How does the 12x model achieve that many lanes? I thought the N5105 only had 8x PCIe Gen3 lanes and no chipset that added additional PCIe lanes? Does it use a PCIe switch?
It only needs to saturate the 10Gb network, so the CPU might be able to push out 1GB? It also depends on RAID configuration - any RAID type that would require more processing (ex.: parity of R5 or R6) would likely severely limit performance. But SSDs would give you the best overall performance, simply due to their response time being able to keep up with this CPU
That's a really good point. 12 SSDs can saturate a 10Gb port even on random reads. (Assuming you have something generating that kind of load in the first place.)
Asustor has not provided that level of detail. But yes, as far as we know there's no way to get 12 PCIe lanes out of Jasper Lake without some kind of switch.
"The Intel N5105 CPU only has 8x PCIe Gen3 lanes. That is enough for one lane per SSD and then one lane for each 2.5GbE port. The 12x SSD version has to use both ASM1480 MUX chips as well as ASMedia PCIe switches to even get enough connectivity."
Nice to see upgradeable RAM in a device like this. 4GB isn't much, but I have plenty of spare DDR4 SO-DIMMs left over from previous upgrades so that's not a problem.
No, RAID goes from 0 to 6. It's just that 2, 3 and 4 are not very popular. But that "RAID 4" on written on this page is a typo, because the asustor website states "Volume Type: Single, JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6, RAID 10"
Yes, there is such a thing. RAID-4 utilizes a dedicated parity disk vs using distributed parity like RAID-5. NetApp, for example, used RAID-4 for a very long time.
A bit unfortunate that the 12x model has a single NIC. The cost to supply a single gigabit or preferably 2.5g port to avoid the single point of failure would have been welcome. Perhaps it will be capable of routing to a usb based NIC.
The 2TB m2 drives are cheap enough now that this could be attractive to those who need 10-20TB of storage and don't mind paying a bit more to keep it quiet so it can be closer to the desk.
Of course they would want to target people that give themselves that label because they're the ones that waste the most money on BS consumer electronics they don't really need.
My 12x model just arrived. While I'm waiting on the actual drives I'll be using to populate it fully, I did take a look at a single drive in the first slot using a 1TB Intel 670P.
I'm new to the Asustor Data Master software and couldn't seem to find any method of native benchmarking, so I wound up installing docker, pulling https://hub.docker.com/r/e7db/diskmark, and running "sudo docker run -it --rm -e PROFILE=nvme -v /volume1:/disk e7db/diskmark".
The 4K Random QD1 dropped by like 75% in reads and around 50% in writes with the IOPS dropping to a similar level. It's odd to see this effect caused by RAID0? Isn't it? Now that you've had it longer have you tested it with more drives or other RAID configurations?
I just ran those tests last night, won't really have any updates until all 12 of the 2tb ones I ordered show up, unfortunately.
I will say that despite each drive being limited due to the processor's paltry 8 PCIe lanes, it's still likely going to be more performant and over 3x smaller for 3 additional bays beyond what I was able to cram inside a Silverstone CS280 loaded with 2TB SATA 2.5" SSDs. Even though I used a cheap Topton NAS motherboard with an integrated Intel J6413 CPU, the price is pretty similar as well once you add the case/mobo/RAM/OS drive/cables/PCIe card & hot swap bay adapter as well.
Random 4K Q1T1: <= Read: 36 MB/s, 9444 IO/s => Write: (I've run the test twice, cancelling the first one after ~10 minutes of waiting for it to finish. The 2nd run still hasn't finished after 20+ minutes and counting)
I'm assuming some of the oddities with speeds are due to the fact the CPU has a total of 8 PCI-e lanes to begin with so it has to use its ASMedia chips to mux all of the consumers (NIC, SSDs, etc).
Thank you Smudgeous, for sharing your finding. I am a pro home user, do not have enough space in the Mac Studio left. I am looking for SSD NAS or even DAS solution. My needs are not much, I am only using for storage purpose and my son will use his Mac Mini with M2 pro chip to save his projects from school. I was being attracted to his hardware for this can be put near the Network router, TV (as Plex server, currently Mac Studio (external drive) ), I have a 10 Gbps ethernet to access. Could you please share how loud does it get? How hot does it get? As I understand from your post, do you recommend a 6 bay version? If I do not need more than 6 TB space. Please recommend another DAS solution as well. Thank you!
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meacupla - Monday, April 24, 2023 - link
How does the 12x model achieve that many lanes?I thought the N5105 only had 8x PCIe Gen3 lanes and no chipset that added additional PCIe lanes?
