Every time I think about building myself an all SSD NAS, I'm reminded of the fact that even with a 10G networking I wouldn't be able to take advantage of all that performance...
Really hard to get full performance from an NVMe unless it’s on the motherboard. Maybe some Thunderbolt 4 or 5 gets closest, but over the network, not so much. 😭 But still, it’s better performance than hard disk and nice and quiet.
I sold my QNAP TS464 which was a great NAS to be fair purely because of the constant noise from the HDD's being accessed for no reason whatsoever. That thing just did not like to go to sleep at all. I created a ticket with their support team and they couldn't resolve it either. On the lookout for a nice, low profile and, most importantly, quiet NAS. This F8 seems to fit the bill nicely. The only thing that stops me is the silly prices for 4TB NVME's right now.
From an SSD perspective, the price per Terabyte is still pretty optimal at 4TB right now, but the unit price is higher of course. Still worthwhile as you use less slots in the NAS in my view, though the parity on the RAID gets more expensive. So I would just start with less NVMe, and expand later, when you need it and the price is likely dropping with larger NVMe at better price points. Terramasters TRAID/TRAID+, similar to Synology's SHR/SHR2 helps with that, as you can mix up the sizes and still use the added capacity, compared to RAID5/6 etc. Of course, past 2 TB the price for NVMe vs Hard Drives really starts to diverge, so this is where the 'cheap and large' vs 'small and quiet with improved performance' choice starts to come in. And the improved performance is only really a thing if you have fast networking.
I don’t think SSD are really more reliable. They have different failure characteristics but the have a shorter life span typically due to lower write endurance and NAND degradation. And electron leakage means they are as good for cold storage. But on the upside they don’t have the same issues with moving parts wearing or issues with GShock in the same way. But for long term storage, HDD are probably better if the unit is kept in the right conditions.
I am not sure you would ever buy enterprise drives for this, but maybe you have a bunch of used ones lying around? If you did, it would indeed be a great place to put them. 😎
@@sometechguy Right now gen3 enterprise m.2 nvme cost equal to or a bit more than consumer drives for higher endurance, better iops and latency than most consumer gen3/4 drives. Kind of a no brainer for a flash NAS even with the PCIE lane restrictions if you want the best long term performance per dollar.
This is a NAS, so it’s reachable over a network. So the OS you use doesn’t matter, as long as it supports access to network shares, which MacOS does. I access this via both windows and Mac machines. For example, you enable a share using SMB on the nas, and the man browse to it from your Mac using ‘connect to server’.
Every time I think about building myself an all SSD NAS, I'm reminded of the fact that even with a 10G networking I wouldn't be able to take advantage of all that performance...
Really hard to get full performance from an NVMe unless it’s on the motherboard. Maybe some Thunderbolt 4 or 5 gets closest, but over the network, not so much. 😭
But still, it’s better performance than hard disk and nice and quiet.
you do it for power consumption rather than speed IMHO
I sold my QNAP TS464 which was a great NAS to be fair purely because of the constant noise from the HDD's being accessed for no reason whatsoever. That thing just did not like to go to sleep at all. I created a ticket with their support team and they couldn't resolve it either. On the lookout for a nice, low profile and, most importantly, quiet NAS. This F8 seems to fit the bill nicely. The only thing that stops me is the silly prices for 4TB NVME's right now.
From an SSD perspective, the price per Terabyte is still pretty optimal at 4TB right now, but the unit price is higher of course. Still worthwhile as you use less slots in the NAS in my view, though the parity on the RAID gets more expensive. So I would just start with less NVMe, and expand later, when you need it and the price is likely dropping with larger NVMe at better price points. Terramasters TRAID/TRAID+, similar to Synology's SHR/SHR2 helps with that, as you can mix up the sizes and still use the added capacity, compared to RAID5/6 etc.
Of course, past 2 TB the price for NVMe vs Hard Drives really starts to diverge, so this is where the 'cheap and large' vs 'small and quiet with improved performance' choice starts to come in. And the improved performance is only really a thing if you have fast networking.
I guess reliability would have to be the main reason for an ssd nas, then performance.
I don’t think SSD are really more reliable. They have different failure characteristics but the have a shorter life span typically due to lower write endurance and NAND degradation. And electron leakage means they are as good for cold storage. But on the upside they don’t have the same issues with moving parts wearing or issues with GShock in the same way. But for long term storage, HDD are probably better if the unit is kept in the right conditions.
main reason for ssd is silence
Solid review, shame they didn't make those units a bit larger so you could stuff 22110 enterprise drives into them though.
I am not sure you would ever buy enterprise drives for this, but maybe you have a bunch of used ones lying around? If you did, it would indeed be a great place to put them. 😎
@@sometechguy Right now gen3 enterprise m.2 nvme cost equal to or a bit more than consumer drives for higher endurance, better iops and latency than most consumer gen3/4 drives. Kind of a no brainer for a flash NAS even with the PCIE lane restrictions if you want the best long term performance per dollar.
3:35 western diddletel
Is it compatible with Mac OS?
This is a NAS, so it’s reachable over a network.
So the OS you use doesn’t matter, as long as it supports access to network shares, which MacOS does. I access this via both windows and Mac machines.
For example, you enable a share using SMB on the nas, and the man browse to it from your Mac using ‘connect to server’.
Main thing is hard disk fails at an inconvenient time. Raid might solve it, but you have to buy one more disk for redundancy.