Should you buy an All Flash NAS for the Speed/Performance?

[@ComoFeldo]

I changed two Synology to „all ssd“ for a total different reason, which is just noise - or better the absence of it. Both replicate the main server in the office and are sitting in my home and second home, close to the living area. Changing to SSD makes both devices absolutely quiet, not even the fans (changed to Noctua) are emitting anything.

[@coolcat23]

I changed my Synology fans to Noctua ones as well because the Synology fans emitted a clicking sound from factory. :( I tried to replace the unit, but the replacement unit made the same sounds. Only a second unit I bought a year later did have "quiet" fans (they do not "tick"). Occasionally, I get a fan stop alert because Synology uses a rare fan movement monitoring system that isn't really compatible with the standard tacho signal produced by the Noctuas. Whenever the alert occurs, one fan is actually not running anymore but I'm pretty sure that's only because the NAS mistakenly measures it has stopped and then actively cuts the power to it. Do you experience these fan stop events as well? If so, have you just disabled fan stop detection? I don't think the Noctua fan ever stops in the first place. Running the fans at higher speeds appears to help a bit but doesn't completely prevent those annoying fan stop events from occurring.

[@ComoFeldo]

@@coolcat23 No, not at all, it‘s working flawlessly. I‘m using a 918+ and a 1819+ with the Noctuas. I‘ve read about that problem and found a reference on the net which Noctua fans are compatible with Synology, so I have chosen those.

[@coolcat23]

@@ComoFeldo I've done my research as well before choosing the Noctua fan model. FYI, there is no compatible Noctua fan because Noctua does not offer fans using the rare "fan stop" detection approach used by Synology. Apparently, if you run the fans on full power, you don't run into issues, but that's not what I want to do.

[@ComoFeldo]

@@coolcat23 I just checked it, one my Synos is running on „quiet mode“, the other on the medium setting, without any error messages as mentioned. Both are still on 7.1 DSM

[@kerry7932]

As someone in the comments mentioned, what about performance when rebuilding or performing maintenance (scrubbing, deduplication) on the storage volume? I never noticed how slow my Synology hampster wheel was until it took _five days_ to rebuild a small 6TB volume after a drive failure. Every application associated with the NAS (backups, etc.) screeched to a halt for almost a full week. That experience opened my eyes to the real reason you still need a powerful computer for your NAS. Most of the time you do not need that capability in your NAS, but when you need it, you REALLY need it. It is true 99.9% of the NAS lifetime is spent performing routine network file transfers that do not require a high performance CPU with a lot of RAM. But when you have to rebuild the storage in a crisis, you will wish you could reduce those five days to one afternoon. That is why I started looking at alternative NAS configurations with much more powerful CPUs and more RAM, and also started looking at smaller but faster drive configurations like the all NVME solution described in this video. Fast volume rebuilds may not be Terramasters's motivation with this device, but it caught my eye for this reason alone.

[@WunderTechTutorials]

The issue with rebuild performance is it's dependent on many factors. RAID 10 will be faster than RAID 5/6 because there's no parity info, then there's the total size of the actual rebuild as larger pools take longer to rebuild. Overall, to answer your question, yes, it will be a lot faster on a device like this than a traditional NAS with 3.5" HDDs.

[@DavidM2002]

I would have one in a heartbeat for off grid homes or boat and RV travel. Otherwise, most unlikely. I did however put in two NVMe's in my QNAP NAS as a separate storage pool for virtual machines.

[@alj7788]

Exactly the scenario I have... Swapping out my Synology for the Terramaster F8 SSD (non-Plus) to take on the go in the RV. No need to worry about hard d isks getting knocked about while on the road.

[@haploid2k]

Not everyone needs several petabytes for gooning material. Some of us have actual jobs, and only need a few TB for system backups, container registries, and small NFS shares. Small form factor and low noise win the day for those who aren't building their homelab around the requirements of their goon cave.

[@cam_934]

"Small form factor and low noise win the day" yep, can have your own media/file server on 24/7, share with family/friends, remote network access that could be using less than 1kWh of power a day.

[@WunderTechTutorials]

I don't know what having a job has to do with anything 🤣, but yes, if you're willing to pay the massive premium for noise, heat, and power consumption, this is a great option.

[@Ughmahedhurtz]

All the regular folks with 10Gbps LAN (or even 2.5Gbps) in your house raise your hands. Also, why is it so hard to find a review of these things that actually delves into RAID/volume rebuild times after a drive replacement?