Does it use a PCIe switch?
idimitro - Monday, April 24, 2023 - link
Dose it even matter? Those processor are too wimpy to fully utilize 12 4x SSDs even if they are PCIe 3.0.meacupla - Monday, April 24, 2023 - link
It's a tech site. These kinds of technical engineering things are interesting things to know about.Drkrieger01 - Monday, April 24, 2023 - link
It only needs to saturate the 10Gb network, so the CPU might be able to push out 1GB? It also depends on RAID configuration - any RAID type that would require more processing (ex.: parity of R5 or R6) would likely severely limit performance.But SSDs would give you the best overall performance, simply due to their response time being able to keep up with this CPU
PixyMisa - Monday, April 24, 2023 - link
That's a really good point. 12 SSDs can saturate a 10Gb port even on random reads. (Assuming you have something generating that kind of load in the first place.)Ryan Smith - Monday, April 24, 2023 - link
Asustor has not provided that level of detail. But yes, as far as we know there's no way to get 12 PCIe lanes out of Jasper Lake without some kind of switch.jamesindevon - Tuesday, April 25, 2023 - link
Hopefully that's 48 PCIe lanes, or at least 24: one lane of PCIe3 per drive is too narrow for 10 gig ethernet.erotomania - Monday, May 1, 2023 - link
From Patrick Kennedy at STH:"The Intel N5105 CPU only has 8x PCIe Gen3 lanes. That is enough for one lane per SSD and then one lane for each 2.5GbE port. The 12x SSD version has to use both ASM1480 MUX chips as well as ASMedia PCIe switches to even get enough connectivity."
https://www.servethehome.com/a-quick-look-at-the-a...
web2dot0 - Monday, April 24, 2023 - link
It is probably designed for random write/read ... so 12SSDs can saturate a 10GE pipe.PixyMisa - Monday, April 24, 2023 - link
Nice to see upgradeable RAM in a device like this. 4GB isn't much, but I have plenty of spare DDR4 SO-DIMMs left over from previous upgrades so that's not a problem.antonline - Monday, April 24, 2023 - link
There is no such RAID 4 thing. It must be a typo.meacupla - Monday, April 24, 2023 - link
No, RAID goes from 0 to 6. It's just that 2, 3 and 4 are not very popular.But that "RAID 4" on written on this page is a typo, because the asustor website states "Volume Type: Single, JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6, RAID 10"
aaronbrodney - Tuesday, April 25, 2023 - link
Yes, there is such a thing. RAID-4 utilizes a dedicated parity disk vs using distributed parity like RAID-5. NetApp, for example, used RAID-4 for a very long time.teosoft - Monday, April 24, 2023 - link
It's a meager amount of RAM in either if one wants to use zfsAdditionalPylons - Tuesday, April 25, 2023 - link
N5105 doesn't support ECC anyway, so some would be very careful about using this setup for ZFS.Threska - Tuesday, April 25, 2023 - link
A curious omission in a server.meacupla - Tuesday, April 25, 2023 - link
1. It says it has 2x SODIMM slots, so you can pack in 2x8GB if you wanted to2. It's not enterprise grade hardware, so ecc is not strictly necessary. That said, ecc would be preferable with zfs.
hmurchison - Tuesday, April 25, 2023 - link
Would have loved to see 4x 2.5Gbe ports.Asustor probably should have left off the "Pro" moniker because
ideally you'd love to have a step up model with a SFP28 and faster
processing.
bsd228 - Tuesday, April 25, 2023 - link
A bit unfortunate that the 12x model has a single NIC. The cost to supply a single gigabit or preferably 2.5g port to avoid the single point of failure would have been welcome. Perhaps it will be capable of routing to a usb based NIC.The 2TB m2 drives are cheap enough now that this could be attractive to those who need 10-20TB of storage and don't mind paying a bit more to keep it quiet so it can be closer to the desk.
PeachNCream - Thursday, April 27, 2023 - link
"...content creators and enthusiasts..."Of course they would want to target people that give themselves that label because they're the ones that waste the most money on BS consumer electronics they don't really need.
Smudgeous - Saturday, April 29, 2023 - link
My 12x model just arrived.While I'm waiting on the actual drives I'll be using to populate it fully, I did take a look at a single drive in the first slot using a 1TB Intel 670P.
