SSD Cache vs Qtier - QNAP NAS

Configuration and comparison of using an SSD Cache vs adding SSD to Qtier on your QNAP NAS. We will walk through how to set up each as well as to try and answer what the basic difference is between the two different technologies.
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#QNAP, #SSD, #Cache, #Qtier, #NAS

[@FairlawnARC]

A fine example of a clear straightforward difference among the three. TY.

[@MikeFaucher]

FairlawnARC.org Thank you for the feedback.

[@impy1980]

Excellently explained, thanks very much, really insightful. I've decided to upgrade my QNAP NAS, which now has nVME and PCIe expansions, and I'll definitely be adding an SSD in the future. Best real world video I saw and not just here is what the 2 options do.

[@MikeFaucher]

Thank you so much for he feedback. It is appreciated

[@mikeh4924]

I just picked up a TS-451D2, mostly for Plex and photos. This was HIGHLY educational, thank you!!!

[@MikeFaucher]

Glad you found it useful.

[@-EC002-]

That was really well explained. Even a goof like me could understand it! Thanks.

[@MikeFaucher]

Thank you for the feedback.

[@mb-electricalservices]

Excellent video Mike and very nicely explained for a newbie to the NAS world. Simple but very informative! :)

[@MikeFaucher]

Thank you. Appreciate the feedback.

[@KyryloHorbatiuk]

Thank you for this great useful video! English is not my native language, but I clearly understand everything! I'm a little bit surprised, that you have just 12000+ subscribers, because you deserve more than 1 million ( at least).

[@MikeFaucher]

Thank you so much for the great feedback. It is appreciated.

[@luczani]

Thanks for the overview. Very useful, also because on the QNAP website there are no such detailed explanations and comparisons.

[@MikeFaucher]

Glad you found it useful. Thanks for the feedback.

[@filipeperry]

Great demonstration! Thanks!

[@MikeFaucher]

Thanks, appreciate it.

[@VictorEdinovich]

Thanks a lot for such deep test!

[@MikeFaucher]

Glad you found it useful and thanks for the feedback it is appreciated.

[@orjaneriksson4070]

Great comparsion, thanks!

[@MikeFaucher]

Thanks for the feedback.

[@wzjc4]

Thank you for your sharing, it really help!

[@MikeFaucher]

Glad you found it useful. Thanks for the feedback.

[@anasismail2892]

Very useful.. Answered all my questions

[@MikeFaucher]

Great to hear. Thanks

[@fredericchnl8997]

Thanks for your video. You helped me make a choice between SSD Cache and Qtier!

[@MikeFaucher]

Awesome. Glad I could help.

[@fredericchnl8997]

@@MikeFaucher I have only 1 SSD for "read only" cache, but I bought second one for "read /write" !

[@MikeFaucher]

@@fredericchnl8997 Awesome, that is a better way to go.

[@ezkul95828]

Great tutorial video. Mostly I'm editing videos. With this tutorial, I'll go with the cache option. Thanks!

[@MikeFaucher]

Good choice. Thanks for the feedback!

[@Hazard4K]

Thanks for the video -- I just purchased this NAS and this was the most simplified explanation of a topic i was havign trouble wrapping my head around (mostly it's taking in so much of the features all at once is very overwhelming... and this is comign from a former CCNA certified person) I bought the 8GB version but quickly foudn out with ZFS that I needed 32GB more than I needed cache drives! But now I'm set up with 2x sata 1TB ssd in the bottom row in RAID 1 for the system volume and 2x WD RED NVME 2TB drives for cache drives (U.2 to NVME conversion bays) I am still setting this up and it should be noted that you need a certain amount of RAM to support a given amount of cache. Qnap has a chart for this. After two days of "IDK what i'm doing but it's working?!" i am finally wrapping my head around how to set this thing up -- and it is FAST !!!! :D

[@Hazard4K]

and so i'm not leaving anyone hanging -- 4TB of SSD cache (RAID 0 wd RED 2B NVME drives) -- 4TB requires 16GB of RAM to work at all.