[@markmonroe7330]

Drive replacement and volume rebuild afterwards it’s not like a daily weekly thing. In fact it’s very likely that many people will never even do it. There are eight or 10 different ways of doing a raid volume and each one’s gonna have a different rebuild time. It’s kind of like having a speed rating on changing a spare tire on your vehicle. It’s rare to have to do it to begin with and it’s going to be completely different whether you have a car truck or van.

[@Ughmahedhurtz]

@@markmonroe7330 I would respectfully disagree. Rebuilds, or even file corruption due to power outages forcing parity checks, are slow as hell even on enterprise-grade bare-metal NAS systems like QNAP or EMC stuff once you get past 8-10TB or so. And I'd also respectfully reject the "too many RAID setups" argument as 95% of people are going to use one of maybe three or four options depending on the use case. To use your analogy, it isn't like you're gonna need to change that spare tire often, but if you're left with that laughable screw-type jack and it now won't fit under the jack point on your wife's beemer because your tire is flat and you didn't wanna spend the money on run-flats, you'll probably feel pretty stupid and frustrated that you hadn't tested it for suitability of purpose. I've been through the RAID modification/drive failure/corruption rebuild process in a bunch of different environments and I have never seen one attached to any kind of remote device do it fast, even counting bonded fiber-channel stuff.

[@annebokma4637]

For me it is also important how quickly a "drive" can be replaced. Waiting for the nvme ssd carriers to be integrated in Nas devices

[@marcomoraschi3972]

I'm just the case that know the pci issue but don't understand deeply. I know that is will be just 1Gbs per Nvme, does sata do better? Because F6-424 cost me more, double the power and is noisy. Need to buy a sata NAS just for space?

[@kanes5105]

non-ECC memory? can that be swapped for ECC if one decides to running TrueNAS?

[@cam_934]

ECC memory requires CPU/Chipset support.

[@kanes5105]

@@cam_934 kind of what I thought 😉

[@markmonroe7330]

Excellent presentation. Thank you. A great explanation of the PCIe lanes and whatnot. Along with watts, noise and form factor is the heat issue. A 12-bay all hard drive NAS will put out some heat in the room it occupies with each hard drive being 100-120F. Enough heat to actually impact your HVAC system. Of all the all NVMe units, this one actually peaks my interest. The challenge with it is that if you only put 1, 2, 3, 4 drives in it (with x1 lanes), with RAID, you will come no where near 10g on the network. It really needs all 8-slots filled to hit 10g is what I would guess. This would be an interesting test to actually see how many drives in RAID you need before it actually saturates 10g on the network. You are absolutely correct that most people are going to see PCIe-3 and think 3g (megabytes) per drive read/write and that even one drive will fully saturate the 10g (megabits not megabytes) network (which is really only 1g drive reads/writes). It is really crazy to think that just a few years ago it took 8-10 hard drives to saturate a 10g network and now one single PCUe-3 NVMe can do 3x that all by itself.

[@WunderTechTutorials]

Thank you very much, and the heat is a great point I wish I touched on!

[@felicytatomaszewska]

Awesome review with sufficient technical details and an impartial, objective approach. I think TerraMaster is trying to target people who may be less technically literate, who could be impressed by the 'flash storage' and 'NVMe' tags but lack the knowledge about how these technologies work and won't use virtualization. However, they may still get the bragging rights of having an NVMe NAS.

[@WunderTechTutorials]

Thank you!!

[@TechMeOut5]

Excellent video as always Frank. I especially liked how you took the time to explain the "myth" of PCIe lanes and how they work and effect the real world speeds...priceless!

[@WunderTechTutorials]

Thanks, Avi! Appreciate you watching. Hope you're doing okay 🙏

[@ascot4000]

What does an SSD NAS offer - the point is not capacity or sustained throughput - it is about latency. Throughput is not speed; speed = latency. 😎

[@rogerhuston8287]

Many people want this as it is quiet. Could you build a SATA SSD NAS (Instead of HDs) and get much the same thing? Here we only use 25% of the performance of the NVME. And for speed could you use NVME drives for cache?

[@WunderTechTutorials]

You can, just not with this device. The performance of NVMe drives is better though from just about every angle, especially on random read/writes.

[@kevinhughes9801]

Brilliant breakdown and well highlighted thanks for making the point. Important as the flash devices are getting more popular like u said. Want to try flashtor gen 2 when that comes out. Thanks again

[@Freshiz325]

Can we get a real time test showing that the NAS is capable of saturating the 10G connection. Would be helpful

[@PoeLemic]

[Not to be nitpicky ...] But, I'm not sure the graphic at 2:29 is correct. You should be getting double the speed as you increase from gen to gen. [Aborting my point, because I misunderstood.] --> [No, sorry, you are right. You're doing PCIe lane count not generations.]

