Tbh, OP is looking at cheap SSDs (that's why he's asking if it's better to buy 2TB or 2x1TB instead - in his case there's probably no need/budget for 2x2TB to maximize his capacity to SATA slots used). A bare NAS will be likely as expensive as the drives he wants to buy.

Yes you can, crippling it to 10% of its performance and thus slowing down your NAS to 120MB/s.

It can pose a problem on AMD Threadripper chips. System network stack, network sockets and handling all the requests, takes your CPU time. That's why SMB Direct is a thing and allows you to transfer straight to another PC's memory, bypassing the OS networking, and using no CPU. Once we're talking fast networks (25GbE, 100GbE), it's even more profound, where copying a 20GB file could take like 30-40% of your CPU just to handle the network traffic. SMB Direct makes your transfer invisible in Task Manager. See, especially around 11 minute mark:

This is not Pentium 4/Athlon 3000, this is top-tier Threadripper and $15,000 100GbE network switch. Yes, Kontakt is probably not hammering your drives/network with sustained 100GB file transfers, but still it is something to check for. They tested using 4-port 1GbE cards to aggregate them into 4GbE, and turns out a 4th-gen i3 was maxing out, and bottlenecking the transfer to 300MB/s, just swapping to 4th-gen i7 fixed it. So CPU usage when working over a network is a thing to check for

It's not, it's actually called USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 to differentiate it from USB 3.2 Gen 2x2

 

Err...Nope . I pressed like because i liked your input on SMB. Fair point.
About USB though hehe, nothing more official than this: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usb_3_2_language_product_and_packaging_guidelines_final.pdf . Which pdf contains this:

•USB 3.2 Gen 1 Product capability: product signals at 5Gbps
Marketing name: SuperSpeed USB
•USB 3.2 Gen 2 Product capability: product signals at 10Gbps
Marketing name: SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps
•USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Product capability: product signals at 20Gbps
Marketing name: SuperSpeed USB 20Gbps

 

Last edited: Apr 2, 2021

will it stress the ssd to read from it?

no, you can read a million times from an SSD and it will still be as new.

only writing to them wears SSDs.

 

no, not really. *
Only writing (Means deleting and rewriting a cell) leads to wear off of the NAND.
Therefore, the guaranteed lifetime of an SSD is specified in TBW (TotalBytesWritten)

Not...quite.
But it's more likely that the controller of the SSD may fail over time than the NAND by only reading it. I have lost several HDD controllers over the decades due to the unhealthy conditions in computer enclosures. *

*) This of course doesn't mean a SSD written only once will live forever but predictions are not possible because many factors like humidity, temp, power fails, voltage fluctuations... will interfere

 

Last edited: Apr 2, 2021

Can I kindly ask you if you have also by chance done some tests also with the 1gbE network using an SSD in a NAS. How much difference is there in latency and playback performance using Kontakt compared to the 10gbE network?

I ask you this because with mechanical hard disks on 1gbE network, even if they are 7200 and in RAID, as soon as you use fairly large libraries with many instruments that plays at the same time there is nothing to do ... it's impossible. Especially because of the high access time that mechanical druves have. The SSD doesn't have this problem, but how does it behave in a 1gbE network?

Many thanks

 

Last edited: Apr 2, 2021

Well... Lemme just say, having a single ssd in an external NAS which communicates with your pc(s) via 1gbE, defeats the whole purpose of having a ssd in the first place. Even a cheap 5gbps USB external ssd will reach much higher read speeds than the ~125 mb/sec max speed of the 1gbps Ethernet and it will be cheaper than a NAS machine with no drives whatsoever.
Therefore, i haven't took the time to test a single ssd on a NAS, as it will behave almost identically to transfering data from one computer (with an ssd) to another with both connected on a 1gbE switch.
However, i have tested tested 3 ssds in RAID 0 and RAID 5 installed on the 10gbE Synology NAS (which at 950 euros with no drives didn't come cheap). In general ssds when in RAID, as we have said before and in other threads too, will reach the expected max speeds of a given RAID mode but latency will be worse because of the raid's permanent overhead which is also added to the network and transmission overhead.

This is not the mechanical drives failing here. I dunno how you came up with this. Yes we 've been "bashing" hdds through out this whole thread but there is still room and a role for them to play as i explained in my RAID 5 in a 10gbE NAS example. Keep in mind though, by modern standards RAID 5 should be considered surpassed and a legacy leftover of the older days. Still, if you are on a tight budget Intel cpus will still do RAID 5 np. Sadly, Ryzen cpus don't support RAID 5, but given that RAID 10 is the most widely used RAID mode today (followed by RAID 6 which isn't supported natively by either cpus), the lack of RAID 5 in the Ryzen platform is tolerated.
Cheers

 

Pick the best performing SSD you can buy and celebrate new speeds like a real Viking.

 

Slightly off topic but I was in the same position and opted for the 2tb ssd. Ive now however basically filled this (thx to the certain Chinese crack in the last week..) and now ready to expand. I however have no more available ports as I use the remaining Thunderbolt 3 port on my iMac for a Windows partition. What is the best solution to this to gain more ports? I would like to add maybe 2 more and possibly more USB ports so I could get another backup hard drive

 

I already have an external NAS with lot of empty slots (but 1gbE and not upgradable) so I asked. There is LAG 4x1gbE but it doesn't improve nothing if there aren't multiple clients. For sure two or more PC's can access audio data at 1gbE but a single PC is always limited to 1gbE.