[@MikeFaucher]

Glad to hear you are making progress. Good luck.

[@MykiVonFerro]

Nice walkthrough. Continually torn between qtier and ssd cache for a few dozen VMs. Qnap was touting ssd cache for a long time for virtualization before qtier was introduced qtier was alleged to have many of the same benefits but I’m not completely sold.

[@MikeFaucher]

Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it.

[@sharedknowledge6640]

You should remain skeptical of Qtier. It’s largely unproven and Qnap has a horrible track record with their in house features, apps, etc. Qnap seems to care more about what they can market and what looks nice rather than making things work right. They don’t seem to understand most people buy a NAS for reliable file storage while Qnap would rather promote all sorts of useless half baked apps that are badly broken ignoring the primary use case for their products.

[@MikeFaucher]

@@sharedknowledge6640 Thanks for your input.

[@mahuubao]

Excellent ... well done ...

[@MikeFaucher]

Thank you for the feedback. Appreciate it.

[@pierrecastanets1974]

Excellent video

[@MikeFaucher]

Glad you liked it. Thanks for the feedback

[@lc6682]

Thanks this really helped me

[@MikeFaucher]

Great to hear. Thanks for the feedback.

[@rajushamsher6789]

Very helpful thank you so much

[@MikeFaucher]

Glad it was helpful.

[@asdf51501]

Solid video, thank you!

[@MikeFaucher]

Thank you for the feedback.

[@asdf51501]

@@MikeFaucher Thought you would appreciate it. Videos like this don’t get a lot of volume, but they really helps people like me who just bought a NAS but aren’t storage experts decide how to properly configure it.

[@MikeFaucher]

@@asdf51501 Great to hear. I have done many QNAP videos and am working on one right now about securing your QNAP. Thanks for the input.

[@tombouie]

Thks, Great classic HDDs, HDD SSDs, NVMe SSDs, & RAM capabilites are start to appear on consumer NASes. File tiering across all that storage just make great sense. Requesting you update your look at SSD Cache vs Qtier. To me caching is tiering with duplication & tiering is caching w/o duplication.

[@MikeFaucher]

I will add it to my list.

[@pallikior]

Hi Mike! Nice video, all clearly explained! I have a QNAP TS-253D 2-bay 4GB RAM NAS with the following configuration: - DataVol1 (System): 2 X 4 TB Seagate ST4000VN008-2DR166 HDDs in RAID 1 Configuration. - Read/ Write Cache of above: Cache: 2 x 500 Gb Samsung SSD 860 EVO M.2 mSATA on a QM2 PCIe Expansion Card in RAID 1 Configuration. - Connection of NAS to a Desktop PC via 2.5 GbE. I have done the following Read/ Write speed tests: AJA Read/ Write Speed Tests to the NAS Volume as recorded on Desktop PC of above configuration (SSD cache on HDD volume & 2.5 GbE LAN connection speed): Read: 137 MB/sec Write: 132 MB/sec AJA Read/ Write Speed Tests to the NAS Volume as recorded on Desktop PC of above configuration (SSD cache on HDD volume) but with 1 GbE LAN connection speed: Read: 105 MB/sec Write: 101 MB/sec AJA Read/ Write Speed Tests to the NAS Volume as recorded on Desktop PC before installing SSD cache and with 1 GbE LAN connection speed: Read: 69 MB/sec Write: 70 MB/sec Despite the improvement with the cache acceleration and subsequently the increased LAN speed, the speeds achieved are nowhere as near what you show in your video for the cache setup (around 470 MB/sec). I would expect SATA 3 would not impact the SSD speed which would allow speeds around 520 MB/sec and the limit should be with the 2.5 GbE LAN connection which should be around 320 MB/sec but I am nowhere as near that. Any suggestions, please?

