Networking at home

I have an older Synology NAS at home, and I am planning to replace it with a custom built NAS. To decide which system to put on it, I have setup 5 different NAS solution in a virtual environment and measured how fast they are. There were two prerequisites to the candidates: they should support WSD and SMB Multichannel.

I have experienced very poor performance on the RAID set up on my new computer, so I decided to do a short test of the speed and capacity of different RAID configurations.

Deduplication means, that when saving data to disks, if the same data is stored once more, then only a reference is stored and space is saved. OpenDedup is an open source online (real-time) deduplication solution, with one of the goals to provide a solution for storing Virtual Machine images, where big parts of the images could be duplicated. In this article we test OpenDedup, both from speed and compression point of view.

I have an Intel SS4200 home storage server running Ubuntu 14.04 server at home, and because the read speeds were only around 60 Mbyte/sec, I decided to do a processor upgrade. After the upgrade I had some problems with the fan, and the speed did not significantly increased. Read more for the details.

Now I am setting up a new NAS and to be able to decide if I should use Stripped LVM I did some measurements. Stripped LVM means the the data volume is spread across 2 physical disks and data reads and writes are executed in parallel to the two disks, so in theory this will duplicate the disks speed. However stripping has one disadvantage that if one of the disks fails then all data is lost, while with normal volumes, there are chances that from the functional disk it is possible to restore the data. The NAS has a Gigabit Ethernet LAN connection so in theory 125 MBytes/sec speeds can be achieved. To do the tests I have set up two 200 GByte logical volumes on the LVM containing two 4 Tbytes physical disks, one stripped across the two disks and the other without stripping. First I measured the speed within the NAS, using the linux DD command: On the normal volume: >dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/data/Adatok/test bs=1M count=2000      2000+0 records in 2000+0 records out...

Last autumn, before installing my Ubuntu home server I had great plans to do network file speed benchmarks between different operating systems to select the best operating system for my home server. The plan was excellent, but after a bit more than one month of testing I realized, that if I ever want to have that server up and running I should cancel these tests and go strait to the installation. In this post I will write about the results in that month. Original intention The plan was simple, I had the new hardware for the server, I had installation disks for Windows Server 2008 R2, Ubuntu, OpenSuse and Solaris. On the client side I had a quad processor 2 gig memory computer with Windows 7 RC, Windows XP and OpenSuse 11.1 and had an older computer with and old Athlon processor running at 2 GHz and 1 Gig of memory. So I intended to install all 4 server operating systems, test them from the 3 client operating system available on the faster client machine and from the XP on the slow...