1.21 gigawatt PSU, 8TB ECC RAM, 1PB of holographic crystal storage

[crazyman]

Is this enough to play back MP3's?

SPECS -
1PB crystal holographic storage with multi laser wavelength division multiplexing
8TB RAM
Mr. Fusion reactor for main power to 1.21 gigawatt PSU, with dual Cummins Diesel with quad smokestacks as backup

But seriously .. I'm new to FreeNAS and it sounds great but ... why why why does ZFS need such crazy hardware to store files? Is there any logical reason FreeNAS couldn't be written to have 1GB RAM and say, a 128GB SSD instead of spending $1000 on 128GB RAM? I get that it loves your data and all ... but when a "crappy" CPU that only does a few hundred million FLOPS and a few billion bytes of RAM has issues streaming a movie, it really makes me wonder...

I know this is the wrong place to ask for opinions on non-FreeNAS, but just for arguments sake, is it really safer having a $3000 FreeNAS box with ZFS, RAID10, SSD cache up the wazoo than having say... Dual Synology NASs mirrored for a fraction of the price and power usage?

Thanks for your insight :)

 

[anodos]

Is this enough to play back MP3's?

SPECS -
1PB crystal holographic storage with multi laser wavelength division multiplexing
8TB RAM
Mr. Fusion reactor for main power to 1.21 gigawatt PSU, with dual Cummins Diesel with quad smokestacks as backup

But seriously .. I'm new to FreeNAS and it sounds great but ... why why why does ZFS need such crazy hardware to store files? Is there any logical reason FreeNAS couldn't be written to have 1GB RAM and say, a 128GB SSD instead of spending $1000 on 128GB RAM? I get that it loves your data and all ... but when a "crappy" CPU that only does a few hundred million FLOPS and a few billion bytes of RAM has issues streaming a movie, it really makes me wonder...

I know this is the wrong place to ask for opinions on non-FreeNAS, but just for arguments sake, is it really safer having a $3000 FreeNAS box with ZFS, RAID10, SSD cache up the wazoo than having say... Dual Synology NASs mirrored for a fraction of the price and power usage?

Thanks for your insight :)

Synology DS214+ costs $340 on Newegg with no disks.
TS-140 with proper amounts of ECC RAM (without disks) costs about $380 on Newegg (and has a Core-i3 Processor).

 

[depasseg]

Minimum suggested are there for a reason. 8GB is the minimum recommended amount of RAM.

I'm not sure how you get to a $3k box. There are budget builds (Lenovo TS140, edited: thx anodos) in the ~$400 range that will do what you are looking for.

 

[crazyman]

Yeah, but when I am pricing out everything to support the awesome performance that I lust after, seems to get really expensive :( ..

Also, I'd really like to know what the issue with filling up volumes on ZFS? What's the deal with "max 80%" full. Technically, why can't it perform the same when using 5TB of a 6TB disk as opposed to 5TB of an 8TB disk? Years ago, I used EMC Centera storage that caused me daily nightmares that sounds suspiciously like ZFS with the "fill to 80% and you will pay!"...

Plus, it scares me to think that just simply using non-ECC RAM can wipe out everything .. on my HDD?? Why oh why? I have an old Synology that I can unplug and kick down the stairs, but the data on the HDD is fine!

 

[depasseg]

So you want to pay for a dual drive synology NAS but expect the performance of something that sounds much higher.

What is it exactly that you plan to use your NAS for?

As for the 80%, there are some posts that explain better that I can here. But basically it has to do with COW and fragmentation.

 

[crazyman]

I see these threads of people getting 10 mbit speeds with a Xeon, 32GB RAM, etc, but I can saturate a GbE connection with my 5 year old Synology with a gig of RAM ...that has it's disks almost full...

It's just for home use, but I will go nuts if speeds are too slow. I do photo and video editing sometimes but also have critical docs and files ... so I want security and performance ...

 

[depasseg]

Sounds like you are reading a problem that someone was having. Xeon with 32GB RAM should have no problem with pushing a 1GbE network.

Again, what are your goals? What problem is challenging you that you need a solution for?

 

[crazyman]

Honestly, I just really wanted to understand the technical reasoning that FreeNAS and ZFS was written in a way that requires so much hardware , CPU, etc (RAM especially, why not SWAP to HDD/SSD?) to do a simple task of storing files and why it was written in a way that if RAM fails or power is lost for any reason that data on your HDD is wiped when I can clearly unplug any other PC or NAS and still have my HDD data safe? Seems that if you sneeze at it, it will delete your data out of spite ;)

 

[SweetAndLow]

Is this enough to play back MP3's?

