Raspberry Pi vs ASUSTOR NAS Head-to-Head Part 2 - the VERDICT!

in part one i set up two nasa's an asus store locker store four nas and a home built raspberry pines both of these machines have quad-core processors 2.5 gig networking though the asus store has dual 2.5 gig and can hold at least four sata hard drives linked together for network storage via raid but hardware is only half the equation nas devices like the asus store offer a ton of features that may be harder to replicate on the pi so how easy is it to get the software set up and which one has the best features and experience once you get it all plugged in in this video i'm going to focus primarily on network storage since that's the thing that's most important for me i already have an apple tv connected to my household tv and i'm happy with the features it offers either nasa would be able to serve my local media collection to it i only mentioned this because the asus store has a lot of features and app integrations that i won't be mentioning at all in this video just the network storage now last video we left off on the asus store right after powering it up the first time the first thing i did was press the buttons on the front of the asus store to initialize the raid array after a few seconds the asus store's ip address was displayed so i opened that up in my browser the first time i logged in using the default admin username and password there was a system update available so i went ahead and installed it after the reboot i clicked through the little intro screen then arrived at the dashboard i clicked around to get my bearings and eventually wound up in the storage manager where i could see that the automatically created raid 5 volume was synchronizing the asus store chose raid 5 for me by default since it gives a good mix of capacity only one drive's amount of storage would be taken up by parity data and redundancy any one drive could fail and my data would still be intact but raid 5 and raid 6 require an initial parity calculation between the drives in the array and that takes some time in this case there were three eight terabyte drives and it took over 10 hours now wait i hear you say didn't you install four drives in that nest couldn't you do raid 10 well yes i did thanks for mentioning it apparently one of the four seagate drives was dead on arrival it made quite a racket when it powered up and if i tried using it in a volume i got an error saying the specified discs do not exist i can assure you this disc exists it's just broken i'm kind of wondering if red shirt jeff might have gotten a hold of this drive anyways when i was checking on the volume i noticed the ssd drives didn't get set up as cash drives by default so i went ahead and added them to the volume as a read and write cache the asus store builds a raid 1 volume with the ssds so since i mixed two different size drives the cache volume was the size of the smaller drive 120 gigs for shadowing it's not a great idea to mix two different types of nvme drives in raid more on that later i also installed iron wolf health management from asus stores app center to see extra details about the life and health of the drives i installed in the nas everything worked great right out of the box and i was happy so i let the drives finish their synchronization before i ran any tests and in that time i also enabled ssh on the asus store so i could log into it and explore the version of linux installed it apparently runs something called adm or asus store data master and it's based on a minimal busybox linux build that's a mixed blessing because it's nice to have a lightweight linux distro for better security and maintenance but it also means i can't just install anything i want on it if i wanted to use the nas as a more general purpose server like i could with the pi i can run things inside containers on the asus store but i couldn't easily install things on adm directly or install an entirely different linux distro if i wanted not that most people buying a pre-built nas would do that anyways but it's good to know i also checked on the running processes and found that md admin was used for raid management by default and dm cache was used for ssd caching both of these tools are well supported in linux and it looks like you can also use btrfs if you want to have snapshot support built in i didn't see any way to add zfs support but again people buying pre-built nasa's are usually not the type of people who dive into youtube comments and start complaining anytime someone mentions storage and doesn't use zfs by default anyways back to the tests i jumped into the file sharing and access control ui which made it easy to set up you can easily enable samba for windows afp for macs or nfs and configure all the relevant options settings applied quickly and it was intuitive enough that i didn't have to consult a manual at all now before getting into the numbers i thoroughly tested afp smb and nfs and all the numbers for all three were pretty close on my mac enough that i chose to do the rest of the tests using samba on a separate windows 10 pc dedicated to the task with a melanox card attached to my 10 gig network using a direct attach cable and i should also note and i won't go into the details here but i ran into weird network issues that i ultimately isolated to my network switch and to figure that out i'm thankful asus store allows access to ssh so i could install iperf3 from the app center and benchmark network throughput between the nas and various computers to find the source of my networking problems anyways back to the task at hand it was time to see how fast the asus store goes i ran a few different tests but the main thing i wanted to see was how fast i could copy large files like my video projects to and from the nas so i copied an 8 gigabyte file from the test pc to the nas and back copying to the nas i got around 205 megabytes per second without the ssd cache and up to 220 megabytes per second with the cache i actually had to disable the ssd cache initially when i used my different size drives for some reason they slowed down the copy to about 30 megabytes per second at least i know it's not because redshirt jeff is shouting at my discs [Applause] i even installed the same two drives on the pi and ran some i o zone benchmarks on a raid 1 volume and was able to get 190 megabytes per second