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When looking into buying a NAS (network drive), would it benefit from more RAM or more CPU power?

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  • 1
    What are you going to use it for?
    – slhck
    Oct 8, 2011 at 18:13
  • 1
    This gonna be used as centralised backup drive,media server and ftp server..
    – Rushino
    Oct 8, 2011 at 20:58
  • I personally have gone with more NICs.
    – surfasb
    Oct 8, 2011 at 22:32

3 Answers 3

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(Hello again :)

Based on personal experience, you'll need at least 1GHz ARM processor (probably Marvell Kirkwood series) to get speeds greater than 50MB/s. Intel processors are generally faster, but also more expensive and power hungry.

256MB RAM is the minimum. You can get very good performance from it if the software is highly optimised (e.g. Synology or Qnap's proprietary system). High-end NASes, especially ones with Intel chip or the 1.6GHz Kirkwood, uses 512MB or more RAM to provide speeds around 100MB/s (i.e. almost saturates the physical gigabit ethernet link). Of course, there are Small Business servers that can run other applications and you'll need more RAM for that.

If you want to get something greater than 30MB/s from your setup, make sure you check the quality of your ethernet card (on your own computer and the NAS), the cables and the switch. You'll probably need 9K jumbo frame to get the CPU usage down, so make sure it's supported on all the devices.

The disks have to be fast enough as well. The WD Caviar Green ones have a long spin-up time so better avoid them.

smallnetbuilder.com is a good place to go to.

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  • I felt this answer was more complete. Thanks.
    – Rushino
    Oct 10, 2011 at 14:47
  • Glad to be able to help. I did this research about 2 months ago for my own file server, but I ended up built it from standard PC parts as the process is more enjoyable.
    – billc.cn
    Oct 10, 2011 at 16:45
  • This is great, nothing wrong with it, but I think it would be super helpful to add an update (if you've got the time and are willing) describing the use-cases for which your solution would work. Seems like this will work well for a NAS serving 5-10 clients? Or would this configuration suffice for serving 10-40 clients? Context is key. But great info so thank you either way.
    – Paul Hazen
    Oct 21, 2012 at 20:09
  • The limitation in this case is the disk (and the cache memory). A disk array or SSD is required to serve 10-40 users with a reasonable response time.
    – billc.cn
    Oct 21, 2012 at 21:40
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RAM. A storage server doesn't need much of either, but if you have more RAM good software on the server can use it to cache frequently read files for faster responses to read requests.

That said, the most common solutions don't really take good advantage of the extra RAM: the embedded hardware devices expect a specific amount and wouldn't know what to do with more or less. The operating system -based options (Windows Server, Windows Storage Server, and linux-based file servers -- even NAS specific distros like freenas and openfiler) don't do a lot to improve on the basic operating system caching, which doesn't optimize for file access in this way.

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  • FreeNAS 8 with ZFC require as many RAM, as you can give... Contrary to your statement Oct 9, 2011 at 2:53
  • That's an improvement since the last time I played with it, then, or maybe a specific quirk of using ZFS Oct 9, 2011 at 2:55
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Depends entirely on what you are using it for.

The more/faster, the better, but, it depends... there will be a point where faster will not help.

For example, if you have a 100Mb network card, and it is serving files at ~20Mb whilst the memory/cpu are at 100%, then, obviously the memory or hard drive are the bottleneck.

If however you are serving anywhere up to 80Mb on a 100Mb card or around 700Mb on a 1000Mb card, then, these are good speeds and I doubt you will get much more from upgrading the other hardware.

If you are searching for premade NAS units, it is really hard to say what you need as some may have much more efficient usage of memory utilization. I suggest you look up reviews.

Also, if there is software raid being used, this can be heavy on CPU usage.

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  • See my first post comment...
    – Rushino
    Oct 8, 2011 at 21:02

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