SSD in a Qnap TS-110 ?

[David Pottage]

Hello

I have a Qnap TS-110, which I am using as a home mail and web server for
the past year. It runs Debian Squeeze.

I am considering replacing the hard drive inside with a small SSD, now
that prices have come down. Has anyone else done that? Can anyone report
experiences good or bad with such a set-up?

Apart from reducing power consumption, and noise I am hoping that the
faster seek time of a SSD will make the server more responsive. I
occasionaly access my mail via squirrelmail web mail, and when I do I
can hear the hard drive seeking a lot. Running strace on the Apache
process confirms that the server is accessing a lot of files to service
each request, so I hope that squirrelmail would benefit from an SSD.

Is an SSD a worthwhile investment, or will it make little difference?

Will there be any difficuty fitting one? (I have one of those sheet
steel adaptors for fitting 2.5" drives into a 3.5" bay).

Thank you.

[Ruediger Leibrandt]

Post by David Pottage
Hello
I have a Qnap TS-110, which I am using as a home mail and web server for
the past year. It runs Debian Squeeze.
I am considering replacing the hard drive inside with a small SSD, now
that prices have come down. Has anyone else done that? Can anyone report
experiences good or bad with such a set-up?

I had only 1st and 2nd Generation SSD's. With those wear from write access was
a heavy issue. More recent drives should have little worries there, but I read
in many manufacturers descriptions that their drives are "optimized for NTFS
and FAT" - which reads like if they'd blow running ext3/4 or any other decent
journaling system.

Post by David Pottage
Apart from reducing power consumption, and noise I am hoping that the
faster seek time of a SSD will make the server more responsive. I
occasionaly access my mail via squirrelmail web mail, and when I do I
can hear the hard drive seeking a lot. Running strace on the Apache
process confirms that the server is accessing a lot of files to service
each request, so I hope that squirrelmail would benefit from an SSD.

When search time is the issue, a SSD is an enormous speedup. The only thing
even faster are Ramdrives - those boxes you plug in DIMM-RAM's - but there
you'll end up with a 16GB drive for 90€, and I doubt you're needing the
600MB/s throughput on read & write that these drives offer.

Post by David Pottage
Is an SSD a worthwhile investment, or will it make little difference?

Personal opinion here: I still have a slight toothache thinking about long-
term reliability with lotsa writing in conjunction with SSD's.
So, as for wotrthwhile: Remember to make backups or get two drives and make a
RAID0, or get 3 and make a RAID5.
But I am paranoid.
Considering search-time might be your Achilles-heel, a SSD should be a major
improvement.

Post by David Pottage
Will there be any difficuty fitting one? (I have one of those sheet
steel adaptors for fitting 2.5" drives into a 3.5" bay).

No worries as for fitting: in the worst case doublesided sticky tape will hold
the drive in place. Its doing so in my netbook since 4 years, which is
constantly being lugged around.
Powersupply, noise and heat will also show an amiable change toward the
better.

Post by David Pottage
Thank you.

Ish' Okies.

[Rogério Brito]

Hi there.

Post by Ruediger Leibrandt
When search time is the issue, a SSD is an enormous speedup. The only
thing even faster are Ramdrives - those boxes you plug in DIMM-RAM's - but
there you'll end up with a 16GB drive for 90€, and I doubt you're needing
the 600MB/s throughput on read & write that these drives offer.

Where can I get more information about such ramdrives? A quick search with
Google has only returned things like "how to create ramdrives from my
computer's RAM".

I would be interested in one of these for use as swap for ARM machines that
are (always?) memory starved. If one could just throw some cheap SDRAM into
one of these ARM boxes...

Are there any potentially hacky solutions, like the [FatSlug][0] for other
computers? This, perhaps, with ZRAM, could be used to alleviate the issue of
running with little RAM.

It seems that RAM is a more or less general problem about ARM, as per the
discussion of the buildd's for armel and armhf qualifications.

Regarding disks, for NASes that have two bays, it seems that using an SSD
with a regular HD, then the [benefits of bcache are promising][1].


[0]: http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/FatSlug
[1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/394672/


Regards,
--
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 4096R/BCFCAAAA
http://rb.doesntexist.org/blog : Projects : https://github.com/rbrito/
DebianQA: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=rbrito%40ime.usp.br

[Phil Endecott]

Post by David Pottage
I have a Qnap TS-110, which I am using as a home mail and web server for
the past year. It runs Debian Squeeze.
I am considering replacing the hard drive inside with a small SSD, now
that prices have come down. Has anyone else done that?

My TS-119 has an SSD. I have used exclusively solid-state storage for
everything since 2006.

I don't know how much the TS-110 case differs from the TS-119. In mine, the
fittings are designed for a 3.5" drive and don't line up with the 2.5" SSD. So
it is attached only by the connector. This is fine while in use because the SSD
is so light, but it did once fall off while in transit. Hot-melt-glue or
similar bodging would be my suggestion for fixing that.


Good luck, Phil.