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In Reply to: RE: NAS storage capacity changes over past year or so? posted by E-Stat on August 06, 2024 at 11:04:28
I've never come close to needing or wanting more NAS space. I've been around 20% to 25% usage for the longest time.There are many reasons for having excess storage capacity other than running out of space for your files. A lot of it has to do with operations that perform best by having capacity overhead like snapshots, defragmenting, data scrubbing, short stroking, and others.
With SSDs it has been recommended to leave around 20-25% free space to maintain optimal performance and to ensure that the SSD has enough space for efficient garbage collection, wear leveling, and TRIM operations. These figures are ballpark rule of thumb and not set in stone. YMMV.
4x4TB WD Red HDDs. All are over 6 years old now in my 24/7 Synology NAS with no issues.
Edits: 08/06/24Follow Ups:
Mirrored SSDs, however, obviate the need for data scrubbing, short stroking and defragmenting.
I'm a firm believer in the KISS principle. :)
"Mirrored SSDs, however, obviate the need for data scrubbing, short stroking and defragmenting.
SSDs have their own needs with more recommended free space than HDDs due to already mentioned garbage collection, wear leveling, and TRIM operations.
I found a post of mine from 2017 where I observed that a 2 TB SSD ran $700. I got mine in 2023 for $105 each. :)
That sounds about right. SATA SSD's have dropped significantly in price but some have bounced up again, depending on availability and what products the manufacturer is focusing its resources on.2.5" SSDs use the legacy SATA III interface and protocol which was designed for spinning HDDs. Unfortunately SATA III limits performance to a theoretical max of 600 MB/sec but in reality it's somewhat lower due to overhead. The SATA interface and protocol are not ideal for SSD so the the industry shifted toward NVMe over PCIe with M.2 form factor which can be 10x faster so that's where the demand is. There's no legacy SATA protocol overhead to slow things down in the newer designs.
Just last week I bought a 1TB 2280 NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD (not the M.2 SATA type that Synology uses in their M.2 slots). You can see the performance difference here:
My Samsung 1TB SATA III 2.5" SSD:
My Samsung 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD:
My Synology NAS. Speed is not HDD limited but 1-Gigabit Ethernet limited.
In a NAS used for streaming music it doesn't matter. The end result with a HDD will be just as fast as the fastest SSD.
Edits: 08/06/24 08/06/24
Unfortunately SATA III limits performance to a theoretical max of 600 MB/sec but in reality it's somewhat lower due to overhead.
Indeed having (somewhat under) 600 megabytes per second transfer rate overwhelms gigabit network speed of 125 megabytes per second. That's not where the improvement lies (in addition to eliminating unnecessary busywork).
In a NAS used for streaming music it doesn't matter. The end result with a HDD will be just as fast as the fastest SSD.
Sure it does. At least with my environment using LMS. Quicker random track access is a beautiful thing. :)
In a NAS used for streaming music it doesn't matter. The end result with a HDD will be just as fast as the fastest SSD."Sure it does. At least with my environment using LMS. Quicker random track access is a beautiful thing. :)"
You're kidding yourself if you think a 100 micro second track access time from SSD makes any noticeable difference at all compared to the 10 milli second average access time of a spinning HDD - when loading or changing music tracks.
Edits: 08/06/24 08/06/24
Maybe its more noticeable for me because of the 500 Mbps WiFi bandwidth.Selecting a new hi rez track from my phone/pad is now immediate .
Look up the relevant metric IOPS.
Edits: 08/06/24 08/07/24 08/09/24 08/11/24
True. The benchmark results for HDDs vs SSDs on their own don't lie. The SSD offers much greater IOPs and MB/Sec throughput. But do SSDs offer usable performance gains when streaming music from a NAS? No.Even an old 3.5" HDD on its own is at least one order of magnitude (10x) faster than needed (IOPs or MB/Sec) for streaming hi-res music. Music playback data is primarily sequential, not random I/O so....
Very old 3.5" SATA HDDs are capable of at least 100 MB/Sec while a 2-ch 24/192 hi-res stream requires less than 10 MB/Sec. So that old HDD is at least one order of magnitude (10x) faster than needed. Many modern 3.5" HDDs will be 2 to 3 orders of magnitude faster than needed.
The end result when playing music from NAS makes no difference whether you have SSD or HDD in the NAS. An SSD capable of several hundred MB/Sec or thousands of IOPs won't do any better than an old HDD in a NAS playing music. Remember, we only need 10 MB/Sec for hi-res 2-ch 24/192.
And we haven't even mentioned the NAS 1-Gigabit/Sec network bottleneck that chokes the performance of your SSDs down to no more than 125 MB/Sec theoretical max over the network.... no better than the HDDs in the NAS.
Did you actually noticea a performance gain streaming from NAS when you switched from HDDs to SSDs? Maybe you did but like anything in audio the hard FACTS rarely matter ;-)
Edits: 08/07/24 08/07/24
But do SSDs offer usable performance gains when streaming music from a NAS? No.Perhaps in your situation. Once again, your straw man argument completely misses the point - what I observe is not about throughput.
