Hi all, I've enabled SDD Tiering on my RN104 and it's fantastic. However, I don't like limiting my HDD to Raid1 once the SSD's are installed (since SSD takes up 2/4 slots).
I do however still have a RN102 that's not being used since i purchased RN104.
is there a way to utilize the RN102 as SSD tiering and connect the RN104 with HDD's as the slower tier?
Model: RN102|ReadyNAS 100 Series 2- Bay, RN104|ReadyNAS 100 Series 4- Bay
I did read his answer. I would like to understand the reason behind why it's not a good idea.
One reason is that the performance wouldn't be very good.
The RN102 can only get data from the RN104 using it's gigabit ethernet link. The RN104 can deliver data at about 70 MB/s over that link. NAS purposed and enterprise disks are a lot faster than that. So it would overall perform quite a bit slower than SSD tiering within the one NAS.
A second reason is that the combination would be much more fragile than using a single NAS. The metadata isn't being cached - it's only on the SSD. It's really important that the metadata stay in sync with the data on the mechanical disks - otherwise you will lose data. That's harder to do if the disks aren't all in the same system.
Personally I think your best strategy is to use the RN102 as a backup NAS. RAID alone isn't enough to keep your data safe - having at least one backup on a different device is the best way to do that. You could use two volumes (one on each disk) to maximize the capacity of the RN102, and use the built-in backup jobs to automatically back up the RN104 every day.
If you care about your data, then having an up-to-date backup saves you money over the long haul. Data recovery can be very expensive and it often doesn't succeed.
Another possibility is to move the SSDs to the RN102, and use them for shares that benefit most from the higher speed. Generally that is shares with a lot of small files/folders (photos, documents, possibly music). Then use RAID-5 on the RN104 for the larger files (videos, movies, etc).