SPECS -
1PB crystal holographic storage with multi laser wavelength division multiplexing
8TB RAM
Mr. Fusion reactor for main power to 1.21 gigawatt PSU, with dual Cummins Diesel with quad smokestacks as backup

But seriously .. I'm new to FreeNAS and it sounds great but ... why why why does ZFS need such crazy hardware to store files? Is there any logical reason FreeNAS couldn't be written to have 1GB RAM and say, a 128GB SSD instead of spending $1000 on 128GB RAM? I get that it loves your data and all ... but when a "crappy" CPU that only does a few hundred million FLOPS and a few billion bytes of RAM has issues streaming a movie, it really makes me wonder...

I know this is the wrong place to ask for opinions on non-FreeNAS, but just for arguments sake, is it really safer having a $3000 FreeNAS box with ZFS, RAID10, SSD cache up the wazoo than having say... Dual Synology NASs mirrored for a fraction of the price and power usage?

Thanks for your insight :)

My E5 Xeon with 16 disks, 64GB ram and supermicro 4u case costs 3k. And that build is in the high end of what most people require. Most builds are around 1k and as low as $375. And all of these have ecc memory and can saturate 1gbit Ethernet easily with a streaming workflow.

 

[crazyman]

Honestly, I just really wanted to understand the technical reasoning that FreeNAS and ZFS was written in a way that requires so much hardware , CPU, etc (RAM especially, why not SWAP to HDD/SSD?) to do a simple task of storing files and why it was written in a way that if RAM fails or power is lost for any reason that data on your HDD is wiped when I can clearly unplug any other PC or NAS and still have my HDD data safe? Seems that if you sneeze at it, it will delete your data out of spite ;)

I'm just having a hard time justifying hardware like this just for a NAS... I mean, I have been doing photo and video editing on an old quad core with 8GB of RAM, but my file server needs more RAM to give me the files (at a decent speed)?

 

[depasseg]

There are some really good stickies and look up the newbie guide by CyberJock. These will give you some insight into how ZFS works and it's relationship with RAM. You are making statements that are either 100% inaccurate or are taken out of context. And I believe the guide and stickies will help clear up your misunderstanding.

Simple rebuttal: If power fails, you will not lose your data. However, if you were making a sync write and were using a SLOG without caps or battery and server power was lost then you could lose data, but that's not really relevant to the use case of what your Synology is doing.

 

[Ericloewe]

RAM especially, why not SWAP to HDD/SSD?

A number of reasons come to mind. Most importantly, no enterprise customer would tolerate having their storage servers be slowed down to save some RAM. FreeNAS just goes along for the ride chosen by the enterprise people. Swap is monstrously slow and has exactly zero benefit once you have enough RAM for the OS and the stuff it's doing. Whatever's left is ARC, meaning your stuff can be served from RAM instead of slow-ass disk.

Seems that if you sneeze at it, it will delete your data out of spite

No, but setups that are really asking for it typically get it. It's Murphy's Law.

power is lost for any reason that data on your HDD is wiped

Not true at all.

if RAM fails

That's a discussion that has been taken to its conclusion, several times: If you're using ZFS and all it implies (higher system requirements), you might as well use ECC. If you don't, you might be fine or you might not.

ZFS was written in a way that requires so much hardware

ZFS was a Sun product. Sun sold servers. They had the luxury of being able to say "We shall now make the best damned software RAID/filesystem combination we can, hardware limitations be damned."

 

[joeschmuck]

Honestly, I just really wanted to understand the technical reasoning that FreeNAS and ZFS was written in a way that requires so much hardware , CPU, etc

Because it does. But if you want something cheaper, you can do that as well and build your own file server using a standard computer running any free OS (like one of the Linux variants) and format your drives for EXT4 and RAID them together if you like, don't need to though. That is a cheaper way of doing it and you could stream music all day and night, but also you do not have all the protection that ZFS gives you which is one of the major draws to a product like this.

 

[jgreco]

Basically the market is flooded with crappy 1980's-grade filesystems that'd work on a 1MB RAM system but no one had made something that would take advantage of the resources of a large server. ZFS was designed to replace insanely expensive RAID array solutions, and they were thinking about petabyte pools back when FFS was having trouble with a 1TB filesyatem.

It is like asking why a Lamborghini is so expensive, after all, a Toyota Corolla is a hell of a lot cheaper... just not the same category of product.

 

[TXAG26]

Why ZFS? One word - Bitrot. Almost every other file system out there will happily keep chugging along while silent data corruption such as Bitrot occurs. ZFS checksums all data and has special scrub routines that verify and actually fix silent data corruption like Bitrot.

Feel free to throw together a cheap Linux or Windows file share server, but their underlying file system will do nothing to fix or prevent these types of silent errors. And I've had ECC ram save my bacon (and my data). My $0.02 is either spend the money needed to do it right or don't do it at all (find another software or hardware NAS product). I will say the cost difference is minuscule in most cases.