These are total Beasts! I really wish QNAP would just sell their NAS OS as a standalone item. I dont wanna do ZFS because it mostly requires ECC RAM, and intel has made damn sure we can't use the latest and greatest cores in NAS's like this.
I wanna buy a i3 6100 and run a Nas with Virtualization support. QNAP's OS is great, but their hardware is very very expensive.
It doesn't. I know freeNAS claims it does, and a particular subset of freeNAS forum users have dedicated a lot of time and energy to yelling at anyone who doesn't, but ZFS does not require ECC ram any more than ext4, xfs, ntfs, hfs+, or fat do.
Does FreeNas Do VM's? thats a huge feature that QNAP has over everyone else. Thats why i want them to just sell the OS. The hardware is to expensive.
Take this i3 model for example. $600 in parts but they charge $2000-$2500. and you still gotta buy drives, SSD's, and M.2's
Althought freenas does not require ECC, your running a huge risk due to the nature of ZFS. There are plenty of discussions on this topic, and the general consensus is, dont bother unless you use ECC.
The reason why FreeNAStards spout the "ECC is required!" nonsense is because if you care enough about your data to have a dedicated machine for it that constantly verifies file integrity, then ECC is naturally along the same vein, and in cases where you're buying all-new-hardware, it isn't a much larger investment than non-ECC compatible hardware.
The problem is, many enthusiasts want to repurpose old gaming machines as they upgrade to a modern one, using the old consumer-oriented (and therefore not-ECC-compatible) platform they already own. It'd cost them $0 to use existing hardware, and it'd cost a hefty sum (hundreds of dollars) to move to an equivalent ECC-compatible system.
I got a consumer grade i3-4130T and 16GB DDR3 (not ECC) and have a 6x 4TB ZFS2 pool (equivalent to 14TiB usable space), and set this up months ago. Apart from FreeNAS not freaking working for publishing a Windows network share folder for a specific PC on the LAN 8 attempts in a row, then following 4 different video guides that did the exact same thing I did before somehow it started working 2 days after giving up, FreeNAS has not posed any issues for me. No data has been corrupted, no random reboots (it's on a UPS), nothing. It's just been stable.
I would guess truth is somewhere in between. ZFS does not require ECC, but it may be somewhat more vulnerable to RAM errors than older file systems, from two reasons: 1) it uses more RAM then old filesystems : 1GB RAM per TB of disk is usual, or even more when using things like deduplication or compression 2) it writes more often to disk than old filesystems : "scrubbing" on ZFS increase writes, but also additional error-correction data for normal writes
So when you combine those two things, it must result in ZFS being *somewhat* more vulnerable to RAM errors. If it use more RAM, there is more chance that RAM error will hit it. If it writes more often, there is more chance that RAM error will corrupt data on disk. But that does not mean it can not be used without ECC : even if ZFS is 30% more vulnerable than older filesystems (invented number), if general risk of corruption from RAM errors is 10% per year, it would mean ZFS would be at 13% per year.... so not big difference. Although, people who are interested in ZFS usually have lower tolerance toward corruption chances ;)
I find the hardware from QNAP also unbeatable, I initially also wanted to build a FreeNAS or OMV NAS but I came to the conclusion that the hardware which was available was inferior. A suitable motherboard with 4x 1Gb LAN ports and a suitable PSU came out about as expensive as these NASs and still wasn't as good. Also, one can buy the non-Thunderbolt QNAP NAS with a Pentium chip for much less....one can upgrade the CPU and Thunderbolt card later.
"A suitable motherboard with 4x 1Gb LAN ports and a suitable PSU came out about as expensive as these NASs and still wasn't as good."
a 4x 1GB Land Card is $50. And thunderbolt is on just about any Skylake Motherboard even the sub $130 ones. regarding the Power Supply's, thats a old argument that no longer holds true. There are so many cheap good PSU's in these small form factors.
"Also, one can buy the non-Thunderbolt QNAP NAS with a Pentium chip for much less....one can upgrade the CPU and Thunderbolt card later."
not enough power. most people buy QNAP for the Virtualization features and excellent software. I believe that is what jason was talking about. By the time you enable a Plex Server, Daily Snap shots, Itunes/Samba, FTP, etcc. your already taxing that cheap $60 cpu trapped inside a $600 MSRP NAS
I agree, They need to SELL US THE OS SEPARATELY like they do the camera licenses.
"Althought freenas does not require ECC, your running a huge risk due to the nature of ZFS. There are plenty of discussions on this topic, and the general consensus is, dont bother unless you use ECC."
Can you explain to me what part of the nature of ZFS makes running non-ECC RAM a risk? The discussions on this topic typically center around a so-called "scrub of death". And as presented it doesn't make very much sense.