[@MikeFaucher]

Interesting scenario. Couple of points. First the max 1G performance is ~100-115MB/sec and the typical across 2.5Gbe is `250-280MB/sec give or take. The typical performance of the RAID 1 should be around 90-120MB/sec depending on the drives. Your benchmarks show correctly for the 1GbE performance which means your 1GbE network speed is good but everything else is low. Looking at your benchmarks leads me to believe their may be an issue with the actual RAID array. If you cant get ~90-110 without any caching from the array, then something maybe wrong at that level. Your cache and 2.5Gbe can only build on a sound array. What sector per inode setting did you use when you created your volume? You can check it my looking under storage and snapshots, right click on the volume, and click on the exclamation point. I have a video on my channel (kzbin.info/www/bejne/n4mpqpVsntGEj80) that shows a very similar thing that you are experiencing that may help. There are also many other factors when it comes to performance. For example, If you activated snapshots, you will lose around 20+% in performance as it adds overhead to the drive controller and system. The other thing is the QM2 card which I have also tested, shares bandwidth with with NIC and two M.2 drives which also limits how much you can put through the pipe so you may not get the performance from the cache. I am testing on a NAS that has a dedicated 10GbE and SSD ports so it will be a bit faster. The first thing you have to do is troubleshoot the native NAS/array and work to get the speed up closer to 100MB/sec before adding any cache. It looks to me as the problem is there and not in your cache or 2.5GbE but possible in the array. Let me know what you find.

[@pallikior]

@@MikeFaucher Thanks for the prompt and detailed response! I will look into the matter based on this and come back with the outcome.

[@MikeFaucher]

@@pallikior Great. Good luck.

[@pallikior]

@@MikeFaucher Hi again, Mike! So FYI based on your suggestion to first concentrate on a solid HDD RAID array performance before looking into other limiting factors, I checked your suggested video and subsequently checked my volume’s reported bytes per inode setting which is actually 64K. According to your video, this should be sufficiently large, so I am rather hesitant at this stage to go into the trouble of backing up all of my NAS data and recreating the volume to see what other default settings may come into play. FYI again and possible other ideas from your part, I can add an additional piece of information: The disks used in my NAS were ported to my current QNAP-253D NAS from an older TS-253Pro unit that had failed, so perhaps some older QTS settings I am not aware of may not be the optimal ones for this new unit, so perhaps at some stage I may need to take the big decision to recreate the volume in the future, unless meanwhile I or anyone else comes up with any other ideas. Thanks again for your assistance!

[@MikeFaucher]

@@pallikior The drives themselves could be an issue. I assume you have looked at the smart info of the drives? As for services, I also have a video on basic settings. Part 1 was released a couple of weeks ago and part 2 comes out tomorrow. Off the top of my head, I would ask do you have the snapshots on? Is the webserver running? Is the download app/service running? I would turn off all three of these.

[@Pooryia]

Thank you!!!!!!

[@MikeFaucher]

You're welcome! Glad it was helpful.

[@yogiwoo]

Hi Mike, nice video, really clear explained the different between the two. Just wonder which Qnap Nas system are you using? For the speed test, are they base on the 10GBE networking? Planning to get the TS-H973ax with 2 u.2 and 2 sata 2.5” bay on it for raw video editing purposes.

[@MikeFaucher]

I have the TS-453 and 2 TVS-951X units. Thanks for the feedback.

[@pontusakesson856]

thankyou for a nice video. after watching this I think I have decided to use 2x 1TB M2 SATA SSD in Raid 0 for cache on the mainboard (I want speed around 1GB/s) and then use 4x 1TB M2 SATA SSD on an expansion card in RAID 5 for Qtier (and 8x HDD in RAID 6 as cold storage)

[@MikeFaucher]

Awesome, good luck!

[@delboyg01]

Even the best SSD will max out at around 500MBs, so you'll never get 1GBs throughput, but I guess you'll have figured that out by now.

