Question Laptop as a NAS

bitsnbytes

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I've got a very high spec laptop not being used which would be ideal to use as a NAS.
My current one an HP Gen8 (running windows 10 pro) works as a NAS pretty good, but I use it more as a NAS. For example lightroom running in the background indexing photos etc. Various cloud services and also VMWare to run a couple of VMs
So it is seriously under powered, the laptop though would be perfectly fine as it has an i7 processor. The only question I have is on storage. My backup needs currently are around 8TB which is spanned across 4 discs in the gen8. I could attach the discs in a JBOD type enclosure I guess can connect via USB. But I think the downside would be I/O as USB doesn't maintain sustained read/write speeds. The ideal solution would be to have the discs internally. But then with a laptop that isn't possible.

Any suggestions?
 
Well other than USB you got two options Expresscard slots or Thunderbolt.

Expresscard is not really any different bandwidth wise from USB3 but there may be a technical advantage to using eSATA over USB, never seen benchmarks to compare. I do know if using soft RAID systems like Windows own built in storage spaces or third parties like Drivepool don't ever use USB with those, too unreliable stick to SATA/eSATA links.

From my basic knowledge RAID5 is what kills write speeds which is what combines drives into one with fault tolerance. The above soft RAID systems try to overcome that but have their own issues.

If laptop has Thunderbolt you have external PCI-e at your disposal, TB enclosures tend to be quite expensive though see Drobo 5DT as one high end example (over $1000) but you can get some in the hundreds range but may or may not have RAID functions.

Get second hand Synology/QNAP etc NAS, use iSCSI with laptop via gigabit ethernet connection, NAS handles RAID functions, Windows treats the NAS as an internal HDD, supposed to offer better performance.
 
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From my basic knowledge RAID5 is what kills write speeds which is what combines drives into one with fault tolerance. The above soft RAID systems try to overcome that but have their own issues.

The "classic" description is that write is slower but read is faster. Given that your average "general purpose" file server, the ratio of read/write is usually cited of the order of 80/20 it's regarded as an acceptable trade off. In something like a media tank, the read/write ratio may be even higher (read often, write seldom.)

I am suspicious that when using software RAID5 talking to the HDD's through a USB2 pipe, it's pulling all the blocks through the USB pipe hat will be hitting performance rather that the parity calculations which IIRC use Exclusive-Or function which is trivially simple.

One might care to contemplate what the cost difference is for an external drive enclosure populated with discs versus a micro server populated with discs and see whether you think it's worth it in light of the performance dis-benefits. It might be the same cost, or not much more, to just by another micro-server, especially if there's a deal going.
 

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