SSD for NAS

There aren't any SSDs on the hardware compatibility list, but there are one or two posts from people who have used them.

StephenB wrote:
There aren't any SSDs on the hardware compatibility list, but there are one or two posts from people who have used them.

Right, but there is also not a lot of traditional HDs either that have been used by others with no issues. I don't think the hardware list was ever intended to be an exhaustive list but rather more of a guide. I did a quick search on SSDs and didn't turn up much and figure it was a dead end or there would be some long term posts on here regarding it. It's a bummer too as the NAS would probably scream performance with those drives in place.

On current firmware, they would install and run, but weird things may happen as the maintenance scripts aren't prepared for the SMART values they have. You may get SMART error emails, that a drive failed tests and should be replaced. Fan speeds may be high, as the system uses disk temperature readings to adjust the fan RPMs.

They won't get you a lot of performance improvement, the rest of the hardware will still be a bottleneck. The systems don't even max out the current 7200RPM disks as it is.

chirpa wrote:

On current firmware, they would install and run, but weird things may happen as the maintenance scripts aren't prepared for the SMART values they have. You may get SMART error emails, that a drive failed tests and should be replaced. Fan speeds may be high, as the system uses disk temperature readings to adjust the fan RPMs. They won't get you a lot of performance improvement, the rest of the hardware will still be a bottleneck. The systems don't even max out the current 7200RPM disks as it is.

Good points on the maintenance scripts as that never crossed my mine. I've installed SSD drives in two 5 year old PCs and still saw good improvements in performance. Neither of the PCs supported Sata III so I would expect similar results but I could be wrong.

For large file sequential reads and writes, the NAS is not limited by the disk speeds.

If you are doing a lot of non-contiguous I/O (database access, reading lots of small files, etc) you do start to become limited by the disk. For those use cases I think using SSDs would result in significant performance gains. Although as Chirpa says, the system software isn't designed with SSDs in mind, and there likely would be some issues.

Also, SSDs fail in different ways from traditional hard drives (though apparently reliability overall is similar). When they fail, all data on them is usually completely lost.

StephenB wrote:

For large file sequential reads and writes, the NAS is not limited by the disk speeds. If you are doing a lot of non-contiguous I/O (database access, reading lots of small files, etc) you do start to become limited by the disk. For those use cases I think using SSDs would result in significant performance gains. Although as Chirpa says, the system software isn't designed with SSDs in mind, and there likely would be some issues. Also, SSDs fail in different ways from traditional hard drives (though apparently reliability overall is similar). When they fail, all data on them is usually completely lost.

Well, there certainly sounds like there are some challenges with SSD drives. I guess one can hope that a future update may have support. :D

There is an interesting article on SSD reliability here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd ... ,2923.html