[@MrPontus]

@@delboyg01 well, there is something called RAID 0 (I just realized I already wrote it in my original comment) however I run into an unexpected problem, one of my cache ports top out at 272MB/s, the other one at 522MB/s with two identical SSDs, I have tried swapping the SSD to an other one and also change place, but cache-port 1 is slower, so maybe I will get a second QM2 card or I have to settle for less than 1GB/s

[@delboyg01]

@@MrPontus- Even in RAID0 you will not get 1GBs, the limiting factor will be the PCIe lanes available. What are you planning to do with this monster? Just do benchmark testing on it? Or do you have a real word application in mind?

[@MrPontus]

@@delboyg01 I have two PCI-E slots (1* PCIe Gen3 x8, 1* PCIe Gen3 x4) right now with a dedicated 2x10Gbit card, lanes should be enough, CPU is upgraded to a 4970 (not S), 32GB RAM, I should see speeds around 1GB/s, I have not put it to production yet because of lack of time

[@VeryThaiEnt]

Thanks for new comer

[@MikeFaucher]

Glad it helped. Thanks for the feedback!

[@tnie2409]

Hi! Thank you for the great tutorial. I would have assumed that the small files would be copied to the ssd first and the large files would be copied to the regular hard drives if "Qtier" is enabled for that folder. But why is in this case - when its only one big file - the performance of Qtier between "SSD cache" and "No cache"? Thanks again!

[@MikeFaucher]

Thanks for the feedback. Qtier treats all files in the same sequence and tries to move off the files not used to make room so it really does not change the sequence.

[@mj1s735]

Mike, when you where transferring the files is the file transferring to different folders within the enclosure or from an outside source? I am trying to get the fastest transfers of files to my Qnap from another computer over 1G ethernet. About the fastest transfer speed I can get right now is about 100-110 MBs. And turning the cache on or off does not help when transferring to a HDD RAID poll.

[@MikeFaucher]

You are getting as much as the 1G will allow. If you want faster you will need 2.5G or 10G network. My testing was done on a 10G network so that the network would not bottleneck and a true comparison would be made. All transfers were from PC to NAS. Hope that helps.

[@mj1s735]

@@MikeFaucher Mike, Thanks for the quick response. That is exactly the info I needed. So basically until I upgrade my network I might as well disable and properly removed the SSD cache, because they can't give my anymore transfer speeds until I upgrade my network? Do you know off hand about how much better transfers I could get with a 2.5 G network? This is an older but, low hours use QNAP which can only do 2G with the two 1G ports in port aggregation.

[@MikeFaucher]

@@mj1s735 Your speed will go from 100-110 to around 250-285. You can get an inexpensive USB 2.5G dongle for your NAS and PC and you will be good to go.

[@mj1s735]

@@MikeFaucher Again Mike thanks for the quick response. I didn't even think about getting a USB 2.5G USB dongle for the NAS, so now I can get a much cheaper unmanaged 2.5G switch to get 2.5 networking between my PC and NAS.

[@filipetorchiamiranda]

Is it possible to create a volume using Qtier and then add SSD cache to it? what would be the advantage of doing that? Thank you

[@MikeFaucher]

Not sure as I have never tried that. I wouldn’t think there would be any advantage at all.

[@Chuchuguitar]

Hey Mike, thanks for this video! In the case of Qtier - when you write a new file to a folder that is not in one of the cached folders, I suppose you lose the benefits of SSD drives?

[@MikeFaucher]

Qtier usually gets all first so you should not lose it on the first copy.

[@Chuchuguitar]

@@MikeFaucher that's great to know. Thanks again!

