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I need to expand the storage for my small business's dell R630 with a windows file server VM. We have a set of 5 matching brand new hard drives (3.5in 5400rpm wd red 6TB) that we would like to use. I know the standard answer is to buy a power vault or other direct attached storage device, but as far as I can tell these all require buying SAS drives with the purchase of the device, and will cost us a relative arm & leg (over $5000) to get to 30TB raw space. I am considering buying an inexpensive synology NAS ($700) and running a gigabit ethernet cable straight from it to the R630. I'll create a virtual disk on the NAS and mount it as the non-system drive in the VM.

For reference, the business currently uses lower capacity 5400rpm drives that are plugged straight into the server, but a larger capacity raid is needed with more space and more total drives for RAID 6, hence we can no longer fit the drives in the R630s built in drive bays. The current performance is fine, but I want to avoid a decrease in performance.

My question is this: Will using a virtual disk on a NAS be noticeably slower than having 5400 rpm drives in the server?

I am guessing no, because all users will be accessing the file server over gigabit Ethernet anyway, so the network bottleneck is already in place.

As pointed out in the comments, noticeably slower is subjective. I would consider plus/minus 10% to be acceptable, but more than 10% slower would be a problem.

Owen
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  • Noticeably slower is subjective. 1Gbps is around 125 megabytes per second, which is slower than a single drive can do ( http://www.anandtech.com/show/8265/wd-red-pro-review-4-tb-drives-for-nas-systems-benchmarked/4 ), I'm not sure if RAID will be slower or faster. Also consider simultaneous users, 5 users getting files at the same time get 1/5 of that bandwidth. Will it be acceptable? Probably, if you buy a decent NAS. Will it be as fast as local storage? Not. 10Gbps ethernet might help a little. – Tim Mar 23 '17 at 21:55
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    Thanks Tim, the synology and R630 both support link aggregation, so I could double up and run 2x gigabit lines from the nas to the server. This would increase the network connection beyond single drive performance. – Owen Mar 23 '17 at 22:01
  • In JBOD mode or RAID0, if you lose one drive you lose the lot. 30TB is a lot of data to lose in one hit. I don't think this is a good idea at all. You can't determine what value others put on the data they might throw into it. – hookenz Mar 23 '17 at 23:25
  • Matt, I did mention that the plan is to use RAID 6 in the new system – Owen Mar 23 '17 at 23:26
  • @Owen, sorry missed that. I got caught up in the "30TB raw space" comments. – hookenz Mar 23 '17 at 23:27
  • Dedicate a NIC port on the server to connect the NAS on it's own little private network. If you don't, you'll chop your file copy speed from client to NAS drive by half. Use channel bonding where possible. – hookenz Mar 23 '17 at 23:33
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    I would say that Synology NAS with huge drives, especially in RAID 6 won't be very effective obviously. Of course, if you need to achieve High Availability, you should definitely look at this article. https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/synology-diskstation-ds916-turbocharged-with-starwind-virtual-san – Stuka Mar 24 '17 at 17:49

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