It's about how quickly (how many operations per second) it takes to initially transfer data where the performance gain for random reads is a factor of 150!
Did you actually noticea a performance gain streaming from NAS when you switched from HDDs to SSDs?
In the manner I've described, yes. Once you queue an album or a playlist, however, the NAS reads and buffers the entirety in a couple of seconds and afterwards, streams out of memory anyway. Hint: it doesn't wait for real time playback of music to place in cache. ;)
What I find odd is your choice of the slowest type of RAID using parity when you have no need for the benefit - higher capacity. You could simply use a mirrored pair of your fours or if you like lots of spinning drives, configure them in RAID 10 for the highest performance . When I worked in supply chain, the corporate hardware guys recommended RAID 10 for that reason.
Edits: 08/07/24
"It's about how quickly (how many operations per second) it takes to initially transfer data where the performance gain for random reads is a factor of 150! "Bizarre. I have never wondered if I could speed up my IOPs by a factor of 150 to begin playing a music track any faster from my HDD based NAS. I hit play and the music plays immediately. I hit Skip and it Skips instantly. I click on an entirely different album and it plays immediately.
By your description your HDD based NAS setup must have been pretty clunky. Glad that you fixed it with the SSDs.
P.S. IOPs translate to MB/Sec and the other way around. It's also based on block size. You can Google it and do the math but again, tweaking these figures is irrelevant to a properly working NAS for music playback . Maybe its your music server software that's to blame as the demands for music playback are extremely low unless there's something wrong with the setup.
Edits: 08/07/24
IOPs translate to MB/Sec and the other way around
Only when comparing an equivalent operation - random or sequential. The context of this discussion is random.
Which is the obvious reason why everyone and his brother uses solid state memory today in computers! Operating systems boot quicker. Databases are accessed quicker. Writes are quicker!
NAS setup must have been pretty clunky
A pair of Seagate ST2000DM008 drives which PassMark benches at 2282.
"The context of this discussion is random. "I thought it was about playing music from NAS. But for the sake of this "random" discussion I can "randomly" choose any album or track from my lowly HDD based NAS and it plays immediately. I can put the music on "random play" and whatever it lands on plays immediately. I see no need for SSDs given that my HDD based setup is "randomly" lightning fast ;-)
Edits: 08/07/24
to pay close attention.
I thought it was about playing music from NAS.
Let's return here for the observation that triggered your knee jerk response:
Quicker random track access is a beautiful thing. :)
After much obfuscation of the issues involved, I needed to repeat the topic under discussion:
In the manner I've described, yes.
Have a good day!
You seem to be hung up on "quicker track access" or "quicker random access" with LMS. If SSD's do indeed make that much of a improvement over HDD's with your LMS setup I would have to conclude that your LMS setup or LMS itself is flawed.Like I said earlier, my track and random access playback both happen immediately with zero perceptible delay with my lowly slow 5400 rpm HDD's. No need for SSDs in my NAS for music playback.
Edits: 08/08/24
lacking any manner of perspective is comical. It embodies all the stereotypes you hear about social media. :)
" Martha, there's a guy on the internet I must correct immediately"
Just too funny!
I am currently running a QNAP box and a TrueNAS box, both having 12TB of mirrored storage space and both are connected via Ethernet. Any issues I've had pertaining to transfer speed were due to LAN performance. Once I replaced a slow switch and an inferior cable my transfer speeds increased dramatically.
I just upgraded to 2.5GB and it's a noticeable improvement. I put a 2.5gb adapter in the TrueNAS box and used port trunking on the QNAP box to try and gain some speed there.
I use Audirvana for music playback and have really never noticed any lag using OS X or Windows.
I've never played with TrueNAS but had some ZFS experience before I retired.I can do link aggregation on my Synology NAS but I can't do it with my cheapie unmanaged Gigabit switches so the 1-Gigabit limit will still be there. A 10-Gigabit switch would be nice but those are still rather pricey. I haven't looked into 2.5 Gigabit switches. Maybe I should.
The most I can get on large sustained backups or transfers is about 100 MB/Sec or so (+/-) which is consistent with the limitations of a 1-Gigabit network.
Music playback with the current NAS setup has no noticeable I/O latency or bandwidth issues. It's never been an issue and it is certainly not bound by HDD IOPs. Music playback doesn't require much.
Edits: 08/08/24 08/08/24
"Music playback with the current NAS setup has no noticeable I/O latency or bandwidth issues. It's never been an issue and it is certainly not bound by HDD IOPs. Music playback doesn't require much."
True. I upgraded to 2.5gbps only because I tend to move large files across boxes. I have seen transfers hit 2.5 and it is pretty sweet.
Agree. Any motivation for me to upgrade to 2.5 Gbs (or even 10Gbs someday!) would be for backup speed and large transfers over the network.
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