A year ago I put up a Raspberry Pi against my ASUSTOR NAS, but the Pi
just couldn't keep up. Over the network, I got under a hundred megabytes per second.
But this year, there's a new single board computer in town: the Rock 5 Model B.
This thing is way faster. Internally? It can write
data over a gigabyte per second. Could I build a better DIY NAS with this thing?
Maybe.
My original plan was to upgrade my old NAS with this new dual-purpose 10 Gig M.2 card and
put it up against the Rock 5. The card is pretty neat, and it made it so I could have both 10 gig
networking and two NVMe cache drives on my 6-bay NAS, but... well, two things changed my mind.
First, ASUSTOR came out with this thing, and it's even faster. It's
got all-NVMe flash storage, and this model has has ten gig networking built right in.
Second, a maker named Rick Johnston sent me this thing, the Pocket NAS. It also
has M.2 flash storage—but with a few compromises. I'll get to that later.
To be clear, ASUSTOR and Rick both sent these to me for testing. There was no other compensation,
and they had no input into the content of this video.
What's interesting about both of these solutions is they only
use SSD storage. Good SSDs, at least, have great random access performance,
use less power than hard drives, and take up a lot less space.
They are more expensive per terabyte, but if you can stomach the price, or you just want
a quiet all-flash NAS for video editing or a small media library, they look great on paper.
First up, the pocket NAS. Now, this is a very early prototype.
Rick is working on a new design that fixes the problems I'll point out.
But this thing is a six-drive SATA NAS. It uses these tiny M.2 SATA SSDs.
I assembled this origami of PCBs,
and then I installed six of these Teamgroup 1 Terabyte drives.
These things aren't that expensive—they only cost about 40 bucks each. All-in,
this whole kit with 6 Terabytes of storage cost me 600 bucks.
But, this thing doesn't come with a case. At least not the prototype I have. And it's completely DIY,
meaning software and support is on you. I booted up a copy of Armbian Linux,
then I installed Open Media Vault from scratch.
Open Media Vault is pretty good,
but it's a bit less intuitive than the software you get with a prebuilt NAS.
Creating a storage array using the onboard flash requires a bunch of clicking around,
and one thing I don't like at all about OMV is how almost every action you take,
it takes a few seconds, then this warning pops up saying you have to apply the change.
Then that takes a few seconds, and finally you can be on your way again.
I wrote an entire blog post on how to set up OMV on the Rock 5 model B,
so go read that, I won't cover it in detail here.
OMV's interface quirks were a minor issue,
but what wasn't a minor issue was how half the SSDs had issues!
That's because this complex origami assembly
resulted in a few broken connections from shipping.
That's a big reason Rick is redesigning the Pocket NAS. These two drives on
top don't get power, and one of the slots on the second board is flaky,
meaning OMV would just see the drive drop out sometimes.
I decided to just use the three working drives in
RAID 5. That means I have 2 drives of storage space, and a third drive for
redundancy. I could lose any one of the three working SSDs and not lose any data.
On the Raspberry Pi, RAID 5 was pretty slow. That's because every time you write data,
the CPU has to do a data parity calculation, then write that extra bit of data to the third drive.
Luckily, the Rock 5 has a faster CPU, and it's not the bottleneck anymore. Using
the built-in 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet, I could write up to 1.2 Gigabits over the network,
though the average was more like a gigabit, just over 100 megabytes per second.
So that's a win over last year's Raspberry Pi, but still not as good as my old spinning-disk ASUSTOR.
Also, write speed was spiky. It would write a bunch, then it would slow down, then write a bunch
again. I also measured power consumption, and the Pocket NAS used about 11 watts of power max.
About an hour into a 300 gigabyte copy, some cache must've filled up, because
write speeds slowed to 45 megabytes per second and stayed that way until the copy was done.
You can see that clearly on this network graph. The write speed just flatlines after a while.
But... it's a good, long while. Most people aren't copying hundreds of gigabytes at a time like this!
Copying data back from the NAS, I got up to 300 megabytes per second. That's
about three times faster, but it didn't quite saturate the 2.5 gigabit connection. Still,
that's a lot faster than I could got with my Raspberry Pi.
The read speeds were also a little bursty still.
