Faster Networking for my NAS - For (relatively) Cheap!
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- Опубліковано 15 кві 2024
- Hello there and welcome to my video. In today's video, I'm going to be upgrading the networking between my NAS and my main workstation computers. I'll also be learning about the existence of Fibre Channel, and how it's far different from ethernet.
Music, in order:
Beyond - Patrick Patrikios
Hanging Out - Bruno E.
Papov - Yung Logos
Soul Searching - Causmic
For the lane stuff, maximum theoretical transfer speeds for 10GbE is 1.25 GB/s, so you'd need at least PCIe 1.0 x4 for it to work and x8 or x16 on a 2 port one. Sadly, it doesn't seem manufacturers have done any PCIe 4.0 cars yet, so we're not gonna find dual port x1 cards yet. For a QSFP card, you'd need PCIe 3.0 x15 since the max speed you could achieve with a QSFP56 module is 200 Gbps.
Great video, love the channel and content so far. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with next!
Thanks for the insight, a project I want to take up too.. Great to be given good advice before the cost sets in..
@ 06:04 the exact cards I purchased for my NAS project / CD/DCD/BluRay storage Frankenstein’s Monster.
Same seller, even. Got two for $28 shipped, then realized one would not fit my half-height SFF HP EliteDesk.
The other was a full-height MT HP EliteDesk Workstation Edition case
So I found the right one ////
Sound familiar? Buy first, check specs second.
Yep haha, buying first and checking specs second... A classic blunder, which I've made many times!
I'm actually planning to move my NAS to a case that will require half-height brackets on the PCIe cards soon. Did you consider trying to modify the full-height PCIe bracket to allow it to fit in a low-profile case? I'm likely going to cut down the bracket and then bend it a little so that it can still screw in/mount to the case when I perform this case change.
You could set the mtu to 9000 on the nas and pc to get a bit faster sequential transfer speed.
These days, you can get 2 x SFP28 25gbps cards for under 30 dollars each, and 40 gbps qsfp cards are as low as 25 dollars. Transceivers or dac cables are cheap as well.
I don't know does it matter in your case, but I'm curious about power drow. Do the network cards support any power save states when not in use? How much did the idle power drow go up on the nas after the installation?
I think it's acceptable to give all the beens while in use, but when idling I don't want too much off increase in power bill
That's a good question, I haven't gotten around to testing that yet, but I might do so at some point! I'm not immediately aware of any power saving modes on the cards, though they could be there. That's something I'd have to research.
Even under full load, the cards don't get exceptionally hot, so I wouldn't expect that they're drawing more than a couple of watts, but I'm not certain of the exact number.
Having a fast network transfer is always going to be the slowest point. The drives.
I've MV drives that are only 4.5gb/s so to max it out, you would need to have raid 0 arrays on both ends/ systems.
You have to remember that the network design is not usually one to one, so if you have 10 people Access 10 discs the network has to be much faster than the drives.
Most people will say raid 0 is bad but if you're moving big files, you shift them to the strip and then move them to LTS.
I believe cache drives are used, but they are not called raid0 but perform the same.
Hba can be confusing.
I use convergence cards on my network, that's network and bus.
You should be able to do bus share too, it's a little bit complicated..
Why you didn't go for rj45 10gbe I don't know. They are about the same price.
Yeah, my NAS is pretty small, so I don't have any kind of RAID 0 cache that gets shifted to a resilient LTS solution (it's just too expensive right now).
I could have gone with RJ45 for the networking for sure, however I already had the fiber cables, so I decided that I'd just make use of them. If I didn't make use of them in this project, they'd likely just sit in a drawer for a long time because I don't have any other fiber gear and I didn't feel like initiating a return. Also, I haven't played with fiber yet, so I wanted to use some to get a feel for it and learn about it.
Also, from what I've heard, RJ45 10Gbps network cards get really hot. These fiber cards get warm, but nowhere close to needing a fan (I can comfortably hold my hand on the heatsink even after a while of running at full tilt). Almost everyone I see who uses RJ45 10G cards in standard computers has had to strap a fan to their cards because they were getting too hot.
@@CompHwTipsAndTutorials 10gbe in a standard pc which would normally have water cooling tend to run things hot, mine tend to get quite warm, but not overly as I have high airflow.
In the servers they get hot so I tend to do a run down after use.
If you wanted to play with FC, you could look at SAN. That way you could use the hba's.
Running large transfers can be done with ram disk (software) this can dump a few gigs, followed by raid0. But if your system isn't drive fast it won't really matter. But a mvme 3.5g would be okay.
A few years ago I had the fun task of unifying my backup and storage. It was on all media dating back 24 years. Cd, dvd, ide, SCSI... One issue was having the hardware to pull data from the media. But nothing like big ide with transfer speeds peaking at 35mbs!!! It took a few weeks!