1) Having a stuck bit in RAM doesn't force every block of the filesystem to be pushed through that particular byte of memory space. So the typical way this "scrub of death" is presented as ZFS gleefully overwriting all of the filesystem one block at a time is at least a misunderstanding of memory management.
2) But so what, even if only 1 block in 100, or in 1000, or even in 10,000 gets pushed through that bad bit that could be REALLY bad if ZFS were gleefully overwriting good-data with stuck-bit data. Unless the stuck bit has a malicious ability to manipulate itself to create fletcher4 or sha hash collisions (and spoiler: and unless you believe in something like Maxwell's Demon, it doesn't) ZFS will first see data that doesn't match a checksum, and try to read a redundant copy. If the redundant copy and checksum get their own memory blocks, ZFS will see how to correct the error, and write out the "good" data. If by some horrible luck, the redundant copies somehow also get pushed through the SAME bad bit, ZFS will see data and its redundant copy that don't match their checksums, log an error, and overwrite nothing.
FreeNAS is loaded from a USB drive and then runs _entirely_ from RAM. Should an unrecoverable error happen in memory, FreeNAS will crash and either shut down or reboot; potentially losing data if it was mid-transfer or mid-way through a file system correction (as this is what it does all the time, scan, rescan, and rescane the file system correcting potential file corruption). This can potentially cause undue system downtime or, very rarely, loss of data, but for a standard home user, this is acceptable.
You can do VM without Qnap soft, but this time is genuinely more about hardware. 3 tier system will squeeze every juice out of this box. PCI NVME slot can reward you with over 2000 Megabytes throughput speeds. Second tier SSD with 500 MB speeds and RAID storage at the bottom. Plus M.2 x2 slots for caching. Can not argue with that! Price for what you get is justified. http://www.span.com/product/Qnap-Desktop-NAS-10GbE...
Getting ECC ram isn't an issue. Getting on an ECC compatible platform is the issue. I can buy 16GB of ECC DDR3 no-big-deal, but my old gaming PC still isn't going to support using it. It's not just the motherboards being incompatible on ECC, it's the entire platform; needing server-grade processors that natively support ECC functionality, needing a motherboard that also supports ECC functionality, getting that ECC memory, and then (for some users) finding a motherboard that fits the size of the case you wanted to use.
I wanted to use a Node 304 (miniITX) and the 6 hard drive cages for a relatively slim and compact FreeNAS box. When I made my build, nothing on the market supported what I needed for a reasonable price.
I would go for i5 or i7 options for future proofing. But you can save some money by choosing less drives or just not filling all bays at very beginning. Price seems to start going down now http://www.span.com/search/IBQ-_star_82
really enthusiastic about these boxes until I got to the THREE HDMI part. That just screams HTPC or whatever acronym they are using for ripping your movies to a box and playing them back on an HDTV. Professional content creators dont plug their source and program monitors into their storage. You could argue that it is a way to keep from tying up TB ports for displays, but editors, AE guys etc are more concerned about nosebleed fast storage. They dont want to give up even 10% bandwidth for a display or two. I'm also a little skeptical about tiering. That works great on databases and even large photos. But when you are editing from prores 444 or 422, with hours of footage, that might be a problem for a deep cache. I hope the tiering doesnt eff up the speed of the unit for video editing by introducing latency.
You can always disable Qtier and use ultra-fast SSDs in all the available slots :)
HDMI ports, I would imagine, come in for free, and for scenarios involving playback of content directly on the NAS (a VM could help with that). I doubt it affects the bandwidth for the storage, since Skylake can support up to three separate display pipelines independent of the PCIe lanes.
Would be a great solution if it had ECC, Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C as CORE architecture for the new breed NVMe SSD's from Samsung or Intel at circa 2,500 Mb/s (and M, and eventually Optaine at conservatively twice that, rather than core SATA
But I'm also old school EMC/HP and don't believe you should be playing media or running applications directly on the NAS, but having said that their Surveillance Station looks pretty interesting . . .
But they need to remember first and foremost it's a NAS
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jasonelmore - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
These are total Beasts! I really wish QNAP would just sell their NAS OS as a standalone item. I dont wanna do ZFS because it mostly requires ECC RAM, and intel has made damn sure we can't use the latest and greatest cores in NAS's like this.I wanna buy a i3 6100 and run a Nas with Virtualization support. QNAP's OS is great, but their hardware is very very expensive.