[@EthelbertCoyote]

This device seems very good from a thinking/engineering perspective... if you understand all the compromises that needed to be made. But, those compromises are ones from the chipsets of the CPU's used to run them that will not be opening their arms to storage on the low end like NAS systems over the short term. It would take someone investing heavily into an alt-chip company to make that happen for a small market so wait I will. Never say never, just how long.

[@MediaproducerCH]

Well done. Like how you explaint the issues/facts 🙂

[@Lunolux]

nice explaination thx

[@pfitz4881]

I agree there needs to be lots of education in this area. Thank your for clarifying this .

[@Suzukii-Krypto]

We're still waiting for a version of a device like this with USB 4 / Thunderbolt 4 as a D.A.S. And why are they still talking i3's when there are very cheap i5's and i7's on the market? I'd be willing to fork up another $50-$100 bucks for one.

[@nixxblikka]

I have all flash since 5 year > 20 TB - its just too noisy and no failures so far. As per the PCIe topic, I am not sure if it really is an issue, as a) you wouldntbe using Gen 5 SSDs on such a device, rather cheaper models and b) due to 10 GB NIC you are limited anyway. And finally despite me having a 10 Gbit network you saturate it only occasionaly. I think its quite an interesting model.

[@WunderTechTutorials]

It's not that I think users will be using Gen5 SSDs, it's more that they're probably not aware of the differences. They see the advertised speeds and go based on that. With SATA, that's not a problem, but it is in this instance.

[@Foton0154]

well for me all flash nas are made only for quiet operations. It is very easy to saturate the network of the average home user and even single nvme can easily handle 10Gbe but who have 10Gbe at apartment

[@bufordmaddogtannen]

What speed? It's all capped at 1x. There is an older product that costs less than 300 and provides four equally constrained NVME slots. I'd go for that if I really wanted to waste the potential of NVME drives.

[@rg-web-design]

I don' tunderstand wht these things are so expensive. The F8 SSD Plus is US$700, without drives. Essentially it is a drive enclosure with connected capabilities and support software.

[@playeronthebeat]

In my mind, it's simply to expensive being completely honest. An all flash NAS is nothing to worth to most people (exceptions exist). I'd much rather have a tiered NAS system where there are HDDs as the backbone of the device with most of the storage. Then - depending on budget - building normal SSDs on top of that to have some hotter storage, yet it's not too fast (think of VM storage or files that are accessed regularly but not too often) and then M.2 NVMe drives with proper bifurcation of PCIe lanes for hot storage or sort of a manual "cache". Think of video editing, photo editing, shared frequently accessed documents etc. Thankfully there are PCIe cards which can give Gen 3 NVMe SSDs their speed. I just wish there were more devices which would support NVMe storage options. Like having a caddy with an exposed PCIe interface that could be swapped in instead of an HDD. Frankly, a 3.5" HDD caddy should have plenty of room for like 4 NVMe SSDs. Especially if they're "just" Gen 3 in terms of heat/cooling.

[@MrPir84free]

Personally, having managed my own NAS's, and SAN's and NAS's at work, I can't understand someone getting a NAS and sticking either a single drive in a chassis; or someone that puts a ridiculously small amount of drive space in a $800 device; one could do better with a single Mini-PC with a single NVME drive, or just use a USB NVME Enclosure and be done.

[@amigatommy7]

1 lane for a 10gb/e port is less than a computer would give the slot for a 10gb/e card.

[@someguy0523]

Great video as always, Asustor has the same garbage solution for virtualization, I likely wouldn't buy either brand again until that is changed.

[@subscription5736]

Anyone sent a product that then gives some real feedback on its shortcomings not only earns my follow, but earns the company a follow to see if they take the feedback and improve.

[@WunderTechTutorials]

Thank you very much!

[@amigatommy7]

The power supply often goes first in a nas.

[@TazzSmk]

I'd rather spend $299 on proper 4x4 PCIe x16 card like Sonnet has to have full performance with 4 NVME drives, and put it into any less than 12 years old PC

[@FerTechCH]

Good video, but a non tech user will probably not buy this. For me what bothers me the most is the lack of ECC ram in most NAS of this price tag.

[@borissorkin8819]

It is Okay to be pessimistic! The optimist is just a poorly informed pessimist. You seems to be well informed. 🙂