Should You Use SSDs For Your NAS?

ssds have gotten cheap you can buy a one terabyte say to SSD for like 60 bucks now from a good brand like Samsung not perfect but they are a real SSD that's actually going to be really performant they've gotten so much cheaper even in the last three years I feel like prices have almost dropped by 50 percent it's insane how cheap they are you can buy a four terabyte SATA SSD now for 220 dollars insane it is dropped a ton in the past few years and so now this video is going to go over should you still be putting three and a half inch hard drives or should you really look at putting say to ssds in a Synology Nas or really any other Nas because now we're at a place where having an all SSD Nas is actually within reason for a lot of people's budgets especially if you're not necessarily storing a ton of data so I want to talk about the pros and cons of ssds and we're going to be talking about mostly SATA ssds but we will also cover nvme ssds because there is a difference between the two especially when it comes to price performance as well as the ability to hot Swap and things like that but we're going to go over all that in a minute here so I do a lot of Consulting check the link down description below if you're looking at hire me and I have started deploying all SSD NASA's or half SSD nases for businesses ssds now are not that expensive and they have some truly massive advantages over hard drives for specific use cases actually a lot of use cases so ssds will run circles around hard drives for randomly accessed files the SATA ssds and SATA hard drives actually do not have that massive of a throughput difference if you're sequentially reading and writing files it's about two times so it's not that much more a SATA SSD will be capped to about 600 megabytes per second and a SATA hard drive can do sometimes about 260 megabytes per second so they are within somewhat spinning distance of each other but where SSG is just absolutely wipe the floor with hard drives is there random reads and writes when you're randomly Reading Writing to a SSD it is able to essentially access more or less any part of the SSD at the same time it's not perfect it's not at the exact same time but if you are accessing this file in this file in this file on a hard drive the hard drive platter actually has to get around there because there's a spinning platter in here and so it takes time for that hard drive head to take the time to actually get to where the data is with an SSD there's no moving components it is just electrical signals which can more or less operate at the same speed based off of anywhere it's reading from the drive and so that is where there's a huge difference a SATA SSD even pretty basic ones will have about a hundred times the random read and write as a mechanical hard drive that is huge that is a massive difference and so when you're doing things that are randomly accessing files on the nas that is where you see this massive massive performance difference between the two of them so this is not just when people are accessing files this also when the nas itself is using them so for example if you're running a Synology Drive database on there there's a lot of stuff in the database that actually has correlation different files and what's there and so having that on a all SSD Nas will have a huge performance Impact versus having them on spinning hard drives because those hard drives have to be clicking around to random places to access this data another thing that really comes into play here is when you have a ton of users connecting onto the nas even if it's just a standard file server so say you have a hundred desktops all connected to the nas all opening and closing Word Documents each word document is probably only a couple megabytes but all of those random operations on mechanical hard drives will start to slow down whereas ssds it just is a different League completely and so that is the biggest selling point for going all SSD for a Nas because you can randomly access files insanely fast and so this is especially true if you're running virtual machines either directly on the nasp or on the drives of the nas using iSCSI or NFS that is where you will see a massive performance difference using all SSD for that boot pool versus mechanical drives just because virtual machines computers in general the operating system has tons of random accessing that it needs to do needs to grab files here here and here and especially when you're doing something that can update you will notice the updates and Boots take 10 times longer with a hard drive back end than with a SSD back and at least it is a massive difference between the two okay so that's a really big use case for SSD NASA's they are just so much faster especially when you've got a lot of things going on on the file server you will notice they run circles around their hard drive components now let's talk about storage capacity and this is where hard drives are going to be winning out for the next probably at least 10 years from what I've read from benchmarks eventually the SSD may actually beat the hard drive in terms of storage density but for now we are just not in that place that you can reasonably on a consumer level fun fact they actually do sell a three and a half inch SATA SSD that's like 100 terabytes in size completely impractical costs insane amounts of money and is actually kind of slow but they do sell them but that is on the horizon but for now hard drives are just simply higher capacity right now I think the highest drive capacity you can buy is 22 terabytes I think both Seagate and Western Digital both sell 22 terabyte hard drives and the max SATA SSD you can buy is eight terabytes which is actually pretty solid that that's more than it used to be by a good margin the with those ssds you do start getting into qlc instead of TLC and what that actually means is there's actually more data storage on every single SSD cell on a qlc versus a TLC device and that's actually not a good thing long story The more data you store on every single cell means the longer it will take to access as well as having a shorter lifespan though this is not nearly as crucial the biggest issue with qlc is it can take a very long time to access files and rewrite sections of data so that is one issue and we're going to talk about that later but you can get very large storage capacity now with ssds though hard drives for the price are going to be much cheaper so hard drives per terabyte are about a fourth the cost as ssds per terabyte roughly and they also are going to give you at least three to five times the overall storage capacity compared to an SSD so those are the big reasons for the actual using of hard drives now let's say we've got a basic Nas and we only need two or three terabytes for an office file server that's where having something like this really really shines you can buy very reliable four terabyte ssds today which are going to serve you great you can start by buying two or three of them and have eight terabytes of usable space