Hello c/homelab!
My NAS currently consists of 6TB of spinning rust, one disk only. As time goes on I increasingly think about how annoying it would be to lose it to a random drive failure.
So, I recently had an idea for a new storage setup when I saw a 2TB M.2 drive for £60-70 online. Given the low price, these drives are likely low-quality and probably cacheless too, but I have a potential solution: If I bought 4 of these and set them up in RAID10, would that be a sensible way to effectively double the speed and increase redundancy?
Yes, I know it’s probably a silly idea when I can just spend more on 2 faster and more reliable drives, but I would like to at least hear from people who might have tried something similar! So what do you think?
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Never tried a build withe M.2 drives, but unless you have a workload that actually needs that kind of speed, SATA SSDs might be better bang for the buck (especially if those m.2 drives aren’t nvme). If you’re just storing media or something, hard drives are probably still the way to go.
I picked M.2 because of the compact size as I’m also looking to reduce the physical size of the box, and also to reduce the noise and energy footprint (so spinning disks are out). SATA SSDs could still work, as the RAID idea can still apply to those too. I’d just have to find a better deal on them than the M.2 ones.
Gotcha. If the m.2 is cheaper (and consider additional HBAs or Adapters or chassis you’d need), then I’d go m.2 still. Just figured SATA might be a little more straightforward and is typically cheaper. Seems reasonable enough.
My plan is to, if possible, get a cheap-ish mini-PC with a low-power (but still reasonably capable) CPU like a 10700T or something with a PCIe slot. I’d then buy a PCIe riser cable and a card with extra M.2/SATA ports (depending on which drives I decide on). Next I’d design and 3D print an enclosure for whichever extra drives I buy, plus the card, to be mounted onto the mini-PC. “Quality jank” is how I’d describe it, hahaha
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I did see that video! And yes I fully intend to test their true capacity with something like f3 or h2testw. Thanks for the warning!
You also could just get lots of hard drives to increase bandwidth
I specifically wanted solid state to reduce noise and power consumption, because I also work in the place the NAS is and power is pretty expensive in the UK. I’m happy to have a higher initial cost to gain those two benefits.
You probably don’t need that kind of read/write performance in your average NAS because you’re almost certainly going to be network limited. Not sure what the specs on these cheap ones are, but something like a Samsung 970 evo from a few years ago would more than saturate a 10g link, so doubling that wouldn’t really help.
That said, I recently built a 4 M.2 drive raid0 on my homelab server for some read heavy workloads, and things scaled close to how you’d expect with just mdadm+ext4 (about 80% of the drives’ theoretical maximum bandwidth in fio test). If you can actually use the extra IOPS or disk bandwidth, it works pretty well and was easy to do.
