SSD on Pro

If you want to use SSDs you should consider ReadyNAS OS 6 or a 3rd party OS.

RAIDiator-x86 4.2.x does not support SSDs.

That's disappointing. What goes wrong if you put in an SSD?

Thanks,

Mike

SSDs don't give SMART stats (I think) so 4.2.x may think the SSD is dead when it isn't.

It will work, but some things like SMART may complain. I had two SSDs in an Ultra2 years ago. Don't have pics anymore, they were on the old Facebook fan page before they got it banned.

SSDs do SMART (at least the crucial and Samsung drives I've used in laptops do). But some of the usual stats are not reported, or just made up. The crucial reports "flying head writes" which clearly is fabricated.

My main concern is the lack of support for TRIM - which will shorten their life and reduce their performance. There are steps to install TRIM in linux, but they might not work on the pro, given the age of its kernel. (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/So ... rives#TRIM)

Also, I don't see a lot of value in using RAID with SSD. They don't have the same failure mechanisms as hard drives. Sizes also aren't aligned with hard drive sizes. I suspect your 512GB hard drives are actually 500 GB.

If I was going to play with it, I'd do a factory reset and set up the SSDs as jbod. Then use them for small files and databases, where the 0 seek time makes a huge performance difference. And of course back them up.

Thanks for your response, Steven

StephenB wrote:

SSDs do SMART (at least the crucial and Samsung drives I've used in laptops do). But some of the usual stats are not reported, or just made up. The crucial reports "flying head writes" which clearly is fabricated. My main concern is the lack of support for TRIM - which will shorten their life and reduce their performance. There are steps to install TRIM in linux, but they might not work on the pro, given the age of its kernel. (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Solid_State_Drives#TRIM)

The kernel is 2.6.37, which looks new enough (your linked article specifies 2.6.33). I may need to upgrade to ext4.

Also, I don't see a lot of value in using RAID with SSD. They don't have the same failure mechanisms as hard drives. Sizes also aren't aligned with hard drive sizes. I suspect your 512GB hard drives are actually 500 GB.

Can you please elaborate on the problem with using SSDs in RAID? I'm using X-RAID2, which IIUC works with mixed-size drives and provides redundancy.

If I was going to play with it, I'd do a factory reset and set up the SSDs as jbod. Then use them for small files and databases, where the 0 seek time makes a huge performance difference. And of course back them up.

My main motivation is that I'm running LMS (formerly squeezebox server) on the ReadyNas and want faster scans and better responsiveness while browsing. Probably 80% of the data on the ReadyNas is music files.

chirpa wrote:
It will work, but some things like SMART may complain. I had two SSDs in an Ultra2 years ago. Don't have pics anymore, they were on the old Facebook fan page before they got it banned.

Thanks, chirpa. That's encouraging. What did you do about TRIM?

Mike

I don't think trim works over any type of raid, due to the abstraction of the drives vs the data volume(s).

you would want to ensure your ssd drives can do automatic background garbage collection and trim itself at appropriate intervals.

mps wrote:
My main motivation is that I'm running LMS (formerly squeezebox server) on the ReadyNas and want faster scans and better responsiveness while browsing.

A RAM upgrade and a faster CPU will probably do more to improve responsiveness.

Like others said, performance will degrade fast without trim support. If you were going to try it, I'd recommend using OS6 on the Pro, not OS4.