[@Chuchuguitar]

I have the qnap-ts-473 with a QNAP Dual M.2 22110 / 2280 PCIe Gen3 x4 and I had 1 stick of 250GB NVMe for read-only cache. After watching this video went ahead and tried making it read-write cache. The speed was great when transferring large ammount of data. I was getting around 600MB/s as I have 10G link to my NAS. So I went ahead and purchased two 1Tb NVMe drives to run them in the same way but RAID1. To my disappointment transferring files was considerably slower (50MB/s slow). After some research, I discovered that my Dual M.2 PCIe card was only X4 so there was no point on using two x4 drives in it. I really don't get why they sell it in that configuration. But also my NAS PCIe slots are only x4 :( So ordering an X8 NVMe PCIe expansion card won't work. What a bummer! I was so excited to take advantage of this. I can only benefit if I use only one NVMe but then I take the risk of losing data if it fails which is not worth it. Otherwise I'd have to get a different model. :(

[@MikeFaucher]

@@Chuchuguitar The M.2 slots in this device are SATA soI would get two SATA M.2 for the cache. It will perform much better than what you are seeing now and not waste a slot. If you want to dual NVMe, then you will need two adapter cards, one for each slot but you will forfeit the 10GbE which is not a good trade-off. DUAL SATE M.2 for cache will be you be a compromise of speed, redundancy, and max utilization of your device slots.

[@Chuchuguitar]

​@@MikeFaucher Hmm.. that's interesting.. this website does say that the expansion card supports NVMe. Take a look: shop.qnap.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=273 It does say that the "connector" is NVMe.. is that the catch? BH Photo sells these as NVMe cards, but the manufacturer says very little about NVMe but it's there. ugh this is disappointing.

[@peetairsh]

I was surpised after enabling qtier that the write did not go to the ssd-s. More precisely if you check disk activity monitor, it looks like that for lot of small files it uses the ssd, but for large files it targets the hdds first. It'd be nice to have this configurable and get the speed advantage of write cache and combined storage space together with qtier.

[@MikeFaucher]

Good observation. It did not do what I expected.

[@SundanceBN]

Hi Mike. Thank you for the good made video. Still not sure how to use my two 512GB M.2 SSDs. Can you tell me when the data at the SSD cache will be finally written to the HDDs? I'am thinking of using the two SSDs for caching two different volumes.

[@MikeFaucher]

With two SSDs you can use read/write. It is unknown how often is moves the data from the cache as that is controlled by the system and when it see available resources. Not sure what type of work flow you have and whether or not you want read/write. The number of volumes does not much matter as the cache is only temporary holding. It is so easy to enable or disable that I would start with read/write and compare it to no cache and see how you like it.

[@SundanceBN]

@@MikeFaucher Thanks Mike for the Answer. I will try it as a R/W cache with one SSD and will then figure out how long the data resides on the SSD till it will be send to the HDDs. I would like to save the 2. SSD for some VMs. With one SSD as a cache there could be the possibility of data loss when the SSD would fail. So for me it is interesting to know when data will be written to the HDDs after sending to the SSDs. Thx again for your videos and the answer!

[@MikeFaucher]

Not sure I would do that. As you need two drives to create a read/write cache, you will only be allowed to select the volumes you want to cache which is better IMO. Let the system work for you.

[@SundanceBN]

@@MikeFaucher My TS-364 will arrive in two weeks. So I didn't knew that I can only do read/write cache with two drives. Then it makes sense to use them both for the cache. :-)

[@fredericchnl8997]

Mike, The SSD cache hit rate is 100% all the time, do you think that's normal? However, the activity monitor shows that SSDs are not used much...I don't understand thanks

[@MikeFaucher]

Maybe. If you are caching every share folder than yes it will hit 100%. You should consider caching only the folders where you need the performance of a cache. I personally do not cache the system volume for example and only my data folders.

[@yungsmoody6525]

Hey man, so I've got the TS-453BT3, and when I go to create a New Volume the 1TB NVME SSD do not show up as being available for setup. I searched around and thought that because they were 1TB NVME that they would not be compatible with the NAS (after doing research and compatibility checks on the QNAP site), I then went purchased slower 1TB m.2 SSD, and they still do not show up as being available in the New Volume drop down menu. Do I need to install drivers or am I doing something else wrong? Would appreciate any and all tips guy. Thanks

[@MikeFaucher]

That device only supports m.2 SATA based SSD's. What model drives did you put in there?