raid rebuilds on ssds are so much faster than on hard drives because of that random access time it is really fast to replace them another downside that a lot of people bring up about SSD is that's really not the case anymore is longevity for a very long time especially in the like late 2000s ssds did not have that long of a lifespan you can only write to a SSD flash sale so many times it has a fundamental limit on how many times you can write data to an SSD before it starts to fail and we'll actually go into a read-only mode because it just cannot handle having any more data so that is a fundamental issue that every single SSD you buy on the market today has however the amount of data they can now take has gone up by an order of magnitude it is very uncommon to ever burn out an SSD in this day and age unless you're having an issue like right amplification or something like that where there's something poorly configured wrong that is causing the issue in general even for businesses who are hitting these ssds all the time you're very unlikely to actually see a life span difference between a SATA SSD and a SATA hard drive because that terabytes written has gotten so high if you're worried about this you can easily look up the terabytes written for every single SSE you're looking at and to be on the safe side give yourself a 50 overhead then multiply that value by your raid multiplier so for example if you're running a raid 5 array with five ssds that's going to be four ssds worth of storage which means whatever your terabytes written are for one of them just multiply it by four and that will be the overall terabytes written of your pool and so that's a really easy way to do the calculation where you're going to realize oh I can write a terabyte of data to this thing every single day for five years and I'm not going to even come close to hitting the lifespan it is remarkable how long SSD longevity has gotten and I have not seen an SSD fail because the flash cells died and I deploy a lot of these units for video production houses who are constantly modifying these files and so it's really not too big of a deal another really big advantage of ssds is the power draw and the noise accessories don't have any moving components and so they're dead silence operate and in general especially smaller Nas units don't really have any noise themselves so you can have a completely silent Nas If you go all SSD whereas hard drives especially bigger ones when they're seeking you go Clunkers and you can definitely hear them so that's another reason why people use them especially for lower power builds you can pretty easily get something that only is taking maybe 20 watts because ssds draw such little power when they're not in use another thing to know almost every single Synology Nas all the ones that I know of actually have the ability to have two and a half inch ssds plugged in so your Nas would come with hard drive screws you just pull out the tray and there's actually four holes right here that you can actually use to install a SSD in pretty much any stock Nas as long as it's a SATA SSD and so it's really not a big deal for that alright so now we're reaching towards the end of this video I do want to talk about a couple of associated pieces Focus around nvme ssds so first we should talk about nvme SD caching which is kind of designed to be the Best of Both Worlds between a all SSD volume and a whole hard drive volume is a mixed volume where essentially you've got one or two ssds specifically you want to be in vme ssds almost certainly and these are used as read or read and write caches basically with a read cache randomly accessed files that are being accessed often will be slowly over time loaded into also being on the SSD drive this means that next time it's requested the nas will not have to ask the slow mechanic hard drives for it instead it'll be able to go straight to the nvme drive which will be almost instant return especially compared to a hard drive this means that there's less commands going to the hard drives which means it can spend more time doing sequential workflows and so you can get the best of both worlds there this is something that's very very hard to effectively Benchmark but I can tell myself that it does have a positive benefit on these setups whenever I'm looking at it I can't put numbers to it I've tried but I can definitely tell especially when you're installing apps and things like that you do get a real performance benefit and now since DSM 7.2 selects Synology models I also have the ability to use nvme drives as actual drives for storage but there's a big asterisk on this where it has to be a Synology drive and this is not one where you can say ah ignore I want to use my own and it'll just show up as red no this is one that will not even let you build a volume using a non-synology in vme drive and this is a interesting proposition and can be useful for specific deployments if you're running large deployments of Synology Drive having that on a all SSD volume can actually give a massive performance benefit so having those kinds of things can be real cases and you can just get two 400 gig ones because it does not require generally that much space it can also be great if you're running Docker containers and things like that though for the price it's a very hard to justify because the Synology nvme ssds are so expensive and so I don't think in this day and age it's super viable to have nvme ssds for regular volumes because Synology has just kept the prices so high and will not let you build a volume with a non-synology SSD however in General on a Nas there's not a massive difference between a SATA SSD and an nvme SSD for an actual overall storage pool just because the networking protocol already introduces so much overhead that there's not a massive performance benefit even though this one is so much faster than this because the nvme protocol is just an a pcie protocol it is designed for super fast transfer speeds between two units one other downside of using nvme drives especially in Enterprise is hot swap ability meaning if you have to replace this drive you would have to shut the unit down before pulling it out whereas any of the slots on the front of the Synology at least all the plus models are hot swappable meaning while the unit's running you never have to shut it down to replace a failing Drive all right well that's going to be it for this overview I hope this was helpful in kind of informing the pros and cons of running an all SSD Nas versus an all hard drive Nas and as time is going on it's becoming more and more viable to go all SSD and I'm excited for that place where most people are just all SSD if you have any other questions you want to hire me for projects there's a link for that in the description below and have a good one bye 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Channel: SpaceRex

Views: 180,921

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Id: vmyrlIYrhIE

Length: 15min 22sec (922 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 20 2023