Hey guys, just trying to do some research and see if its worth building a box vs just buying something… Maybe people here can help steer me in a direction that will best suit my needs.
Thanks
What is your expected workload? We can recommend a lot of things but based on the lack of detail it may or may not be accurate. Do you have a budget? Expected workload? Anything in particular you want it to do?
Without some more context I could recommend anything from a $50 raspberry pi 4 to a $5k dual Xeon monstrosity
yea, so basically i built a powerful pc for doing video work and Visual Fx with houdini. Primarily i work with 4k raw footage and things like that… The goal for this storage setup is just to give me fairly quick access to a ton of stuff i need to store, I want to make it a media library with 4k HDR blurays, also it will be storage for my Model libraries, texture libraries etc. Its only my PC and my TV which it seems people recommend i put a Shield device on the TV to stream thru , thats all that would be connected so it will be a low workload system, but i do need like 8 bays… I was looking at the Qnap 832x originally, but thinking i could probably build something more powerful for less money.
Thanks
also as far as budget, id say sub 1000 bucks for the empty system, ill probably run 8 - 8tb ironwolfs
Check out the NK4 builds:
Lots of options that are more powerful than a qnap 832x for less than 1k (Diskless).
You should also get on the drive shucking bandwagon, you can routinely get 10tb white label wd drives for ~160-170/ea on sale. 8tb models are ~130-140/ea
ah thats good to know… yea i was looking at the Nas Killer 4.0 stuff… Just curious do u guys think dual 10gbe tied together is the best route to go?
DJ,
I don’t think there is a need to link together 10Gbe (and link aggregation does not mean you double your network speed). Your problem is disk speed. Even a single 10Gbe network connection is much faster than any spinning disk.
I’m not sure what your expectations are regarding: “fairly quick access to a ton of stuff i need to store”
If this means: about as fast as a normal spinning 8tb/10tb disk physically attached to my system, then even 1Gbe (125MB/s) is pretty reasonable (considering real-world disk speeds). And a single 10Gbe connection is absolutely enough bandwidth for reading from multiple such disks.
i was thinking as close to 1000mb/sec as i can get, not sure what u can get with 8 spinning disks but i would hope something 500mb/sec or higher.
125MB/sec is gigabit.
Realistically though you’ve got a few options. You need high throughout and fast seeking through data. You can build an all flash array but that can be expensive. You could build something like hot/cold storage with a small flash array and a regular array. You could build something advanced with ZFS. It’s up to your comfort level with customizing things and your budget.
1000$ will get you a lot of disk. Not so much for flash.
1000 dollars was my budget for the build without any discs. i figured discs would be on top of that.