My experience with traditional HDDs in a NAS (but in my case 1gbE) is different, even enterprise 7200 drives in RAID5 don't offer enough performance for large complex libraries. I can raise the streaming cache in kontakt, but even doing this sooner or later if there are multiple instruments playing in realtime the hdds can't get behind (drops everywhere...). The problem with kontakt isn't the 125MB/s,but the access time of the traditional HDDs, when there are only some instruments with few samples it works without problem...but add more of them and the heads of the drives can't move fast enough.That's why I was asking. Access time is the strength of SDDs, in fact you can also reduce the kontakt cache to zero to recover RAM when using SDDs.
For sure access time, compared to mechanical drives, improve even if the SSD is inserted into an external NAS, but of course you loose a lot due to the ethernet connection, I wondered how much...

 

Absolutely correct. Although i haven't seen the terrible dropouts you mention with hdds in raid5. Btw, i'm sure you know but i have to mention it would help a lot having a quality switch (managed if possible) and using the shortest possible Ethernet cables to minimize latency.

Putting a good sata ssd in your NAS, like a Samsung 860 Evo or Crucial MX500 etc., will definitely saturate your 1gbps connection maxing it @ 120-125mb/sec, mostly regardless the type of workload. Access times will be just like a local sata connection minus your (permanent) network's latency (which can be measured precisely) & the given overhead latency which of course varies (depending on the amount and type of data in inter-communication). Hope this last one helps.
Cheers

 

but not more than with harddisks controllers - and less when compared to reading - which is what the question was about.

and how many harddisk controllers you have lost really says nothing about the SSD situation.

though, depending on the formfactor and brand, replacing a controller board might be more difficult or impossible for SSDs, so in a way, it is somethign to consider.

 

Last edited: Apr 3, 2021

as usual, the thread goes once more deep into peoples´ theories about using raid level 17 and why a 100 petabyte CAT 9,1 connection is faster than your mother.

however, network attached storage is not the normal use case when you are a musician - and not only because it is too slow and already outperformed by SATA 150 (where a modern industry standard SSD delivers 550 - 10000 mb/s.)

network attached media only make sense when you 1. need to access them from more than one computer at the same time or 2. with different operating systems (or 3. both of that.)

that is basically the idea behind NAS.

 

Thanks taskforce for your suggestions

in fact is exactly like you said...option number 3 ;-). But maybe there is also an option number 4: when you have to store large amount of sound libraries or your data and sometimes use them on different computers. For storage only it is better to save the data in double or triple copy and keep the discs off and safe. But there is also a middle ground between using data every day and "I need them every now and then" and on different computers or systems... there comes into play a NAS also for musicians, also because it does not seem very cheap save TBs of data using only SSD discs. In the end to keep costs down you find yourself selecting those usual 2 or 4TB. Of course the same goes for the same thing even if you put individual SSD discs inside a NAS, again you have to make a selection, but as I wrote, you can keep something "light" on HDDs something on SSD all in the same place and accessible.
I'm not saying it's ideal but as in some cases it can be useful to organize things this way, or at least for me it is.

 

I'd say going SATA SSD NAS route really needs 10Gbit network for performance to shine, 6Gbit SATAIII interface in modest RAID configs would make use of 10Gbit network, pity cheapest Synology NAS with onboard 10Gig NIC is DS1621xs+ which is ridiculously expensive so far and doesn't support SHR

 

The basic idea of NAS is file server and/or single/multiple backup. So you were halfway there. The different OS's is self explanatory since NAS machines run their own OS (as mentioned earlier), just accessing them you are already using a different OS lol. But yes, it is a good reason too.
This though,

Childish. I am only talking of things tried and tested by myself and from trusted web resources. With proof if needed and i try to stick with proven, academically correct explanations as much and as simple as i can. And so far, all other people's contribution has been on par with what i mention. The only "flattening" ramble here, is your sentence above. Perhaps a lot of numbers make you feel dizzy?
Cheers

 

You need two HDs, you need one extra whether SSD or HD to back up your sounds on SSD if the drive fail.

 

obviously it is not. because that is not what he wanted to do, yet forum threads like this always end up with this kind of discussion.

a network disk has a dozen of missing features compared to "normal" disks and you should really only use it with a good reason. IMHO :P

 

as soon as you have a Mac and a PC, a NAS can save you a lot of trouble, even if you switch clients only 5 times per year.

however, i would never consider to read files from them when making music, programming, things like that. it is really more a storage thing.

i dont understand what the type of media has to do with the way it is connected.

other than that i can follow you. i also have internal SSDs, internal harddisks, and external harddisks and i use these 3 different options for different things and wisely choose which solutions are the cheapest, since i need a lot of space and have a hilarious budget.

if money would not matter i would get a 24-bay SSD rack with fibre and put everything inside that central solution, but the good ones are around 25,000 (barebone!) and so i have chosen consumer HDs.^^

 

Paragon Mac Toolbox is $32.50 and includes NTFS read/write driver for Mac, and HFS+/APFS driver for Windows. After that, you can use whatever drives you like, including the ability to create Mac-formatted partitions from Windows. That's a more cost-effective solution than purchasing a NAS and reducing your performance in the process due to 1GbE being a ~120MB/s bottleneck in real life.

 

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