Some consideration about Network Attached Storage (NAS) and CPU speed

Question

(I hope that my question is not too trivial ...)

I am going to choose a NAS device and I am looking for a professional NAS model. To choose correct model I am keeping in mind about network speed, capacity of disk, redundance solutions (RAID) etc. Now, I am thinking about a question: is there a correlation between the speed of the CPU and the network adapters? I mean, if I have two models of NAS, with the same disks, same network adapter speed but different speed CPU, will the performance be greater on the NAS with a higher CPU.

Thanks.

dmc

Answer 1

If you had only one client accessing a NAS using regular NAS protocols such as NFS, SMB/CIFS or iSCSI then CPU performance in the NAS is probably less of an issue. If you're using a number of different protocols, have lots of IO contention from multiple client machines or are using the NAS for 'higher' functions such as VAAI, compression or deduplication then you'll want the best CPU you can get so that normal traffic performance is impacted by these extra functions the least.

I don't know how much expertise you have but something I thought I'd add (and is commonly discussed on serverfault) is PLEASE don't use RAID5 with large disks (or at all in fact if you can), RAID levels 1, 6 and 10 are the ones professionals use, we generally hate R5, just thought I'd mention that to you at that point. Oh and we don't do product recommendations on this site but if you narrow your choices down to 2 or 3 makes/models then come into the 'Comms Room' on chat and we can talk to you about it ok, just not on here.

Answer 2

After a certain point, it does not matter. CPU speed in NAS solutions may help with other features (compression, deduplication, etc.), but in your case, there's no additional benefit.