[@yungsmoody6525]

@@MikeFaucher I checked with the compatibility check list on the QNAP site. I am using x2 Samsung 860 EVO M.2 2280 1TB SATA III V-NAND (MZ-N6E1T0BW)

[@MikeFaucher]

@@yungsmoody6525 Interesting. Make sure they have not been assigned to cache or qtiier and make sure the show un initialized. Then try to create a new storage pool and see if they show up. No reason this should not work.

[@DAHCKRAM]

Just recently set up a new TS 673A with 4x 8TB Seagate Iron Wolf (not Pro) NAS drives (Set at RAID5) and 2x 1TB Samsung 980 m.2 (Set as RAID1 SSD cache). I have added a Qnap 10gb nic to the NAS and have a 10gb nic (TP-Link TX-401) in the PC using a Cat7 cable to each (no switch)... everything works fine but I can't get any more than 225 MB/s copying files from the PC to the NAS ... Both nic's are definitely at 10gb.. I have disabled Large send offload V1 and V2 (on PC nic), and tried turning off Windows auto tuning... Jumbo packets are turned on in the NAS (9000 in NAS and Jumbo frames turned on in the PC nic). Still slow... I should be getting around 450 MB/s like you are any ideas or tips why the speeds are slow? Thanks in advance.

[@MikeFaucher]

How is this hooked up? I got these speeds with 10GbE network. If you hook up directly or with a 1GbE it will be slower.

[@DAHCKRAM]

@@MikeFaucher I am connected directly with a Cat7 cable 10gb to 10gb with no switch.

[@MikeFaucher]

​@@DAHCKRAM I had a similar issue a couple of years ago (kzbin.info/www/bejne/n4mpqpVsntGEj80) but in your case, there are several things to try. Have you tested it without any cache (completely disabled or preferably drives removed) and just to the array? Also, I would run speed tests on your PC drive just to make sure you are not restricting speed. With a direct connect and nVME drives your NAS should be around 700+. Sorry, I can't see anything obvious but you need to isolate whether it is on the PC or NAS side, or in the direct connection. Do you by any chance have a 10GbE switch you can try? Direct connects can be tricky or do have access to another PC that you can move the NIC to and see if you get the same speed? This probably not much help but without seeing it is hard to troubleshoot.

[@hammersbald7612]

I have a TS-473A with two 1TB m.2 ssds and 4 4TB Hdds over 10gbe. NAS switch PC write 50mb/s without cache, 200mb/s with cache. In qts Hero I get 900 mb/s for about 5 seconds and 400mb/s after that. I'm not happy with either. Big boy frames are on and working. I am already considering going back to a drawer full of usb ssds.

[@MikeFaucher]

The 900 is very good and. The 400 sounds like the speed of your array. Not sure why you would go to USB drives.

[@hammersbald7612]

@@MikeFaucher 900 is good for files with 5gb, not so much for files with >300gb. My backups only need to survive a couple of weeks and aren't even meant to be real backups, just dumb storage to maybe compare older data . More like a big buffer queue. I'm just dissapointed because the ssds are practically useless for sequential writes and I just realized I need a third sacrificial nvme ssd just for the system.

[@WhoDeanyUnchained]

cache is king...

[@MikeFaucher]

Agreed. Thanks.

[@mahuubao]

The Nvme becomes very hot do thermal pad wouldn't be wrong ....

[@MikeFaucher]

The nVME drives run hot but the 2.5 inch drives that are in this NAS ran very cool. Thanks for the observation.

[@Notmy00000]

😃😃😃😃🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏👍👍👍👍👍👍👍

[@MikeFaucher]

Thanks for the feedback!

[@bibbychung]

ssd cache is better.

[@MikeFaucher]

I agree. Thanks for the comment.