Sequential 1M Q8T1:
<= Read: 766 MB/s, 766 IO/s
=> Write: 774 MB/s, 774 IO/s
Sequential 128K Q32T1:
<= Read: 683 MB/s, 5470 IO/s
=> Write: 628 MB/s, 5025 IO/s
Random 4K Q32T16:
<= Read: 454 MB/s, 116272 IO/s
=> Write: 199 MB/s, 51113 IO/s
Random 4K Q1T1:
<= Read: 2 MB/s, 754 IO/s
=> Write: 92 MB/s, 23581 IO/s
Smudgeous - Saturday, April 29, 2023 - link
I'm new to the Asustor Data Master software and couldn't seem to find any method of native benchmarking, so I wound up installing docker, pulling https://hub.docker.com/r/e7db/diskmark, and running "sudo docker run -it --rm -e PROFILE=nvme -v /volume1:/disk e7db/diskmark".Smudgeous - Saturday, April 29, 2023 - link
I realize I copy/pasted the wrong data in my first post, which was actually from a 512GB Solidigm P41 Plus NVMe 4.0 drive.----------------
Single 1TB 670P:
----------------
Sequential 1M Q8T1:
<= Read: 773 MB/s, 773 IO/s
=> Write: 817 MB/s, 817 IO/s
Sequential 128K Q32T1:
<= Read: 748 MB/s, 5991 IO/s
=> Write: 811 MB/s, 6495 IO/s
Random 4K Q32T16:
<= Read: 507 MB/s, 129865 IO/s
=> Write: 207 MB/s, 53091 IO/s
Random 4K Q1T1:
<= Read: 52 MB/s, 13359 IO/s
=> Write: 89 MB/s, 23024 IO/s
-----------------------
Two 1TB 670P in RAID-0:
-----------------------
Sequential 1M Q8T1:
<= Read: 878 MB/s, 878 IO/s
=> Write: 1602 MB/s, 1602 IO/s
Sequential 128K Q32T1:
<= Read: 825 MB/s, 6600 IO/s
=> Write: 1601 MB/s, 12812 IO/s
Random 4K Q32T16:
<= Read: 1081 MB/s, 276843 IO/s
=> Write: 211 MB/s, 54250 IO/s
Random 4K Q1T1:
<= Read: 19 MB/s, 4964 IO/s
=> Write: 24 MB/s, 6219 IO/s
Elann-Morin-Tedronai - Sunday, April 30, 2023 - link
The 4K Random QD1 dropped by like 75% in reads and around 50% in writes with the IOPS dropping to a similar level. It's odd to see this effect caused by RAID0? Isn't it? Now that you've had it longer have you tested it with more drives or other RAID configurations?Smudgeous - Sunday, April 30, 2023 - link
I just ran those tests last night, won't really have any updates until all 12 of the 2tb ones I ordered show up, unfortunately.I will say that despite each drive being limited due to the processor's paltry 8 PCIe lanes, it's still likely going to be more performant and over 3x smaller for 3 additional bays beyond what I was able to cram inside a Silverstone CS280 loaded with 2TB SATA 2.5" SSDs. Even though I used a cheap Topton NAS motherboard with an integrated Intel J6413 CPU, the price is pretty similar as well once you add the case/mobo/RAM/OS drive/cables/PCIe card & hot swap bay adapter as well.
Smudgeous - Friday, May 5, 2023 - link
The last of my drives just arrived.Re-running with 12 x 2TB 670P in a RAID 6 on ext4:
Sequential 1M Q8T1:
<= Read: 3154 MB/s, 3154 IO/s
=> Write: 879 MB/s, 879 IO/s
Sequential 128K Q32T1:
<= Read: 3148 MB/s, 25190 IO/s
=> Write: 778 MB/s, 6230 IO/s
Random 4K Q32T16:
<= Read: 1596 MB/s, 408670 IO/s
=> Write: 108 MB/s, 27701 IO/s
Random 4K Q1T1:
<= Read: 36 MB/s, 9444 IO/s
=> Write: (I've run the test twice, cancelling the first one after ~10 minutes of waiting for it to finish. The 2nd run still hasn't finished after 20+ minutes and counting)
I'm assuming some of the oddities with speeds are due to the fact the CPU has a total of 8 PCI-e lanes to begin with so it has to use its ASMedia chips to mux all of the consumers (NIC, SSDs, etc).
Smudgeous - Friday, May 5, 2023 - link
...and the write finally finished:=> Write: 0 MB/s, 21 IO/s
AnandHIanand - Thursday, June 8, 2023 - link
Thank you Smudgeous, for sharing your finding. I am a pro home user, do not have enough space in the Mac Studio left. I am looking for SSD NAS or even DAS solution. My needs are not much, I am only using for storage purpose and my son will use his Mac Mini with M2 pro chip to save his projects from school. I was being attracted to his hardware for this can be put near the Network router, TV (as Plex server, currently Mac Studio (external drive) ), I have a 10 Gbps ethernet to access. Could you please share how loud does it get? How hot does it get? As I understand from your post, do you recommend a 6 bay version? If I do not need more than 6 TB space. Please recommend another DAS solution as well. Thank you!