we can see all the drives see if we can get them set up and we'll go from there and for that i hate to do this to you but i'm gonna have to make you wait until part two which is coming next week i'll compare the rest of the setup for both nasa's i'll benchmark them and i'll share some interesting problems i ran into on both devices i'll give my final verdict then so subscribe to see it and until you watch that video i'm jeff gearling bandwidth constrained so i'm going to limit it i'm gonna i'm gonna five gigabit ethernet cards through this pci x s or p that's not pci x i'm gonna need to get my pliers really quick hold on a lot of people wanna watch me suffer i mean it's just good entertainment

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 253,437

Keywords: raspberry pi, nas, asustor, seagate, network attached storage, storage, western digital, ironwolf, hard drive, ssd, nvme, caching, san, iscsi, setup, hardware, compute module, compute module 4, cm4, pi, pi nas, omv, open media vault, media, 2.5g, link aggregation, pci, pci express, power supply, psu, drives, disks, disk, data, raid, raid 5, raid 0, raid 10, raid 6, zfs, btrfs, linux, debian, build, diy, itx, pc, make, how-to, guide

Id: vBccak8f-VY

Length: 25min 16sec (1516 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/jakethepeg111]

Really interesting video thanks and I look forward to the next episode. It feels so far like a bit of an unfair competition... we'll see I guess!

Somebody else's feet and hand made it into the video at moments. Red shirt Jeff?