Forum Discussion

anirudha

Follower

Feb 05, 2019

Is ready nas an economical storage solution

Hi, I looking into Ready NAs and Is ready nas an economical storage solution

kevinfor2014

Guide

Feb 08, 2019

I have been asking myself the very same question over the last several days - comparing multiple brands, models etc.. here is my thinking... with ReadyNas I could buy a NAS Device with either 1G or 10G ports and a variety of drives supported 2 to 12 drives..

For example let's say we buy the RN628X with 8 bays 10G ports and I install 6x10TB drives + 1x4TB +1x6TB (total 8 drives) with RAID6 i would have 21.8Tib usable, 7.28Tib used for protect and 34.6Tib completely unused.. and 2 drives could fail... with Netgear XRAID2 or Synology - I can take "full advantage" of my drives my space would be 45.4Tib 18.2 Protection (none unused) - this means that athough the QNAP 16bay is "cool" it doesn't support this so it's "off my list" - but it does have SSD Caching which I don't believe Readynas has (install one SSD for cache - the rest for storage using XRAID2 storage advantages

Now the problem with Netgear/Synology a single RAID6 drive failure is the "rebuild time" can take Days/weeks to recover with Btrfs - what if we could recover a drive a 14TB drive failure in 30 Minutes? so we look at a product that offers "Erasure encoding" /Clustering with 2 drive enclosures.. from a company like 45Drives that uses GlusterFS, or Qumulo QFS file system or we want "instant recovery to any second in time.. with no snapshots" like Reduxio - much better solution then Readynas.. problem is 160TB is like $80,000 and "yearly license fees for the NAS OS (Qumulo) for that price you could buy R4360X (60bay unit with 60 drives for around 980TB RAID60) and no "yearly software license for OS 6

What about using Windows Server 2019 - with Direct Storage Spaces.. just grab a bunch of random hard drives with 3 servers setup your own Cluster server.. with whatever hardware you have around.. using ReFs - I've not tried it yet but it's all Command line - no GUI

Basically the answer is ReadyNas is the best "bang for the buck" - what do others think?

StephenB
Guru - Experienced User
Feb 08, 2019
kevinfor2014 wrote:

but it does have SSD Caching which I don't believe Readynas has

OS 6.9 has metadata tiering on SSD; OS 6.10 (still in beta) adds SSD file caching. So the ReadyNAS does have this feature. Note that with the ReadyNAS the SSDs normally are also using RAID.

kevinfor2014 wrote:

so we look at a product that offers "Erasure encoding" /Clustering with 2 drive enclosures..

Technically RAID does use erasure encoding (forward erasure correction) to recover the data on a replaced drive. The parity blocks used in RAID-5 and RAID-6 are both forms of FEC. But there are more sophisticated ways to use FEC if you integrate it into the file system (instead of using it to create block storage for a file system, as RAID-5 does).

Clustering is just organizing a group of computers to act as a single computer. That's orthogonal to FEC, though it is possible to store FEC repair blocks on different computers in a cluster.

kevinfor2014 wrote:

Basically the answer is ReadyNas is the best "bang for the buck" - what do others think?

Well for me, it is cost effective. I have no need for the massive rack-mount systems you reference. Although price does matter to me, I'm also not looking for the cheapest possible system, so I am fine with a turn-key NAS (and not building my own storage system on a PC platform).