I am a little bit lost reading all forums and tutorials, where people which take some assumptions for granted don't bother to explain the basics.
So first let me explain where I am right now and where I've come from. First I was considering buying the NAS device from the shop.
#SYNOLOGY
At first, I was considering buying Synology NAS. What I liked about it was the simplicity of DSM, the flexibility of SHR, the idea of private cloud available from everywhere and mobile apps to support it.
I was considering buying 4+ bay NAS as using anything less seems like a huge sacrifice in terms of the amount of drives used for redundancy comparing to amount of drives available for use.
What I didn't like was the price tag on those multibay devices, fact that to utilise the power of multiple HDs connected to RAID you would have to use 2-4 wired aggregated network connections which would require further investments in the special network switch and infrastructure, special card to PC and the whole multi-wire absurd all over the place. So this is when I started to consider another brand.
#QNAP
I liked that especially for the idea of adding DAS functionality on top of similar NAS functionality offered by Synology.
Unfortunately, the USB solution provided in some "cheaper" devices is limited only to 100MB/s transfer so there is no improvement over the single 1Gb/s network connection. They offer also 10Gb/s network cards in higher spec models but that would also require a huge investment in the network card, not mentioning lack of connectivity on the laptop - Mac in particular which holds already Thunderbolt 2 port instead, the same as some QNAP models. This solution is really tempting as some people reported performance better than standard SSD reaching 1900MB/s read 900 MB/s write but the price tag on those models is not acceptable 2-3 thousands for an empty case.
#unRAID
Then I discovered this Linus video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpXhSrhmUXo and I loved that idea from the beginning as it seems to solve the performance bottleneck problem as everything seats under the same hood and allow to put money where they are really needed - to buy better and bigger hard disks, maximise storage and horsepower of the machine, GPU, RAM, etc.
So this is where I am right now, I've bought better hard disks 6 x 3TB HGST 7200 RPM and fresh new powerful gaming rig for less than cheapest QNAP with Thunderbolt adapter. I've followed the setup ... and this is where my doubts have shown up and I started to look for alternatives to unRAID and I started to consider XPE.
And here is why?
Unlike Linus on the youtube video, I've chosen new hardware setup based on AMD solution Ryzen + Vega GPU. The first problem is that Ryzen, unlike the Intel processor, doesn't allow you to have second video card yet even motherboard is equipt with HDMI output. It might be possible in the future when a new version of Ryzens would be released. I might have to put additional cheapest video card to solve that problem but my attempt to work with just one video card has failed so far even such option seems to be available.
Posible poor performance symptoms. Right now I am waiting for the second day for the Parity-Sync to finish. It's been 2 days already and covered only 77% of space (2,3 TB out of 3TB in 1 day 18 hours and 18 minutes). It was promising at the beginning as the single drive was showing above 150MB/s read write speed and combined read speed from all 5 drives 750MB/s and predicted time to finish this process was just 4 hours.
So I do have doubts about performance, reliability, functionality to access the NAS from outside - as I understand Synology is trying to block some functionality so special hacks of network cards are required, the old website with some few months link in one of that post has gone already https://myxpenology.com doesn't sound promising, etc, and so on.
#VM
On top of this, I do not quite understand virtualisation approach in here.
I can understand that I can install XPE bootloader which would allow me to install DSM as the first OS, right? So like in Synology (and unRAID) I can create VM running lat's say Windows 10, right? but I've not seen anything like Linus video prepared with XPE yet so I'm not sure if this would be possible at all to setup this the same way as in case of unRAID as a gaming rig on top of XPE+DSM? And if yes would the performance be the same/similar like in case of unRAID?
Now there seems to be another installation path possible to install XPE in VM. So this would be running on Windows already, right? So this would be XPE+DSM running on top native Windows OS. But is it possible to utilise all functionality and performance of NAS native system in this case? Windows would have to be running all the time to keep server availability, I'm not sure about how the performance of each drive would be affected and I would have to leave one just to run Windows instead of having full space of array available for virtualized Windows.
