Hi all Before writing this thread, I previously scoured google a few hours to find articles or videos or any technical information that could make me understand if this idea is totally absurd, or if this is possible somehow; but as of now, I found nothing related to my query Well, I hope nobody will throw me stones, I can consider that it is perhaps nothing but crazyness, but I must go to the end of this idea, and be sure it is impossible before giving up, or it won't leave me in peace In terms of storage, everyone will agree that the fastest one is Nvme SSDs... I saw some outrageously expensive nvme servers, designed for pros, but I cannot afford it. Thinking about a cheapest way, I don't know exactly what kind of hardware is installed inside those expensive servers but I guess it is a motherboard with many nvme slots or many PCI 16x slots filled with nvme PCI cards, and I suddenly thought about the mining motherboards, for example this one: https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/H510 Pro BTC+/index.fr.asp I know nothing about mining or mining hardware & software, I saw it requires some special and dedicated distributions, based on Linux, but I ignore if it is possible to boot and install alternative operating systems on these cards, even though they're running with the same processors as desktop ones... but if so, that would be a cheap way to have several PCI slots to install PCI cards full of SSD nvme, provided that the CPU is able to manage so many lines as well. I reckon it is still confusing for me and probably impossible but may be, someone here would tell me the truth about it and stop the ramblings of a mad man thanks by advance
The first question is why would you want to? I do have 6 NVMe in my NAS but it's purely because I had loads of small ones from my threadripper system back in the early days when they were pricy, I use them now for different VMs, but you can't access them that fast across a network unless you are going in hard with your network, I run 20 gigabit link to my NAS, that is still slower than one of my NVMEs, still being able to read/write to the NAS at 2 gigabytes a is lovely with big data. Each NVMe requires many PCIe lanes, these are costly on a normal board, to do it proper, you'd want to use a server board based around something with a lot of lanes. If you are doing a lot of processing on the NAS then there might be some benefit to many fast NVMe but for a personal NAS probably not That BTC board would give you enough for 6 NVMe, 1 per slot running on 1 lane, so fast enough for a 10Gb but thats your lot. You can run many more Sata SSD drives in a NAS and its probably fast enough considering interfaces require to get data on and off.
Thanks for your reply Sandys, I understand it better now, and it answers to my questions. Why would I want it? well, I bought a batch of 4tb NVME ssds from china, really cheap and working well, and I thought about this idea to have like 24 inside a pc and get a fast storage NAS, but if I am limited to 6 nvme only it is not relevant. My network is only low brandiwth ADSL, fiber isn't here yet, disk speed still matter to me, but it was just an idea, thank you very much to enlight me.
So there is no limit to what you can fit in a Nas with the right hardware but I guess you are not running a network at home that has the capability to get data off the NAS at NVMe speeds even if you had the right machine? What you can do is get something like this and add in 4x 4 lane NVMe for 8 lane cost if you have 8 spare lane and slot in your current desktop and take advantage QM2-4P-384 | Hardware Specs | QNAP Or a hyper m2 if you have something with 16 lane slot free like in your datamaster.