I had some data corruption, I also had repeat data. All of which had to be sorted out.. adding to the time.
I ended up with a 15 bay jbod, a perc and a few dac cables (you can use these of fibre)
I added another converge card (16 port) as I had to do a logistical nightmare or moving data from multi places to a single place, duplicate it. Then organise it. Recover some and then put it on LTS as well as live data.
This tend cleared the newer drives which then had to be put into an array for some data to be wrote back.
Four servers later! I had done it
What you may find useful is just having a jbod as it's like having drives on your computer. Then it's just a matter of setting it up right to get the best speed for your use.
But having a big array (primary) means having a second backup. So you end up doubling. But when you're done, it doesn't matter so much how long the systems get their parity done in.
Do u not compress your videos at all? I know using a camera is different but I recommend 1440 gameplay at 6k bitrate using av1 and it looks very crisp. I haven’t looked into handbreak recently but that might be a good way to crunch those huge file sizes down
you cannot keep compressing the same video multiple times
I love AV1 and export all of my videos in it because of the file sizes. I don't compress the raw footage of my videos, though, because there is a massive quality decrease - even with nice codecs at reasonable bitrates.
I film all my stuff at 4k30FPS, and my camera encodes the files with h.264 @130,000Kbps, so the footage is chonky. But, it looks far better than any re-encoded/compressed version of it does, and so I keep all the raw footage. It's definitely a storage eater, but I just like having all the full quality clips from each video haha.
@@CompHwTipsAndTutorials makes sense. 130k is crazy
It's like my Home Internet I use today. It's Fiber and it felt just fast for most activities.
Maybe not related, but I actually impressed with the Fiber Internet I use today
Yeah, fiber internet seems absolutely great. I'm still on cable internet, but hopefully at some point fiber will be an option for me!
nice video brother keep up the good work though i didnt undersatnd shish but it is a good video
Glad you enjoyed! Yeah, I feel you on not understanding this stuff. It took me a good while to get my head wrapped around even the basics, which is where I'm at now, and I've still got so much to figure out and learn!
@@CompHwTipsAndTutorials yeah brother I am basic it guy with some basic knowledge 💪 but you bro oh my bro you have a really good amount of knowledge and thanks for replying to me
i think you should have gone with dual port 56g connectx cards to do 40gbe - they are not pricey and with point to point no switch is needed - the ws to dual nas is a good idea for many esp smb sector where network may be their weakest link - better network saves time, improves efficiency
40Gbe would have been fun to do, but I didn't go for it because in all honesty, I didn't think of it. But also, 40Gbe for my use case is just absurdly overkill lol, I'm not going to be saturating 10Gbe (outside of the NAS's RAM cache) any time soon.
I've been on a similar journey recently. Ended up with some Solaflare cards that came with the transceivers like yours. Just our of interest do your cards get hot ?
Really those cards are designed to be in a rack server with screaming fans all the time. Yes they do get hot. A fan near by wouldn't hurt. I have seen similar looking 10Gb cards with small fans built in.
As another commenter said, they are definitely designed to be in servers where air will be driven over their heatsinks at all times. They do get pretty warm, though I wouldn't say they end up incredibly/concerningly hot in my case. The ones to really look out for are any cards that use 10Gbps over RJ-45 ports (10GBASE-T). Those cards get HOT, because 10GBASE-T is pretty inefficient. Same thing goes for 10GBASE-T SFP+ transceivers; they're toasty little guys.
Sounds like you might want some tiered SSD storage in your server
Probably, that might be fun to implement in the future. Might require an OS change, which is going to be a little bit of an adventure to figure out but I'm sure I'll be up to the challenge when the time comes!
Ambitious setup for non IT person, aka Brave. Subscribed
Thanks for the sub, mate!
Yeah, definitely a little bit out of my comfort zone on this one. But hey, sometimes we've got to dabble in things we don't know much about in order to learn about them, and thankfully in this case everything worked out well and I've now got some more knowledge about fiber optics!
I have wanted to get 10g on my main pc but I don’t have enough slots. My main pc already has 2 gpus 2 m.2s. If only there was enough bandwidth in a wifi m.2 and someone made a card
Why do you have two gpus?
@@tendosingh5682 for recording and streaming and for decoding videos I’m watching
I saw one of those while researching the HP cards.
I t was a connectors to the WiFi M.2 then a cable to a SFF holder in a full-height back-plane bracket.
Seller had ten he was selling at $30 shipped.
Sadly I hesitated.
I’ve seen similar, but they were like $250-$300 each. WAY too pricey.
Not to disrespect but... When I heard you said, that your QLogic Adapter was not loaded up as a network card... I kinda facepalmed. Sorry.
Haha, don't worry, I was facepalming when I realized too!
@@CompHwTipsAndTutorials btw, if you might think of tape archival storage. You might be able to use those Fibre Channel Controllers. Some LTO Tape drives are fibre channel compatible.