Many people I know treat their NAS as kind of a slow storage which maybe runs some services. You might store backups on it too. But you would never ever directly work on it. I mean with a 1Gbit link one can understand this.
But could it be time to actually revisit this?
You can get a 10Gbit NIC for ~70 bucks in Europe. Some newer computers might actually come with them. Yes even cheaper/affordable ones. more on that later.
There are relatively cheap switches with a handful of 10Gbit ports. (e.g. from Mikrotik)
You can get even relatively affordable 10Gbit NAS now. Jeff Geerling recently tested some small 10Gbit capable NAS on his channel like this one for more see his channel or the Serve the home channel
Suddenly you are not talking to your NAS not with 1Gbit anymore but with 10. Your internal SATA storage is only 6Gbit. Sure we are not reaching the blazing fast speeds of internel NVME. But at least faster than local SATA storage.
What would we gain from that? Centralized storage of all your working files. you can move from the PC on your desk, to the laptop on the sofa and really have all your data accessible. no more âdamn I need to turn the PC back onâ
Easy backup management as all your files should be on the NAS now.
So I mentioned cheaper computers with 10Gbit storage. I will use the Mac Mini as an example. The cheapest MacMini is 599 in the US atm. For 100 more you can get the 10Gbit nic. compared to the storage update prices on Apple devices, the NIC upgrade is actually a bargain. You might find some older M1/M2 MacMinis second hand which can run Asahi. Small powerful and energy efficient devices.
But many of those small formfactor computers like minisforum are also coming now with 2.5, 5 or even 10GbE ports. And you cant really upgrade the storage on those as much as you want due to space constraints. Neither on your laptop. Speaking about laptops. There are thunderbolt docks with 10GbE.
And for the people, who are like â10Gb is too slow for meâ, 25 is starting to become affordable.
either works. the N150 in the lincstation is not super duper fast either. and yes NVME based cache drives in a NAS is a really good way to speed it up.
Jokes aside, this setup is pretty common for video people it seems. I ran a setup like this for a while, even with gigabit, its not that bad, you really only need to load a raw file once into to the editor, then its in RAM.
My editing rig has a zfs mirror pool, so I just send snapshots around for backups, and I donât really enjoy editing on my laptop, so I have no need, currently.
As for the fast connections: thatâs one part, that all falls apart the minute the disks in your NAS canât keep up; youâll need lots of NVME storage which isnât exactly cheap, yet. And whatever powers your NAS must be able to fill that pipe consistently.
Also, Iâm getting a bit jaded by professional deformity, 10G is, in our network, pretty much phased out now. Lots of stuff on 25G, and 40G, and all the stuff we currently buy is 100G. With an experimental setup with 400G. Of course, thatâs not just storage anymoreâŚ
I now use centralized storage, but since my âserverâ is also my PC I can benefit from fast speeds between them. I currently use a VM as my main âPCâ, I pass the RTX3080 to it and 14 out of 16 cores, it works perfectly fine and graphics performance is native, while cpu/memory performance has very little impact due to how good KVM is. I then use NFSv4 to share my storage with it.
For everything else, sadly my rented house has Cat5 in the walls, so no 10Gbit. Itâs fine either way, itâs enough to serve my services(jellyfin, immich, nextcloud, etc).
Modern HDD pools are pretty quick and enough to saturate 10Gbit, so why even bother with SSD storage for home use?
Head search time is still a thing. A SATA SSD can saturate a the link. I dont think spinning disks can. and if we get to PCIe 4/5 NMVEs are we are in a completely different ballpark of 7GB/s (4) or even 14+ GB/s (5) ⌠so a magnitude or 2 faster than even a SATA SSD.
Trust me. if you want to make your system feel fast add even a SATA SSD and it will be âwoah i should have done that soonerâ
I was just rewatching the Asrock Deskmeet + AM5 Epyc build video from level1tech and he mentioned that many 25Gb components are actually cheaper as many people move their homelabs and companies to 10Gb.
Yes I am aware of the differences, and of course both OSâs, games, regularly accessed files etc, are all in NVME drives at the moment, but for most things I store it doesnât make much sense. My current pool can read concurrently at 500MB/s or more so it doesnât really impact me at the moment.
Neat idea, but the the use case does not make sense for me for two reasons:
I am outside my house quite a bit, frequently on the road (trains). For files I need for work, I want instant access, even when I am fully offline.
I just donât have that much data. I have a 2TB m.2 SSD in my laptop, and it is only 40% full, even though I work with large datasets. I got it so that I would have room to grow, but at this rate it will be good for years (I donât delete stuff just because I need space ever). Now that SSD prices are around âŹ60/TB, I would go for a 4TB one.
I thought photography would eat up disk space. But I take about <1000 photos a year that I consider worthy of keeping even for sentimental reasons (family, friends, holidays), which is <25Gb / year.
My first computer was a 80286 with 1.2Mb 5.25" floppy disks. I am keenly aware how spoiled I am at the moment, when I would not even think about taking up a few hundred Gb at a whim for a project. But storage ceased to be a bottleneck for me a while ago.
If I had a laptop this would be an issue for me. So far I havenât found a good syncing piece of software. Syncthing works fine until it doesnât, itâs a mess.
I think that two- or multi-way syncing in general is not a viable concept, because not all files have the right level of granularity. Eg suppose I import files on machine A and B with Darktable, what happens to the database? There are myriad similar failure modes. So I have a single machine, which is a laptop.
That said, syncing works fine on a project level. I do computational work on servers, for which I use rsync or git (depending on how much data they generate). But it is never automated, I always initiate syncing back and forth manually.
Finally, for simple file-level syncing, I found Nextcloud OK, though you need to resolve conflicts from time to time if you work on files simultaneously. But it is not hard.
there is the whole systemd-homed thing where i was curious how well it would work on a laptop.
Also did you look into things like headscale/tailscale or netbird? both can set up vpn wide policies. and make it easy to be âat homeâ all the time.
and with vpn wide policies I mean things like my friends can access our minecraft server, but not my nextcloud e.g. but my family can access all services.
I think the problem is having a reliable connection, although at least in my country, data plans are becoming pretty cheap, so using the phone as a hotspot shouldnât be too bad. If your phone has USB3.0 hotspot also works via USB which is great
Nextcloud works wonders for me, especially on desktops and laptops. On mobile youâre somewhat tied to whatever your phone vendorâs mangling of OS will allow you to do with the expensive computer pocket you apparently rent⌠But I assume youâre not going to be running full syncs to your phone.
Iâve also heard good things about Syncthing and Seafile, but no personal experience so YMMV.