I recall LTT did a video on a full NVMe server a while ago. The main challenges were availability of PCIe lanes and CPU threads to be able to service all the NVMe drives if you wanted to hit anything like the theoretical throughput. That server was based on threadripper rather than any sort of consumer hardware and they still had real issues trying to deliver any significant increase in speed. I think even they decided it wasn’t worth it. Edit: something like the hyper M.2 add in cards might work, but you still want a lot of PCIe lanes and CPU threads for it to really be worthwhile though
I am glad to find new comments here, thank you Sandys and BeauchN Well, Sandys, as you guessed, my network is a P.I.T.A, (4mo/s in download speed), I don't rely on it to access my datas fastly. My Datamaster, as you remember it, has evolved a bit, the "modding job" I planned to do is not done yet , but it works great, I changed the I7 3930K for an Intel Xeon E5 2398 with it's 40 lanes, like the x79 chipset, (it was a great time for PCI lanes, seems we're going backwards nowdays)...but with all the hard drives and the hardware, all 40 lanes are used. Inside there is one M2 PCI card with 4 slots but only 1 NVME ssd installed, it was already a challenge to modify the BIOS and boot on a NVME ssd on a x79 MB, it worked, but it takes 4 lanes just for 1 SSD, and I cannot upgrade... The 24 hard drives (4tb) inside are almost full, and I start to miss some free space Luckilly, I have several computers, each of them have several SSDs sata or M2, some older ones got hard drives, so I have parts of my storage spread over those machines, and it makes the third part of my whole datas without backups...backups is what takes the more space, but it is compulsory if you care about your datas...that is why I start to think about a new storage solution... I found 4TB Nvme SSDs, gen 4, 7000mo/s for 34 euros each on Ali-ex , I bought 4 of it, thought it was a scam but no, it works, I remember last one I bought in Europe, I payed 280 euros for one almost similar except the brand and I started to think of a full nvme storage, but as you guys explained, it's gonna be hard unless investing in professional gear...as BeauchN said, I need a lot of PCIe lanes and CPU threads for it to really be worthwhile BTW, I watched this LTT vid already, insane yes, the cost of it above everything Thinking about this famous mining MB, 6 Nvme of 4tb still make a 24 TB, wich is not ridiculous, the problem will be with PCI lanes once again... Still chewing it actually...
When people are talking about "network" in this thread, they're not talking about your ADSL broadband - they're talking about the LAN, your local network. If you're building a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, you need a way to get data on and off it - and that's via the local network, as the name implies. You'll have an Ethernet connection between your desktop and the NAS. If it's gigabit Ethernet (like mine is), you'll saturate the network - your local network, nothing to do with your ADSL broadband - with a single NVMe drive in the NAS. No matter how many more drives you add, you'll never get more than 125MB/s to or from it. If you upgrade your NAS, desktop, and switch to 2.5-gig-E, you'll be able to get at most 312.5MB/s through it - still not enough to saturate a single NVMe drive. (My old Samsung 970 EVO 1TB manages 3.2GB/s, or about ten times that.) If you upgrade your NAS, desktop, and switch to 10-gig-E, you'll be able to get 1,250MB/s through it - which, again, is still not fast enough to saturate a single NVMe drive. So, you're going to be looking at 100-gig-E. This will cost you thousands upon thousands of pounds just for the switch. With 100-gig-E, the peak (which you won't reach, but let's pretend you will) throughput is 12,500MB/s - enough to saturate an SSD, at last! In fact, it would saturate a system with a whopping four SSDs in RAID0! TL;DR: Unless you're spending £8,000 or more on your network switch, you're not going to see a speed benefit from having more than one NVMe SSD in your NAS. (Also, how cheap were these Chinese SSDs? 'cos if I were you I'd test them very thoroughly before deploying them: I've seen plenty of "bargain" drives which turn out to have a tiny storage capacity and a loopback driver that makes it look like they're massive: you can write 4TB of data, but it only stores 32GB. When you read back the last 32GB you wrote, it looks fine - but heaven help you if you try to read the first 32GB you wrote...) Ah, that answers the above. I absolutely guarantee they're fakes with a loopback driver. Test them with something like f3, it'll confirm it. There's no chance you'll get a refund, so unfortunately you'll have to take it as a lesson in caveat emptor. At least this means you don't need to splash out on a motherboard and CPU to host 'em!
OHH, yes, I see my misunderstanding, my apologies, I lack of knowledge to talk about those things, and also terminology mislead me a bit sometimes. Of course, my server is linked to the ethernet switch like other PCs, and data transferts aren't that fast from the server to my other computers through my lan, but what matter the most for me is to store and backup precious datas, a fast transfert speed is secondary for me. In another hand, your advice about my chinese mvme is something that I would not imagine, but you know a great deal so you're certainly right, I did not know FightFlashFraud neither that people could sell fake ssds but the world is crazy so I'm barely surprised, I order a lot of things from china, but it is mainly screws and water-cooling fittings, watercooling pumps, reservoirs, and accessories for loops or even electronic items, and as of now, I have never been disappointed, but it is the first time I venture out of this range of products. I take it as a lesson in caveat emptor, I downloaded fff and will test them asap, it's only 120 euros but I feel bitterness in my guts... Thank you very much, I'll sleep a bit less silly tonight