I wasn't sure but it seems like XPE also doesn't require any RAID hardware - the same like unRAID, right? I had some doubts as AMD motherboards supports only RAID 1, 0, and 10 as I remember where I would like to go with 5 or 6 or SHR equivalent if possible.
Any comments and answers would be appretiated, especially around virtualisation subject.
Question
Krzysiaczek
Hi everyone
I am a little bit lost reading all forums and tutorials, where people which take some assumptions for granted don't bother to explain the basics.
So first let me explain where I am right now and where I've come from. First I was considering buying the NAS device from the shop.
#SYNOLOGY
At first, I was considering buying Synology NAS. What I liked about it was the simplicity of DSM, the flexibility of SHR, the idea of private cloud available from everywhere and mobile apps to support it.
I was considering buying 4+ bay NAS as using anything less seems like a huge sacrifice in terms of the amount of drives used for redundancy comparing to amount of drives available for use.
What I didn't like was the price tag on those multibay devices, fact that to utilise the power of multiple HDs connected to RAID you would have to use 2-4 wired aggregated network connections which would require further investments in the special network switch and infrastructure, special card to PC and the whole multi-wire absurd all over the place. So this is when I started to consider another brand.
#QNAP
I liked that especially for the idea of adding DAS functionality on top of similar NAS functionality offered by Synology.
Unfortunately, the USB solution provided in some "cheaper" devices is limited only to 100MB/s transfer so there is no improvement over the single 1Gb/s network connection. They offer also 10Gb/s network cards in higher spec models but that would also require a huge investment in the network card, not mentioning lack of connectivity on the laptop - Mac in particular which holds already Thunderbolt 2 port instead, the same as some QNAP models. This solution is really tempting as some people reported performance better than standard SSD reaching 1900MB/s read 900 MB/s write but the price tag on those models is not acceptable 2-3 thousands for an empty case.
#unRAID
Then I discovered this Linus video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpXhSrhmUXo and I loved that idea from the beginning as it seems to solve the performance bottleneck problem as everything seats under the same hood and allow to put money where they are really needed - to buy better and bigger hard disks, maximise storage and horsepower of the machine, GPU, RAM, etc.
So this is where I am right now, I've bought better hard disks 6 x 3TB HGST 7200 RPM and fresh new powerful gaming rig for less than cheapest QNAP with Thunderbolt adapter. I've followed the setup ... and this is where my doubts have shown up and I started to look for alternatives to unRAID and I started to consider XPE.
And here is why?
#XPE
So I can see some people, like me right now, are considering to go the same way as me from unRAID to XPE https://xpenology.com/forum/topic/5270-reliability-and-performance-vs-unraid/ but at the same time some other people considering to go opposite way https://xpenology.com/forum/topic/3591-xpenology-vs-unraid/
So I do have doubts about performance, reliability, functionality to access the NAS from outside - as I understand Synology is trying to block some functionality so special hacks of network cards are required, the old website with some few months link in one of that post has gone already https://myxpenology.com doesn't sound promising, etc, and so on.
#VM
On top of this, I do not quite understand virtualisation approach in here.
I can understand that I can install XPE bootloader which would allow me to install DSM as the first OS, right? So like in Synology (and unRAID) I can create VM running lat's say Windows 10, right? but I've not seen anything like Linus video prepared with XPE yet so I'm not sure if this would be possible at all to setup this the same way as in case of unRAID as a gaming rig on top of XPE+DSM? And if yes would the performance be the same/similar like in case of unRAID?
Now there seems to be another installation path possible to install XPE in VM. So this would be running on Windows already, right? So this would be XPE+DSM running on top native Windows OS. But is it possible to utilise all functionality and performance of NAS native system in this case? Windows would have to be running all the time to keep server availability, I'm not sure about how the performance of each drive would be affected and I would have to leave one just to run Windows instead of having full space of array available for virtualized Windows.
I wasn't sure but it seems like XPE also doesn't require any RAID hardware - the same like unRAID, right? I had some doubts as AMD motherboards supports only RAID 1, 0, and 10 as I remember where I would like to go with 5 or 6 or SHR equivalent if possible.
Any comments and answers would be appretiated, especially around virtualisation subject.
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