just testing raw write speed so i'm still working with asus store to figure out the source of the right cache issue with mixed ssds like i was trying but when asus store asked seagate to then send me some nvme drives so i'd have a matching pair well they sent me these terabyte nas ssds and they're fast and big and apparently so big the asus store could only use half the space with the default four gigs of ram the system ships with luckily i had a spare 8 gig ddr4 stick from a laptop upgrade so i put that in the empty ram slot and tried to set up cache again this time it let me use the entire capacity of these two giant nvme drives which equates to about 1.7 tebibytes and caching worked great now i could copy to the nas willy-nilly and i was always getting more than 200 megabytes per second no matter what kind of data i was copying across before i move on though i do want to mention the main reason seagate sent me these particular ironwolf ssds and that's longevity they cost a bit more than consumer drives like the xpg and wd black but they're rated for one drive right per day over the ssd's five year warranty a consumer ssd like the samsung 970 evo i also use sometimes is rated for a third of that these ssds are built for nasa's and they have a price to match they performed flawlessly in my testing though i can't give any long term review yet alright back to the testing copying the eight gigabyte file from the nas resulted in an unflinching 275 megabytes per second that's around 2.2 gigabits so pretty close to the maximum real-world throughput you can get through a 2.5 gig network and i use the nas for some video editing too and it felt about as good as editing directly on my mac though loading a complex timeline did take a little longer that's fair because my local ssd storage is about 10 times faster than the network link itself now let's jump over to the raspberry pines like with the hardware setup i had to do a few extra things before i could even install nas software i had to compile my own custom pi os kernel with config options for ata and ahci so the pi would recognize sata drives i also had to add the real tech r8169 kernel module so my 2.5 gig network adapter would work i cover how to do that in detail in a link in the description now let's get started by installing openmediavault over ssh i used a headless raspberry pi os install because i'm dedicating this pi to nas duty and i don't want the overhead of a gui running i decided to use open media vault because it seems to be the best open source out of the box nas solution and it's been maintained well for a really long time the install process is pretty simple you run a command that downloads a script from the open mediavault github and then it spends about 12 minutes installing everything it needs on your pi at the end the installer wound up changing the pi's ip address so i used nmap on my mac to find the ip of the pi again and log back in with that done i logged into omv's admin interface by entering the ip address in my browser just like the asus store the ui is pretty straightforward though it's a little less colorful i went to the raid management section and created a raid 5 array with the three good seagate drives and then it started initializing the array again this takes a long time so i did some other things while it finished that first sync the entire time it was thinking the cpu was getting hit pretty heavily and the discs were riding about 400 megabytes per second so the pi was going full tilt it's not a good idea to try to start using your storage until it's done with this process once it was done i wanted to create an nfs and samba share so i had to do a few extra steps that the asus store did automatically i had to create a file system so i did that and waited for it to complete then i went to the nfs tab and added a new share one thing i found annoying about omv's interface though is i would click ok thinking that applied the change but then a few seconds later a bar would appear at the top of the screen saying i have to apply the changes for them to take effect it's a small thing but it happened every time i made a change and it made everything feel a little disjointed especially since sometimes when i when i clicked okay it would take three or four seconds before the little bar would pop up but back to the task at hand now that i had a share and i also set it up in samba so i could access it on windows i hopped over to my windows machine for the testing when i copied my eight gigabyte test file to the pi it copied at a whopping 225 megabytes per second at least for the first half gig then it settled in at around 95 megabytes per second the whole time it copied i monitored the pi with atop and found the cpu wasn't completely overloaded but it did seem like the process of transferring so much data from the network to the cpu and back out to the disks along with the parity calculation caused some amount of queuing that slowed down writes that initial spike was because the pi quickly queued up the first chunk of data in ram which is a lot faster than the raid 5 array once the ram cache filled up and the disks had to catch up though it was a battle between the network packets and disk bandwidth on the pi's pesky little buy one pci bus copying data back from the pi to the pc resulted in a lot more encouraging results though the pi was solid at megabytes per 193mbps the whole copy and if you remember from some of my older videos the raspberry pi's capacity for network traffic is tied to the clock speed the compute module 4 is clocked at 1.5 gigahertz by default so what happens if you overclock it to 2 gigahertz to match the asus store's clock speed now the pi can write through around 100 megabytes per second which is about 5 percent faster and copying back from the pi now 202 megabytes per second another 5 speed up so there you have it the pi can handle a respectable 100 megabytes per second when writing to raid 5 and serves up 200 megabytes per second read speeds i wanted to see if removing the raid parity calculation from the equation made much of a difference so i deleted the raid 5 volume and created a new rate 0 volume to get the maximum performance possible i ran the copy and was getting a nice 233 megabytes per second but then the pi completely locked up i tried it with and without the overclock but kept having the pie lock