Toshiba

I had this question asked earlier today, and the plain answer is “Stuff”.

I decided that I needed more expandability in the server, and since I was using a Fractal Node 804 for a gaming case, I decided to swap out the board and gaming components and put them in the Fractal Node 304. This allows me up to 8 3.5in HDDs and a lot more real estate.

Top View

Back of the Case

GPU Side

Side View

Top View Closed

Back End Closed

GPU Side Closed

Front Side Closed

Couple notes on the Fractal Node 304 Case

Cable Management is a Pain. See the bundle of cables by the back of the GPU? That’s what I mean. There is only room there because I don’t have the HDD Sliders in.
The PSU design is smart, but is a problem if you need to access it. Point and case, I didn’t flip the PSU Switch before powering on and had to remove the cover and flip it.

So what am I running in my gaming box and what games do I play?

It’s a rather simple build running Windows 10 to play No Man’s Sky

capture

I’m been racking my brain trying to figure out this Synology NAS. I wanted a very simple benchmark, as I don’t need to go into complex workloads. The problem is that I’m using Synology Hybrid Raid. From what I can see from mdadm is that Synology created a RAID 5 from two slices of from each 6TB Disk and a RAID 1 from each 3TB Drive, and then RAIDed those two arrays in a RAID6 for 10TB. It is in interesting way to handle different size disks.

capture

@NAS:/$ sudo mdadm --detail /dev/md2
/dev/md2:
Version : 1.2
Creation Time : Sun Jun 5 14:32:46 2016
Raid Level : raid5
Array Size : 8776306368 (8369.74 GiB 8986.94 GB)
Used Dev Size : 2925435456 (2789.91 GiB 2995.65 GB)
Raid Devices : 4
Total Devices : 4
Persistence : Superblock is persistent

Update Time : Tue Oct 4 16:12:35 2016
State : clean
Active Devices : 4
Working Devices : 4
Failed Devices : 0
Spare Devices : 0

Layout : left-symmetric
Chunk Size : 64K

Name : DiskStation:2
UUID : 7bda9cd2:56823007:93f428e6:169ca70e
Events : 1336

Number Major Minor RaidDevice State
4 8 5 0 active sync /dev/sda5
5 8 21 1 active sync /dev/sdb5
2 8 37 2 active sync /dev/sdc5
3 8 53 3 active sync /dev/sdd5
@NAS:/$ sudo mdadm --detail /dev/md3
/dev/md3:
Version : 1.2
Creation Time : Sat Jun 25 05:33:13 2016
Raid Level : raid1
Array Size : 2930246912 (2794.50 GiB 3000.57 GB)
Used Dev Size : 2930246912 (2794.50 GiB 3000.57 GB)
Raid Devices : 2
Total Devices : 2
Persistence : Superblock is persistent

Update Time : Tue Oct 4 16:19:16 2016
State : clean
Active Devices : 2
Working Devices : 2
Failed Devices : 0
Spare Devices : 0

Name : NAS:3 (local to host NAS)
UUID : 57946685:1d64279d:4929b9da:9c01f117
Events : 915

Number Major Minor RaidDevice State
0 8 6 0 active sync /dev/sda6
2 8 22 1 active sync /dev/sdb6

These benchmark speeds are to be expected. I plan to benchmark the Synology in different RAID Modes as well, but for now, I’ve benchmarked md2 (RAID5), and md1 (RAID1)6

@NAS:/$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/md2
/dev/md2:
Timing buffered disk reads: 422 MB in 3.00 seconds = 140.61 MB/sec

@NAS:/$ sudo hdparm -T /dev/md2

/dev/md2:
Timing cached reads: 1478 MB in 2.00 seconds = 738.35 MB/sec

@NAS:/$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/md1

/dev/md1:
Timing buffered disk reads: 498 MB in 3.04 seconds = 163.86 MB/sec

@NAS:/$ sudo hdparm -T /dev/md1

/dev/md1:
Timing cached reads: 1508 MB in 2.00 seconds = 754.19 MB/sec

Okay what happened with the NAS Server?

Early NAS Benchmarks