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Ask HN: Are you switching to SSDs in your NAS?
One of the 3TB HDs failed in my NAS so trying to decide what to do next. I usually mirror HDs but SSDs are getting cheaper all the time. Do you need to mirror SSDs in a NAS or are they "good enough"? Or is it better to stay with spinners? What do you do?
- JohnnyHerz 4y agoI have 30 4TB SSD's attached to my Synology and have yet to have one die before it's scheduled EOL. IMO, SSD's became the standard a few years back.
- xupybd 4y agoI recently priced up new drives for a server at work. SSDs made more sense. Mirroring is essential for us as data loss is a big problem. The price difference was not that great so it was hard to justify buying slower spinning disks. We were looking at high speed spinning disks vs SSDs. If you are looking at slower speed drives maybe the math works out a little differently.
- jqpabc123 4y agoThe price difference was not that great so it was hard to justify buying slower spinning disks. "Slower" is not always easy to judge. Lots of SSDs (if not most) tend to slow down as they start to fill up.
- xupybd 4y agoYeah but the comparison for us was with 5400 rpm spin disks. I made the assumption that SSDs would always read faster.
- dClauzel 4y agoNo: the price of terabyte of SSD is still too high for RAID.
- ChumpGPT 4y agoI guess it all depends on your budget and how much disk you require. WD Black SN770 is $119 for 2TB and the Crucial P3 4TB is $219 @ AMZN. Prices have really tumbled and they might still go down a little. You could always check /r/DataHoarder or /r/HomeNAS on reddit to see what they advise.
- kstenerud 4y agoSSDs have made nice price gains on spinning disks. The price difference is now only 3:1 at the price point (12tb hd costs roughly the same as a 4tb SSD) vs 5:1 only a year and a half ago. Use mirroring if losing everything on the drive would hurt.
- jqpabc123 4y agoUse mirroring if losing everything on the drive would hurt. Simple mirroring may not be enough. SSDs have been known to fail based on power-on hours --- which means mirror and main die at roughly the same time. This has affected HN in the recent past. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048148
- jqpabc123 4y agoWhich is more important for your NAS --- data reliability or read/write performance? SSDs can be faster but also less predictable and reliable. SSDs are more highly software oriented so they are more error/bug prone and performance can vary over time and based on usage and utilization patterns. For example, it is not uncommon for an SSD at 75% of capacity to have significantly reduced read or write performance than it has at 25% of capacity. This very forum has been affected by SSD bugs in the recent past. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031243
- rektide 4y agoLong long WIP but Ceph/Rook across 4x usb attached drives has been my go, across 4x small kube servers. Honestly I'd love to have a sad based fast-Nas too, also attached. I was going to chime in to complain that there aren't good toaster carriers for nvme drives, but there actually are more than plenty of low price single drive USB carriers. To me the question comes down to need. Mostly I need some good reliable bulk storage. I don't really need speed. It'd be fun to have a couple TB pool of fast storage, but not needed, where-as I need capacity badly. Getting some Seagate Exos spinning rust is just a no brainer, just fabulous drives at a great price.
- navjack27 4y agoI run Rockstor on my NAS which is an "old" Ryzen 3950x with 32GB RAM. It has 4 SATA SSD drives 120GB - for the system itself 2x 960GB 1x 480GB And it has 4 NVMe m.2 drives 1x 4TB 1x 250Gb 1x 750gb 1x 960GB They all run as a single btrfs drive mode with no redundancy. Been like that for almost a year now so far and all the drives we're previously used in other systems that I have before I put them in the nas. Absolutely zero issues. Love it. Every single time that I've tried using a rotating drive in an nas it just fails. Be it a WD red NAS drive or some random laptop HDD I have lying around. Don't listen to people that say ssds fail. The way prices are going right now I'm going to try to pick up more of the four terabyte nvme drives and replace the rest of the nvme drives in this nas one by one. If I could get every drive except for the small system drive to be a 4 TB drive that would rule. But there is one exception. I have had reliability issues on this machine using a external nvme dock that's over USB c. And it's only with this particular OS or maybe it's just with Linux because it's fine in Windows and it has to do with how the dock doesn't give a unique serial number to the drive and also sometimes it just provides a very flaky connection and I was having a little bit of problems with that and as soon as I removed it from the array all the problems went away.