wishlist - ultra 2/4/6 with sandybridge and hdmi

[TeknoJnky]

I want an ultra with an intel sandy bridge system and hdmi out.

Sandy bridge has integrated video on the cpu that is actually pretty powerful.

Why?

An XBMC server.

[TeknoJnky]

also, a built in slot load bluray drive would be groovy too.

if you build it, they will come.

[fbmachines]

Brilliant, I like it!

Basically an HTPC with XRAID. Think of the possibilities.

[mjw]

I want an ultra with an intel sandy bridge system and hdmi out.

I agree this would be great and coincidentally made the same suggestion back in October. It would be such an improvement to have the Intel QuickSync hardware accelerated transcoding and also let's face it the Atom processors are pretty anemic (as anyone who has used a netbook can attest to). A bottom of the range Sandy Bridge would not consume significantly more power on average than an Atom but it would make the whole ReadyNAS platform capable of so much more. Of course, the purchase price would be higher but within reasonable limits it could be justified if it saves buying a separate streaming device. Tomshardware showed that even a Core2 has better performance per watt than an Atom. Another possibility might be to build it around AMD's new Brazos platform which is slightly faster than an Atom but has much better graphics capabilities. I guess they could call it a ReadyMedia or something. I would wager that for most home ReadyNAS users the majority of the disk space on their NAS is consumed by Media files. It makes perfect sense to add an HDMI output to the device rather than needing two separate devices (NAS plus Streaming box) to be switched on.

Here's another idea: I'd like a ReadyNAS that can achieve >100 MB/s read and write speeds under all circumstances (i.e. even for doing a Windows directory copy that contains lots of smaller files). The Ultra 4 can only manage about 14 MB/s which doesn't come close to saturating a single gigabit ethernet connection. Perhaps Netgear could put an optional (Sandforce controller based) SSD cache into their products to accelerate beyond the limits that can be achieved with 4 mechanical disks, or even better provide an additional 6gbps SATA slot where customers can optionally install the SSD of their choice. With this sort of solution and dual-gigabit ethernet we could even exceed 200MB/s for a cost of an additional $150 for the SSD. There would also of course need to be some additional smartness built into the caching implementation so that the contents of cache does not get flushed when the nightly rsync backup reads the contents of the RAID volume. Perhaps this could be done my providing an additional read-only mount point (for use by non network based services like rsync or media indexing processes etc) that bypasses the SSD cache driver.

[TeknoJnky]

Here's another idea: I'd like a ReadyNAS that can achieve >100 MB/s read and write speeds

viewtopic.php?f=19&t=51208

under all circumstances (i.e. even for doing a Windows directory copy that contains lots of smaller files). The Ultra 4 can only manage about 14 MB/s

I think its highly dependant on the disks.

I wish SNB standardized testing with SSD's for every nas, then we could see the real performance of the nas, instead of the disks that came with them.

[mjw]

viewtopic.php?f=19&t=51208

under all circumstances (i.e. even for doing a Windows directory copy that contains lots of smaller files). The Ultra 4 can only manage about 14 MB/s

I think its highly dependant on the disks.

Interesting to see your performance results in the thread you referenced however I notice that although these numbers exceed 100MB/s you are mostly copying large files (movies, music) and also you seem to be measuring the aggregate performance across multiple concurrent reads. Is that correct? I would expect that if you did the same test with a single user process copying thousands of 4K files you would get much lower than 100MB/s.

For example, if you look a the results for the WD20EARS drives that you use in your NAS, the 4K read/write performance is less than 1MB/s! Here is the worst-case performance of a single disk. You should get higher performance with 4 disks in RAID-5 but not 4 times the performance:


So, I think there is a lot of potential performance benefit by adding an SSD cache like the Vertex 3 that can approach 70MB/s for a 4K read (which is over 100 times better performance than possible with a WD20EARS drive).

and 200MB/s for a 4K write:

[TeknoJnky]

the pro is 3 WRITE streams
- pulling bluray files from nv+
- pulling mp3 files from ultra4
- later on I copied a dvd from pc to pro

so yes, most files are not 'small', however the mp3 archive does contain art images and logs etc all being copied

you have a point regarding thousands of small files, but you will find/ought to know that will kill just about any network server.

even copying thousands of small files across a LOCAL drive is slow.

[mjw]

even copying thousands of small files across a LOCAL drive is slow.

I suppose that it depends on your definition of slow. But copying thousands of small files at 68.8 MB/s using a Vertex 3 sounds a lot faster to me than 0.499 MB/s with the WD20EARS alone. The SNB result of 14 MB/s for the Ultra 4 copying a directory of files was most likely not caused by using slow disks but rather because no mechanical disk has good performance for this sort of test (but SSD's do).

Granted, for a remote drive perhaps some of that performance advantage would get lost with the ethernet and CIFS overhead but I would still expect a NAS fronted with an SSD cache to have dramatically superior performance to any other consumer NAS out there at the moment (if implemented well).

[TeknoJnky]

I mean slow relative to other IO scenarios.

WD EARS drives are not the fastest drive, even in optimistic io usage.

and of course, any ssd is goin to have faster than a mechanical drive

I think my point is, you can't necessarily blame the device for poor performance of the drives in a particular scenario.

Also, I beleive that thousands of small files puts CIFS/SMB in general in a poor situation.

I would expect ISCSI to perform much better than cifs in this type of usage.

but I would still expect a NAS fronted with an SSD cache to have dramatically superior performance to any other consumer NAS out there at the moment (if implemented well).

hah, wishful thinking there. Especially in the prosumer/soho/smb segment.

[mjw]

I would expect ISCSI to perform much better than cifs in this type of usage.

Good point.

I did some googling and apparently there are people working on SSD caches for Linux. Facebook has released some open source code called FlashCache. Here's some documentation:
https://github.com/facebook/flashcache/ ... he-doc.txt

Interestingly they specifically mention handling the issue of backups:

It is possible to mark IOs issued by particular pids as noncacheable
via flashcache ioctls. If a process is about to scan a large table
sequentially (for a backup say), it can mark itself as non-cacheable.

Someone has run some database benchmarks using FlashCache and an Intel X-25M SSD and found a doubling of performance compared to having the RAID alone.

Another sign that this idea is becoming mainstream is reported by tomshardware which reports that the upcoming Z68 motherboards will have an SSD cache feature.

[mjw]

Since we started this topic it seems like Thecus has beaten Netgear to the punch with using a Sandybridge CPU:
http://www.thecus.com/media_news_page.php?NEWS_ID=3188

and Intel has introduced SSD caching:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/z68 ... 888-2.html

I certainly hope that Netgear has some soon-to-be-released NAS models ready to compete with this.