ASRock Rack C2750D4I and U-NAS NSC-800: A DIY File Server
by Ganesh T S on August 10, 2015 8:45 AM EST- Posted in
- NAS
- storage server
- Avoton
- ASRock Rack
- U-NAS
Performance Metrics - Storage Subsystem
In the previous section, we looked at various benchmarks for databases, web servers, general memory and CPU performance etc. For a file server, the storage performance is of paramount importance, since the main expectation from the system is one of writing to and reading from a disk volume protected against disk failure. In this section, we use Ubuntu 14.04 and mdadm to configure the disks in the hot-swap drive bays in a RAID-5 volume. Selected benchmarks from the Phoronix Test Suite are run with the RAID-5 volume as the target disk.
AIO Stress
Our first test in the storage benchmark is the AIO Stress PTS test profile. It is an asynchronous I/O benchmark, and our configuration tests random writes to a 2048MB test file using a 64KB record size, enabling apples-to-apples comparison with the other results reported to OpenBenchmarking.org
FS-Mark
FS-Mark is used to evaluate the performance of a system's file-system. The benchmark involves determination of the rate of processing files in a given volume. Different test profiles are used - processing 1000 files of 1MB each, processing 5000 files of 1MB each using four threads, processing 4000 files of 1MB each spread over 32 sub-directories and finally, 1000 files of 1MB each without using sync operations to the disk. The processing efficiencies are recorded in the graphs below.
PostMark
This benchmark simulates small-file testing similar to the tasks endured by web and mail servers. This test profile performs 25,000 transactions with 500 files simultaneously with the file sizes ranging between 5 and 512 kilobytes.
Numbers from the evaluation of other systems can be found on OpenBenchmarking.org
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ethebubbeth - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
Your proposed setup does not support ECC memory, which is essential for any sort of software RAID style configuration. The system in the article does. I would not want to run a NAS without ECC memory unless I were using a hardware RAID card with cache battery backup.brbubba - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
This system is quite capable of running Plex transcoding, check the cpu benchmark scores. If you want even more power grab a E3C226D2I and throw in an i7.HideOut - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
All this power an d still USB 2.0 ?DanNeely - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
It's a 2013 SoC, so no native support on Intel's support. I'm not sure if ASRock deliberately decided not to support it; or just ran out of PCIe lanes. It looks like they should have a few still available but I might be missing something. The SoC has 16 total; 8 go to the PCIe slot, 2 go to sata controllers, 3 to lan controllers, the GPU is a single lane PCIe model. That leaves 2 lanes unaccounted for...DanNeely - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
Also, it was never intended for use in consumer systems. USB3 primarily matters for backing a NAS to an external HD (or pulling files off of one); Avonton was intended for higher end business class NASes, that whether rackmount or standalone would be primarily accessed over the network.brbubba - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
Glad to see more mainstream sites posting these types of reviews. I was seriously considering the U-NAS boxes, but they aren't exactly what I call mainstream and I have yet to see any US retailers stocking their products.DanNeely - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
It appears you can order their cases direct from the manufacturer and pay in USD, so the lack of 3rd party resellers is not a major problem. For my location in the US northeast, they wanted $16.66 to ship the 4bay case. No indication of shipping time was given; so if they don't have a US distribution point they're either shipping slowboat or eating the cost of airmail.Paul357 - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
A great system for a NAS/Plex Media server. Still though, I'd wait to see what Denverton brings to the table. If it even is announced this year....bobbozzo - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
Hi,1. would like to have seen more discussion about the power supply quality and other possible choices; will most 1U PSUs work, or is cabling going to be a problem? Would an SFX PSU fit?
2. I didn't notice any mention of noise levels.
3. any idea why the VDI performance was poor?
thanks!
mdw9604 - Tuesday, August 11, 2015 - link
Would like to see an option for redundant power supplies, even it means a bigger chassis.I have a couple of Synology DS1813+ and like them, but my next NAS will need to be beefier and will want some enterprise features, so looking at ZFS, redundant power supplies & possibly an iLO/Drac /Remote Console Card, as it will be located in a data center.
This one doesn't quite make the cut.