Hello,
I hope someone can provide me some guidance or point me in the right direction. I am looking for a solution and I believe a good NAS would work but I need to know for sure.
As far as the storage or sharing it doesn't get much easier than what I need. 500GB to 1TB per device is more than enough capacity. No authentication or access control, no quotas, no automated backups or media streaming. Just serve files via an SMB share.
There are some extra services that would be very helpful, but I doubt if I will find a NAS that can offer them. Those being, DHCP/DNS server, PXE server... That would be awesome, but again, I'm not going to hold my breath on that.
I do have a few other easy to accomodate considerations. They need to be reasonably small. Most of the time, they will be stored in protective travel cases. I cant use some huge 19"x19"x7" server. It also needs to be reasonably priced. I am not going to be able to convince the company to shell out a few thousand dollars per unit.
Now for the hard part. As the subject line indicates, each device needs to be able to sustain 15 to 20 clients all trying to pull down a multi-GigaByte file at the same time. The clients will all be 32 Bit Windows PE copying down an image file before applying it. I dont think it can get much harder than that for a file server. Very large sequential reads made worse by getting requested from many concurrent clients. I know it will have a pretty significant impact on performance. But what I need to know is:
Will it drop/reset connections? (Will the downloads be interupted and have to be start over alot?)
Will it scale relatively well? (Will the performance drop be pretty linear and proportionate to the number of clients?)
What I would really like is to see some charts/benchmarks showing different numbers of connections pulling large files simultaneously. 1 client, vs 5 clients, vs 10 clients... Does anyone know if that information exists anywhere? All of the reviews/benchmarks that I have seen concentrate on 1 single connection. That would be fine if you the performance was the same as a single connection divided by the number of connections. i.e. 1 client = 30 MBps, 2 clients = 15 MBps, 3 clients = 10 MBps, and so on, but in reality it is not going to work like that. I would also really like to know how the RAID configuration affects this usage in the real world. I dont care about slower rights, just fast reads. So in theory RAID 10 would probably be the best but I guess it really dependson the RAID controller and its implementation. If it is not a hardware RAID controller and the system is already being overtaxed, then maybe it would perform worse and I should not use RAID at all, run them as JBOD/Spanned?
Any help or feedback that anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Richard
