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ReadyTIER with ReadyNAS Pro 6
Hi,
I've got a NAS Pro 6-bay system, currently on NASOS 6.9.5 hotfix 1 and loaded with 4 x WD RED 8 TB drives in FlexRAID RAID 5. Primary use case for the unit is as an NFS server for my VMwar...
sstillwell wrote:
So...here's my putting-the-cart-before-the-horse question: Do you know of any reason this shouldn't work when adding a 512 GB RAID1 SSD tier to the existing volume?
It should work in the Pro-6 (though you do need to change to flexraid in order to use ReadyTier).
The main challenge is adapting the trays for the SSDs, and you've already found mounting brackets for that part.
ReadyTier isn't caching the metadata, so if the SSD RAID group fails you will lose the volume. Your SSDs will reach their write limits at the same time. So you might want to replace one of them about half-way through it's expected life, so you can stagger the replacements.
sstillwell wrote:
So...here's my putting-the-cart-before-the-horse question: Do you know of any reason this shouldn't work when adding a 512 GB RAID1 SSD tier to the existing volume?
It should work in the Pro-6 (though you do need to change to flexraid in order to use ReadyTier).
The main challenge is adapting the trays for the SSDs, and you've already found mounting brackets for that part.
ReadyTier isn't caching the metadata, so if the SSD RAID group fails you will lose the volume. Your SSDs will reach their write limits at the same time. So you might want to replace one of them about half-way through it's expected life, so you can stagger the replacements.
Sure, understood re: not a cacheing solution. For what it's worth, the old aluminum Mac Pro towers have slide-in trays for 3.5" drives, and need an identical adapter for 2.5" SSDs, so when trying to find something that makes a 2.5" drive fit mechanically and electrically, those parts are pretty easy to find.
The 860 Pro 512 GB has a guaranteed write lifetime of 5 years or 4,800 TB written (EDIT: it's 600 TBW for the 512 GB drives...still a long lifetime)...It's gonna last a while. Point taken, though. It's unlikely that they'll both die at EXACTLY the same time, but it's sure possible (and Murphy says "likely") that the second one would die before you finished re-syncing the array after replacing the first one.
Thanks for the information!
I've already changed from X-RAID to Flex-RAID.
I'm pretty sure the Pro is only SATA2, so I wonder how much you gain with SSDs.
Well, in terms of absolute bandwidth it's obviously 3 Gbps vs 6 Gbps for SATA3...and you're not going to hit either of those limits on even a single drive over two bonded 1 Gbps network connections. The primary gain is likely to be in latency and IOPS...which is just what I want for VM backing stores. Will I gain as much as I would if the unit were SATA3? No, of course not. Will I gain worthwhile performance improvement? I am assuming so and putting my money where my assumption is. :)
Just to confirm...I understand that if the SSD RAID group fails, your volume goes bye-bye, but do I remember correctly reading that you CAN remove the raid group via the UI and the metadata (& data if you're using it) migrate back to the spinning RAID group?
sstillwell wrote:
but do I remember correctly reading that you CAN remove the raid group via the UI and the metadata (& data if you're using it) migrate back to the spinning RAID group?
I don't recall seeing that myself, but it really ought to work that way.
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