So write performance is certainly better than the Pi, but not as much as I'd hoped. And read
performance is very good, but it still couldn't saturate my 2.5 gigabit network.
I like the promise of this little pocket NAS, but it's not without its compromises.
Besides the origami-approach that makes this thing hard to assemble, the only other negative
for me is this little fan and heatsink. For a prototype, it works... but even with fan control
to slow it down, it's a bit noisy. [pause] I hope the final design has better cooling.
Now, moving on to this PS2-style slab of black plastic, this is the Flashstor 12 Pro.
It has a quad-core Intel N5105 CPU. It ships with four gigs of RAM,
which is a bit too small in my opinion. 8 would probably be adequate,
but I upgraded to 16 gigs, which is the maximum the N5105 supports.
Since this thing uses an Intel X86 processor, I could even install TrueNAS on it if I want.
And I will! We'll get to that. But for now I'm gonna test it with ADM,
which is ASUSTOR's basic NAS OS based on Busybox Linux.
Oh, and did I mention I also filled up the whole thing with not 6 but twelve 1
terabyte SSDs? I bought these Teamgroup NVMe's with DRAM cache, so hopefully with this many,
they won't slow down after an hour like the Pocket NAS and it's cheaper SATA drives.
And one other quick note, I love ASUSTOR's tooless M.2 slots. All
you have to do is pull back on the tab, and push down the drive.
The NVMe SSDs I bought were $5 bucks more per drive than the SATA ones in the Pocket NAS,
so all-in, this setup cost about 1300 bucks. You could keep it under
a thousand bucks if you don't go insane filling up all the bays right away.
So this thing's double the price of the Pocket NAS, but that's with double the storage. Plus,
10 Gig Ethernet and 16 Gigs of RAM, so it's definitely an upgrade in specs!
For double the price, does performance also double?
Short answer, yes. The little Celeron CPU inside does bottleneck write speeds a little, topping out
around 600 megabytes per second... But that's still five times faster than the pocket NAS.
And read speeds are flat out on this thing; I got a solid 1.2 gigabytes per second all day.
But performance isn't the only thing this box has going for it.
The out of the box experience buying a prebuilt NAS is night and day. Sure,
you can't tweak every little knob and dial, but the software is easy and intuitive.
On first boot, it upgraded itself to the latest firmware.
The setup wizard holds your hand just enough to get a storage volume going in less than 5 minutes.
And after some RAID 5 testing,
switching to a 10 drive and 2 spare RAID 10 only took a minute or so.
But both RAID setups still saw write speeds averaging around 600 megabytes per second.
And read speeds still saturated the 10 gig
connection at 1.2 gigabytes per second, regardless of RAID type.
I even tried a 3-drive RAID 0, and that, too, wrote to the drives at 600 Megabytes per second.
So the limitation is in the CPU here, and there are two reasons:
First, the CPU is slightly underpowered for a bunch of fast NVMe drives. But more importantly,
it doesn't have enough native PCIe lanes. It only has 8 lanes, and if you're stuffing
drives in all 12 slots... you'd need 48 lanes to give them all the bandwidth they can use!
Add on the 10 gigabit NIC, and you need more than 50 PCIe lanes to avoid any bottlenecks.
But, then, how does that work? 50 lanes of hardware on 8 lanes of PCI Express? Well,
ASUSTOR's pulling a little magic, using these tiny ASMedia chips. They're like
Ethernet switches, but for PCI Express devices. They split up one lane into many,
so these chips split up 8 lanes into all the lanes required for all these drives.
But switches aren't magic—the overhead takes out some performance, and the result is a NAS
that can only really write around 600 Megabytes per second, no matter what type of RAID you use.
That's not bad. It's just, I see the potential, and I want more! Maybe in the next gen Flashstor.
Read speeds were great, though. And that's more important for what I do:
video editing over the network.
I wanna replace my old edit NAS with this thing. The NVMe drives should be a little
faster than the SATA drives I used in that one, plus this NAS only uses about 50 watts
under load, so it'll save a tiny bit on power consumption over the Xeon system I was running.
To test video editing performance,
I copied ALL 13 hours of footage from my Mr. Beast project into a Final Cut Pro Timeline.
