I really want a denser SSD to store my photo collection. My current small form factor PC has two NVME PCIe slots and no room for SATA drives. I have two 4 TB SSDs in there right now and it seems that consumer SSDs basically cap out at 4 TB. I would really love to get about 16 TB in my computer.
I'd love to find a M2-only NAS in a very low profile form factor. I live in a small apartment and prefer small electronics that can hide in a cabinet, but it seems like all of the NAS enclosures that I've ever seen recommended are fucking huge.
I've heard the Flashtor 12 is great, and can take lots of M.2s, but they end up with relatively few channels so data transmission rates aren't awesome. It can be fine as most users will be connecting over the network anyway which will be the bottleneck.
There’s a lot of really cool options in the replies here, but I think I’m at my limit on the number of tech hobbies I can manage. Really just waiting for a consumer grade Synology SSD NAS.
Exactly. It would have been great if I was still young and studying. I have seemingly infinite of time to fiddle around with things. Once you are working and have a family, most would really prefer to having something that simply work out of the box.
Unfortunately Synology have been moving towards Enterprise segment and completely forgot consumer.
I have the Flashstor 12 Pro. As the name suggests it's 12 m.2 nvme bays and it's pretty darn small considering.
Pros:
- It does what it says on the tin and I have 12 nvme drives in a ZFS pool
- It has 10G ethernet built in.
- It's pretty small, especially compared to most HDD focused NAS systems.
- It's just an x86 PC and you can blast the factory OS away to install your OS of choice without issue.
Cons:
- Each drive only gets a 3.0 x1 connection. It's honestly not much of a problem though as 1 GB/s per drive is still a ton of bandwidth after 12 drives.
- The built in ethernet is RJ45 instead of SFP+. Not the end of the world, just less power efficient.
- No PCIe expansion slots for anything but m.2 2280 drives.
- Single RAM slot so no dual channel and no large amounts of RAM. 32 GB works fine (I think Intel says the processor is only rated for 16). I can't remember if I tried 48 and it failed or if I never bothered. Either way 32 GB can be a bit small if you're really wanting to load it up with 4 TB or 8 TB drives and features like ZFS deduplication.
- The single built in fan could have been silent had they made any reasonable design choice around it. Instead I had to externally mount a noctua fan (to the same screw holes, just the inside is not a standard mount) and feed it power via a USB adapter. Works damn silent and cool now though.
- CPU (4 core Intel Celeron N5105) is very weak and the actual performance limitation for most any setup with this box.
I don't regret getting it, it's a solid choice given the relative lack of premade options in this segment, but the follow up NAS build was just me getting a motherboard/CPU with lots of PCIe lanes and loading up 4 way switches. You can do that via buying used Epyc servers on Ebay (loud/chunky) or just building a low end consumer class "workstation" (things like x8 x8 from the CPU instead of x16 for the assumed GPU) and PCIe to x4 switches (not the splitter cards which assume the motherboard has bifurcation and lanes available but actual switches). If you go the Epyc route you don't have to get switches and you can go back to cheaper splitters. I went the latter via some PCIe switch cards off Aliexpress. Performance and scaling of this one was better of course, but so was cost. Since I did all of this prices for m.2 drives have actually went up quite a bit so I'm glad I did it when I did.
What I would not recommend is anything non-x86 (older Ampere servers have lanes at not sky high prices but better to just go used Epyc at that point and get more CPU perf for the same dollar. SBCs are... a poor choice for a NAS on most every account but hacking factor). I'd also not recommend the Flashstor 6 as it only has 2.5 GBe connectivity and at that point what's the value in paying extra to do this all in flash.
In general yes but in the Flashtor you're going to be hard pressed to do much with that unless you wire up a separately powered external chassis which defeats the point of getting the Flashtor.
It's not a NAS, but you could hook it up to a low-power device and share it. I've got one connected to my primary machine and love it. Super fast storage.
Side note: One of the m2 chips that I got from Amazon was an obvious fake that I might not have caught if I hadn't ordered four together and one obviously didn't match.
There is good reason for size of such NAS devices. HDDs are just better to maintain your not corrupted data when not connected, as NANDs needs to be refreshed from time to time. The best you could do is to use SSD as a fast cache.
I'd like to find some good quality but slow nvmes, I dont need super high speed for media serving but getting a lot of storage (4x4tb/2x8tb ~) is much more expensive than hard drives. Itd be nice to have a silent home server
Good quality has a baseline level of speed which is pretty fast. There's not much you can cut at that point.
But cheap SSDs got down to 2x the price of hard drives last year. Even after prices stabilized, they're at 3x. Flash catching up relatively soon seems likely. Flash matching the current price of hard drives seems even more likely.
I think that is too optimistic. The cost / capacity of NAND, even by Western Digital roadmap wouldn't have come down to current HDD price by 2027 / 2028. And that is assuming HDD price dont fall.
I agree. The price difference between SSD storage and HDD per TB is still a multiple (seems to be currently about 5x). That is better than the 10x it was a few years ago; but I don't expect them to be equivalent any time soon.
Making sure I'm looking at new hard drives, I see prices around $15/TB at the cheap end. There are a few name-brand SSDs at $45/TB, many more at $50/TB. They're not high end but even the low end is fast these days.
Although the ads I saw claimed to be new drives, I have no way to verify that they are not refurbished. Of course, I don't know if the $50 per tb SSDs are reliable either.
It seems that HDD density has stopped improving so fast and you're going to run into a wall on price reduction because due to the extra material and shipping cost involved in producing an HDD vs. a tiny m.2 SSD.
Still way better than the M.2 NVMe drives which can be well over $1000 each.
However, these SATA drives still dominate HDDs in most metrics like random access and sustained transfer with like 560MB/sec. Not great compared to modern NVMe drives at like 7GB/sec, but for reference HDDs are usually less than half that and the random access metrics can be dire.
Not really. SSDs are silent, and have greater storage density. Both very attractive attributes for a home NAS. Even if the SSDs only do 250MB/s, four of them will saturate a 10GbE link.
You can get 15TB U.2 NVMe drives and use a PCIe U.2. adapter! Whether it fits in a SFF is going to depend on the specific chassis, but anything larger and it's fine.
You can also use an external PCIe Thunderbolt enclosure for macOS.
I use the Intel P4510 (8TB) and have been super impressed with the performance. I also have some older WD SN200’s that are excellent MLC flash. You do need some active cooling for these types of drives such as in the path of a fan.
I'm using these (Samsung 970 QVO) as the data drive in a couple of workstations right now. Not the fastest SSD for a number of reasons, but still a lot faster than a mechanical drive.
I've got a PNY XLR8 CS3140 8TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD with an M.2 adaptor in my MacBook Pro 2014, and it works well.
I also have an external one for backup purposes, and it works well in a Thunderbolt enclosure but has been a little unreliable (random disconnects) in a USB-C enclosure.
SSDs are maybe not so great for long term data retention, I've found even nice brands of sata SSDs left in a drawer for 5 years coming back full of read errors. :(