Essence_of_War - Saturday, May 14, 2016 - link
" because it mostly requires ECC RAM"It doesn't. I know freeNAS claims it does, and a particular subset of freeNAS forum users have dedicated a lot of time and energy to yelling at anyone who doesn't, but ZFS does not require ECC ram any more than ext4, xfs, ntfs, hfs+, or fat do.
jasonelmore - Saturday, May 14, 2016 - link
Does FreeNas Do VM's? thats a huge feature that QNAP has over everyone else. Thats why i want them to just sell the OS. The hardware is to expensive.Take this i3 model for example. $600 in parts but they charge $2000-$2500. and you still gotta buy drives, SSD's, and M.2's
Althought freenas does not require ECC, your running a huge risk due to the nature of ZFS. There are plenty of discussions on this topic, and the general consensus is, dont bother unless you use ECC.
extide - Saturday, May 14, 2016 - link
It is not any greater a risk than any other file system. In fact the risk is LOWER with ZFS because of the checksumming.JoeyJoJo123 - Sunday, May 15, 2016 - link
extide has it right.The reason why FreeNAStards spout the "ECC is required!" nonsense is because if you care enough about your data to have a dedicated machine for it that constantly verifies file integrity, then ECC is naturally along the same vein, and in cases where you're buying all-new-hardware, it isn't a much larger investment than non-ECC compatible hardware.
The problem is, many enthusiasts want to repurpose old gaming machines as they upgrade to a modern one, using the old consumer-oriented (and therefore not-ECC-compatible) platform they already own. It'd cost them $0 to use existing hardware, and it'd cost a hefty sum (hundreds of dollars) to move to an equivalent ECC-compatible system.
I got a consumer grade i3-4130T and 16GB DDR3 (not ECC) and have a 6x 4TB ZFS2 pool (equivalent to 14TiB usable space), and set this up months ago. Apart from FreeNAS not freaking working for publishing a Windows network share folder for a specific PC on the LAN 8 attempts in a row, then following 4 different video guides that did the exact same thing I did before somehow it started working 2 days after giving up, FreeNAS has not posed any issues for me. No data has been corrupted, no random reboots (it's on a UPS), nothing. It's just been stable.
Nenad - Tuesday, May 24, 2016 - link
I would guess truth is somewhere in between. ZFS does not require ECC, but it may be somewhat more vulnerable to RAM errors than older file systems, from two reasons:1) it uses more RAM then old filesystems : 1GB RAM per TB of disk is usual, or even more when using things like deduplication or compression
2) it writes more often to disk than old filesystems : "scrubbing" on ZFS increase writes, but also additional error-correction data for normal writes
So when you combine those two things, it must result in ZFS being *somewhat* more vulnerable to RAM errors. If it use more RAM, there is more chance that RAM error will hit it. If it writes more often, there is more chance that RAM error will corrupt data on disk. But that does not mean it can not be used without ECC : even if ZFS is 30% more vulnerable than older filesystems (invented number), if general risk of corruption from RAM errors is 10% per year, it would mean ZFS would be at 13% per year.... so not big difference. Although, people who are interested in ZFS usually have lower tolerance toward corruption chances ;)
okenny - Sunday, May 15, 2016 - link
FreeNAS does Virtualbox VMs....so yes.I find the hardware from QNAP also unbeatable, I initially also wanted to build a FreeNAS or OMV NAS but I came to the conclusion that the hardware which was available was inferior.
A suitable motherboard with 4x 1Gb LAN ports and a suitable PSU came out about as expensive as these NASs and still wasn't as good.
Also, one can buy the non-Thunderbolt QNAP NAS with a Pentium chip for much less....one can upgrade the CPU and Thunderbolt card later.
Morawka - Sunday, May 15, 2016 - link
Drinking the Kool-Aid it seems."A suitable motherboard with 4x 1Gb LAN ports and a suitable PSU came out about as expensive as these NASs and still wasn't as good."
a 4x 1GB Land Card is $50. And thunderbolt is on just about any Skylake Motherboard even the sub $130 ones. regarding the Power Supply's, thats a old argument that no longer holds true. There are so many cheap good PSU's in these small form factors.
"Also, one can buy the non-Thunderbolt QNAP NAS with a Pentium chip for much less....one can upgrade the CPU and Thunderbolt card later."
not enough power. most people buy QNAP for the Virtualization features and excellent software. I believe that is what jason was talking about. By the time you enable a Plex Server, Daily Snap shots, Itunes/Samba, FTP, etcc. your already taxing that cheap $60 cpu trapped inside a $600 MSRP NAS
I agree, They need to SELL US THE OS SEPARATELY like they do the camera licenses.
Essence_of_War - Sunday, May 15, 2016 - link
"Althought freenas does not require ECC, your running a huge risk due to the nature of ZFS. There are plenty of discussions on this topic, and the general consensus is, dont bother unless you use ECC."Can you explain to me what part of the nature of ZFS makes running non-ECC RAM a risk? The discussions on this topic typically center around a so-called "scrub of death". And as presented it doesn't make very much sense.
