Re: choosing low-power/low-noise/free NAS servers to run Debian
On 12/04/16 16:22, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>> How many can be upgraded to Debian and operated with 100% free software,
>> no binary firmware blobs at all? Is there any comparison table that is
>> useful for people buying these things with the intention of running free
>> software?
>
> My understanding is that if you're really interested in low-power and
> low-noise, then you want 2.5" HDDs rather than 3.5" HDDs.
>
> And conversely, if you want to use two or more 3.5" HDDs, then the power
> consumption of the CPU/SoC is not that important.
>
I'm looking at solutions involving a pair of SSDs (for NFS mounted home
directories, Maildirs and other things that benefit from high IOPS) and
a pair of large capacity disks (4TB or bigger) for media files such as
photos, remote backup and other things that require lots of space
without extreme performance.
Each pair of disks in RAID-1
The large capacity disks appear to be only available as 3.5" right now.
One other comment: for a scenario like this, it is very useful to have a
fifth bay for data migrations, e.g. migrating from a 4TB disk to a 6TB
disk in future. Data migration can also be done using a USB3 SATA HDD
docking station but I've found the quality of the docking stations
varies considerably, it is much more convenient to have a spare bay in
the NAS where you know it will just work.
>
> Stefan
>
>
> PS: I use a BananaPi + WD20NPVT as low-power low-noise NAS, running
> blob-free Debian. But given your mention of SSDs you're probably not
> interested in that kind of solution, since the Allwinner A20's sata-II
> port is inexplicably limited to about 50MB/s throughput.
>
Yes, that is why I mentioned IOPS in the original email. There are many
of these system-on-a-chip or on-board SATA chipsets that don't perform well.
For example, in my HP Microserver, testing with the fio utility random
writes with 10GB of data on an old SSD,
- the onboard chipset achieved about 133MB/s and 33k IOPS
- an LSI 9207-4i4e achieves about 170MB/s and 43k IOPS
The LSI card spec sheet says it is capable of 700k IOPS, so I suspect
that 43k IOPS is the limit of the PCI bus or the SSD
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