Besides crashing once when I tried copying like a hundred gigabytes at once—the NAS handled editing
over the network like a champ. That crash was more Final Cut Pro's fault than the NAS.
Just as an aside, to get the best experience on my Mac,
I turned on SMB Multichannel and the macOS VFS compatibility checkbox in the ASUSTOR's settings.
But nothing stuttered at all while I was scrubbing around.
And I'm playing the full res 4K clips here.
I was a little concerned about heat, since there aren't any SSD heatsinks. The design
relies on just this one fan on the bottom. But the CPU stayed under 85°C most of the time,
and the drives never got over 45° in my testing.
The box puts out a little heat on the left side, so on a cold day, I could use it as a hand warmer.
The fan is audible, but it isn't annoying like the tiny fan on the Pocket NAS. And
if you put it under your desk or in a rack, you're not gonna hear it at all.
So what's the verdict? Does the ARM NAS win this round? We'll get to that. First,
I wanted to highlight my favorite new feature on the Flashstor.
And that's TrueNAS! Wait, what?
I've always wanted ZFS on ASUSTOR, but my older boxes only run ADM,
and right now at least, ADM doesn't support ZFS. Only basic RAID and Btrfs.
Those aren't bad, but ZFS has features I like for data integrity and sync.
So when I found out ASUSTOR's not locking down this thing at all, I had to see how TrueNAS runs.
This box is a pretty standard Intel PC under the hood,
so you can press F2 during boot, and get into the BIOS.
So I did that, and installed TrueNAS on an external SSD.
I have a detailed writeup on my blog,
so I won't go through how I did it here. Check the link below.
But bottom line, it was easy to get TrueNAS up and running.
Just like with RAID, ZFS write speeds always topped out around 600 Megabytes per sec, but
it was a little strange, I could only get around 700 Megabytes per second read speeds using RAIDZ2.
And even if I used a ZFS stripe, I only got about a gigabyte per second,
which was slower than the 1.2 gigabytes per second I got with ADM.
The CPU seemed a little toastier under TrueNAS, though, so I'm wondering if maybe
thermal performance or fan control tuning could've made a difference.
I checked on the CPU frequency, and it looked pretty normal,
bursting between 2.6 and 2.9 gigahertz, but it's something I'll be testing more.
For now, I've switched back to ADM, but I'm floored ASUSTOR is making their hardware more
appealing by not locking it to their own proprietary OS. In ten years, if Flashstor
support ends, I could still install another OS on it and get more useful life out of it.
That means this hardware's infinitely more flexible than a locked-down box.
Of course, the Arm board the Pocket NAS uses was never locked down, except for the
fact a lot of Arm chip vendors never really provide long-term support for their silicon.
The Rock 5 is faster than a Raspberry Pi,
but it's nowhere near the speed I got with the Flashstor, even considering it's half the price.
I'm excited, though, because this Pocket NAS was just Rick's first try. Makers like
Rick keep iterating. There are a ton of cool DIY NAS solutions on the horizon.
Even so, not everyone needs a 10 Gig video editing NAS like I do! The Pocket NAS would
be awesome for travel. It runs on 10 watts, so it's gonna go a lot further off-grid.
But in the end, I must crown a victor. This round, once again,
goes to the ASUSTOR. It's the one I'm installing in my rack.
But ASUSTOR better stay on their toes! What if I turned my monster Arm server into a NAS? It's
hundred and twenty eight lanes of PCI Express bandwidth would eat the Flashstor for lunch.
I mean, it's more than double the price of the Flashstor... but if I cared about fairness,
I wouldn't be running a Raspberry Pi against a consumer NAS, now, would I?
So we have a victor for round 3, but who are these NASes for? All-flash NAS devices serve a small
niche right now. SSDs are still too expensive to beat hard drives on price per terabyte. And hard
drives aren't that bad, even for video editing, if you throw a bunch of them together in RAID.
But flash is the future. I think both of these guys offer a glimpse at the type of size,
performance, and silence we'll expect out of our storage in the next five or ten years.
For all but the most devoted data hoarders, these things will be the norm, not the exception.
They just need a little better CPU, and a little more time for SSD costs to come down.
Until next time, I'm Jeff Geerling.