up whenever it would go over 220 megabytes per second i still haven't figured out why but maybe it's the pi's way of telling me not to fly so close to the sun stick to a safer raid type now one thing i used on the asa store but missed a lot on the pine ass was the ability to easily put the drives to sleep or set up wake on lan so i could remotely start it up if i had to shut it down there are some hacks i could do to try to put the pie into a sort of sleep mode or set up some sort of wake on land through a poe injector board but in reality it's a lot more work implementing features like this on the pi there's even an auto shutdown plug-in for omv but getting the pi back up is the part that's a pain once it's shut down alright so now you've seen everything the hardware setup process the software setup process and how both nasa's perform what would i recommend well for most people i'd recommend an out-of-the-box nas like i said in part one if you're not in it for the extreme customization or the experience a nas based on a low-powered sbc is going to be frustrating to get going and keep tidy and the asus store is a really good nas the only issue i encountered was related to using two different sized nvme drives and i'm still trying to figure out what happened there it was consistently fast pretty quiet and it has every feature you can imagine in a modern nas device and one aspect where i thought the pi would actually beat the asus door is in energy efficiency but i was wrong both devices seemed to idle around 45 watts with all three drives spinning and as i mentioned the lack of a feature like wake on lan means you'd probably leave the pi running 24 7. that would use a lot more energy than an asus store which can be powered off and spin down the hard drives a lot easier powered on at idle the asus store used less than 10 watts and this adds up to a sizeable power savings over long periods of time in terms of upgradeability both have their pluses and minuses the pi offers almost infinite possibilities but it's severely hampered by having only one lane of pci express gen 2 bandwidth available the asus store has a lot more bandwidth faster usb 3.2 ports two internal nvme slots and even an extra ram slot for memory upgrades but it is a custom board and custom linux os without the same community and ecosystem around it so with the asa store if you like it that's awesome if you don't you're not going to be able to mold it into something completely different like you could with the pie finally there's the price and this is something i know a bunch of people will harp on in the comments first one person is going to ask how can you charge 550 bucks for that asus store and the next person will mention how that's a pretty good deal for a mid-tier nas with dual 2.5 gig ethernet but the truth is this the the raspberry pi setup i have is splayed out all over my desk as you can see on the screen all the different components which i had to buy separately and sometimes wait a few days or weeks to get them add up to around 350 bucks but that doesn't include a case so if you want a good setup for the pine ass you're going to have to get creative until someone makes an integrated board and speaking of that i am excited to say someone is doing just that though not quite the same spec as mine ass the wire trustee sata is a board in the same spirit as the helios 4 or the odroid cloud shell it's an all-in-one compute module board that has the sata controller and power built right in and they're even building a case for 2.5 inch drives so you could have a complete pine ass in a box on your desk i hope to cover the wire trustee set us soon so subscribe so you don't miss that back to the pines though it's just not fully baked yet and having to compile a custom kernel for now already puts this project on a different level of difficulty so in the end what do i think the premium you pay for a fully built nas is worth it if you aren't in it for the experience customizability or just want to build something for the lowest possible cost and for a lot of people one gigabit is enough so you could reduce the complexity and price of the project a little bit if you wanted dropping the 2.5 gig network card would also allow me to drop the pci express switch and some extra software configuration and it drops the price another 50 bucks but in the end what am i going to use now instead of my mac mini the answer to that is the asus store i really do need to replace the mini and i need a workhorse nasa it's going to let me work with tons of footage as i continue growing this youtube channel instead of spending my time debugging pi issues with mine ass i'm going to spend time exploring new things for new videos and it bears repeating i will still be backing up everything on the nas with rclone to an s3 glacier-backed bucket because repeat after me raid is not a backup in this case do as i do and follow the 321 backup plan three copies of important data in two locations one of which is offsite now is this the last time you'll hear me talking about my pines or the asus store probably not i hope you learned something please subscribe and until next time i'm jeff gearling the automatically created raid volume raid volume that was exciting even though i chose to do the rest enough even oh man action jack barker sticks with safer so man bang it do not exist but i can assure you the kids are walking upstairs right now

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 162,452

Rating: 4.946866 out of 5

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, iperf3, performance, benchmark, comparison

Id: KhHAf7mTxkk

Length: 17min 32sec (1052 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Raspberry Penas

[u/geerlingguy]

I posted a hardware build / part 1 (here), and in this video I show the software setup, compared to an ASUSTOR Lockerstor 4 (which runs ADM, a custom Linux distro based on busybox). OMV seems pretty simple to set up and administer, though it's not without its warts.

Bottom line: 100 MiB/s RAID 5 write and 200 MiB/s read over 2.5 Gbps network. I also tried RAID 0 (since the Pi's CPU has a hard time keeping up with parity calculations and network interrupts), and could get 230 MiB/s both ways... but the Pi locked up after about 10 seconds every time (can't figure out why).

[u/discofisso]

Thank you Jeff, great content as usual.