1) Having a stuck bit in RAM doesn't force every block of the filesystem to be pushed through that particular byte of memory space. So the typical way this "scrub of death" is presented as ZFS gleefully overwriting all of the filesystem one block at a time is at least a misunderstanding of memory management.
2) But so what, even if only 1 block in 100, or in 1000, or even in 10,000 gets pushed through that bad bit that could be REALLY bad if ZFS were gleefully overwriting good-data with stuck-bit data. Unless the stuck bit has a malicious ability to manipulate itself to create fletcher4 or sha hash collisions (and spoiler: and unless you believe in something like Maxwell's Demon, it doesn't) ZFS will first see data that doesn't match a checksum, and try to read a redundant copy. If the redundant copy and checksum get their own memory blocks, ZFS will see how to correct the error, and write out the "good" data. If by some horrible luck, the redundant copies somehow also get pushed through the SAME bad bit, ZFS will see data and its redundant copy that don't match their checksums, log an error, and overwrite nothing.
JoeyJoJo123 - Sunday, May 15, 2016 - link
It doesn't require it.FreeNAS is loaded from a USB drive and then runs _entirely_ from RAM. Should an unrecoverable error happen in memory, FreeNAS will crash and either shut down or reboot; potentially losing data if it was mid-transfer or mid-way through a file system correction (as this is what it does all the time, scan, rescan, and rescane the file system correcting potential file corruption). This can potentially cause undue system downtime or, very rarely, loss of data, but for a standard home user, this is acceptable.
Dunkurs1987 - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
You can do VM without Qnap soft, but this time is genuinely more about hardware. 3 tier system will squeeze every juice out of this box. PCI NVME slot can reward you with over 2000 Megabytes throughput speeds. Second tier SSD with 500 MB speeds and RAID storage at the bottom. Plus M.2 x2 slots for caching. Can not argue with that! Price for what you get is justified. http://www.span.com/product/Qnap-Desktop-NAS-10GbE...Space Jam - Saturday, May 14, 2016 - link
I'll be sticking to the recommendations and best practices as recommended by the devs and community, "yelling" or otherwise.Acquiring ECC is no price premium nor difficult for most people. The correct complaint is motherboards...
JoeyJoJo123 - Sunday, May 15, 2016 - link
Getting ECC ram isn't an issue. Getting on an ECC compatible platform is the issue. I can buy 16GB of ECC DDR3 no-big-deal, but my old gaming PC still isn't going to support using it. It's not just the motherboards being incompatible on ECC, it's the entire platform; needing server-grade processors that natively support ECC functionality, needing a motherboard that also supports ECC functionality, getting that ECC memory, and then (for some users) finding a motherboard that fits the size of the case you wanted to use.I wanted to use a Node 304 (miniITX) and the 6 hard drive cages for a relatively slim and compact FreeNAS box. When I made my build, nothing on the market supported what I needed for a reasonable price.
edward1987 - Tuesday, September 6, 2016 - link
I would go for i5 or i7 options for future proofing. But you can save some money by choosing less drives or just not filling all bays at very beginning. Price seems to start going down now http://www.span.com/search/IBQ-_star_82danjw - Saturday, May 14, 2016 - link
Last line, "a low lower", I think you meant "a lot lower".CalaverasGrande - Tuesday, May 17, 2016 - link
really enthusiastic about these boxes until I got to the THREE HDMI part. That just screams HTPC or whatever acronym they are using for ripping your movies to a box and playing them back on an HDTV.Professional content creators dont plug their source and program monitors into their storage. You could argue that it is a way to keep from tying up TB ports for displays, but editors, AE guys etc are more concerned about nosebleed fast storage. They dont want to give up even 10% bandwidth for a display or two.
I'm also a little skeptical about tiering. That works great on databases and even large photos. But when you are editing from prores 444 or 422, with hours of footage, that might be a problem for a deep cache. I hope the tiering doesnt eff up the speed of the unit for video editing by introducing latency.
ganeshts - Tuesday, May 17, 2016 - link
You can always disable Qtier and use ultra-fast SSDs in all the available slots :)HDMI ports, I would imagine, come in for free, and for scenarios involving playback of content directly on the NAS (a VM could help with that). I doubt it affects the bandwidth for the storage, since Skylake can support up to three separate display pipelines independent of the PCIe lanes.
David Harris - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
Fully agree, these are beasts.!!!Would be a great solution if it had ECC, Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C as CORE architecture for the new breed NVMe SSD's from Samsung or Intel at circa 2,500 Mb/s (and M, and eventually Optaine at conservatively twice that, rather than core SATA
But I'm also old school EMC/HP and don't believe you should be playing media or running applications directly on the NAS, but having said that their Surveillance Station looks pretty interesting . . .
But they need to remember first and foremost it's a NAS
David Harris - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
. . . was saying (M.2 - 4 lanes) . . .