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Re: Looking for a mini PC for use as a home server
Posted: September 5th, 2020, 2:28 pm
by hiriskpaul
Infrasonic wrote:hiriskpaul wrote:However, there are a few oddities. I cannot get my SSDs to work reliably with either ntfs or ext4.
Curiously as well, real world read testing seems much worse than writing. Reading back my 3 large files and writing to my local SSD gives only 35MB/s. Anyone know why that might be?
SSD's rely on cache, the better (more expensive) the SSD the more cache it will have (generally SLC).
When you do large file transfers the cache gets saturated and the performance drops off a cliff, sometimes below that of a HDD!
No way out of it other than stumping up for decent branded high performance SSD's (Samsung et al).
In general it's best to have a good DRAM/SLC cache SSD as a boot drive, cheaper DRAMless/small cache as data drives are fine (unless you routinely handle large files).
Long life NAS specific SSD's are now available (WD red £,Seagate Ironwolf ££ and Synology £££ --very expensive with power failure caps et al like enterprise drives).
I think modern Synology NAS' are BTRFS by default these days rather then EXT*.
My SSDs are all Samsung EVOs of one sort or another. Running my large file backup test case (3 files, 21.33 GB) and backing up to a USB3 attached 500GB EVO 850 takes 1 minute 18 seconds (about 280MB/s). Reading them back in and writing to my local SSD takes 1 minute 13 seconds (300MB/s).
Re: Looking for a mini PC for use as a home server
Posted: September 5th, 2020, 2:46 pm
by hiriskpaul
ps, the same backup tests carried out on the old Hitachi drive I am using for testing gives 94MB/s write, 95MB/s read. Drive attached via USB3 and freshly NTFS formatted.
Re: Looking for a mini PC for use as a home server
Posted: September 5th, 2020, 3:46 pm
by Infrasonic
hiriskpaul wrote:ps, the same backup tests carried out on the old Hitachi drive I am using for testing gives 94MB/s write, 95MB/s read. Drive attached via USB3 and freshly NTFS formatted.
Might be better to open your own specific thread listing all the gear (make/model no's) and the network chain rather than drag this thread even more off topic?
There's a thread by mc2fool dealing with NAS bandwidth issues too, that might give you clues...
viewtopic.php?p=338088#p338088
Re: Looking for a mini PC for use as a home server
Posted: September 5th, 2020, 3:55 pm
by hiriskpaul
Agreed, my conclusion anyway is that a Raspberry Pi 4 would make a reasonable low end NAS, provided ntfs was not used on the USB drives. In some ways it would be better than a dedicated low end NAS, such as my Synology DS115j, as the hardware is much more capable and there are far more software options available. The main thing missing is a neat box to house the Pi 4 and drives in.
Re: Looking for a mini PC for use as a home server
Posted: September 5th, 2020, 4:33 pm
by Infrasonic
Yeah Pi4 with the latest firmware for SSD boot, and there are loads of Pi NAS case options.
Either dumb 4 drive bay USB 3 boxes (Orico et al) or dedicated Pi NAS cases with four SATA port Pi hat and external power supplies to run 4 X 3.5" HDD's (if needed).
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_ ... nas+builds
Re: Looking for a mini PC for use as a home server
Posted: September 6th, 2020, 2:15 pm
by Infrasonic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty23K4g ... yRn3u7%3A6Explaining Computers
Overclocking a Raspberry Pi 4 fitted with an ICE Tower cooler.