fenny

• Asustor FS6812X with room for 12x NVMe M.2 SSDs, no SATA
• Purchased from Scorptec at the end of 2024
• I didn't necessarily need all 12 slots, but I wanted the dual 10G ethernet ports, and the bump to 16GB of RAM while also making it ECC was a compelling option
• I've installed 4x Kingston 4TB KC3000 SSDs, PCIe Gen4, in RAID10
• Single volume, with file shares and LUNs carved out of that

Purchasing notes

Based on my research for options to upgrade ../iowa, my Synology NAS, I determined that they just don't have what I want, or would be vastly too expensive if they do. The Asustor Flashstor was in the right place at the right time, and it's an excellent product so far.

And that sounds like a lot (and it feels like it), but the cheapest Synology all-flash array here is $6500. And it only takes 2.5" SATA SSDs (not inclulded), so I'm just not sure it's worth it. And it's a gonna be noisy because it has little 40mm 1RU fans. You can put a 25G NIC in there I guess, that's nice, but getting less and less relevant for me. Yeah the 10G switch was 1200 bucks, but I'm still ahead on pricing.

Disks

SSDs

• KINGSTON SKC3000D4096G (S/N: 50026B7686E0DF57)
• KINGSTON SKC3000D4096G (S/N: 50026B7686E0DF69)
• KINGSTON SKC3000D4096G (S/N: 50026B7686E0DF53)
• KINGSTON SKC3000D4096G (S/N: 50026B7686E70B88)

Volume 1

• 7.44 TB usable
• RAID 10
• btrfs

iscsi

• Target: iqn.2011-08.com.asustor:fs6812x-437849.fenny

• LUNs
  • gitea-data: 100G

  • AlmaLinux repo mirror: 2TB

Tuning your client performance/behaviour

This is nice to do, it should get the client to flush data more regularly and not appear to "lurch" so badly when doing big writes.

cat <<EOF > /etc/sysctl.d/10-vm-dirty-bytes.conf
vm.dirty_background_bytes = 209715200
vm.dirty_bytes = 419430400
EOF

Then just load the change as you normally would (or reboot). Without this, what you tend to see is the OS rushing and filling the writeback buffer at gigabytes per second, then the foreground operation (like rsync) comes to a screeching halt as it quickly flushes the buffer to the target at a much slower pace. What you'd like to see is smooth performance at a consistent wire-speed for the link, and this should help with that.

Backups

Cloud Backup Centre provides the same functionality as Cloud Sync on Synology. I sync the volume to an S3-alike bucket in Backblaze B2, and it seems to work quite nicely.

There's about 4TB of files in there. I don't sync everything to the cloud because it'd be too expensive for data that just isn't that valuable to me, it'd roughly double the costs.