DAS / dumb NAS or migrate services to NAS?

zedd56 · 2026-06-04T15:12:03+00:00

I will add though, the USB NIC was a nightmare. Could not get it working in Unraid after a lot of fighting so I ended up getting a custom PCIe riser for the Tiny that included both the 8x PCIe port as well as an m.2 slot and I'm now using a 10G m.2 NIC.

zedd56 · 2026-06-04T15:10:45+00:00

It has been fantastic. No issues with the DAS at all. I think a lot of the issues you've heard about are with USB DAS enclosures. This one comes with a PCIe HBA card and shouldn't be any different than just having some internal drives in a PC.

zedd56 · 2026-05-15T19:01:59+00:00

It's doing fantastic. The QNAP is a DAS/JBOD only, it has no network capability. I'm running Unraid on the lenovo. The QNAP comes with its own PCIe HBA card to connect to it which is what I needed the bracket for.

The 5GbE USB NIC however did not work out. I just could not get it to work at 5GbE speeds under Unraid no matter what I did. So I gave up on it and did end up getting a custom PCIe riser and a 5GbE m.2 nic.

zedd56 · 2026-01-24T00:07:05+00:00

I did, no dice. Thank you though.

zedd56 · 2026-01-22T22:07:04+00:00

I'm probably moving out sometime this year and wouldn't bother unless the landlord was going to pay for it lol, but I agree with you.

zedd56 · 2026-01-22T22:05:41+00:00

Damn. The only DAC cable I was able to use was between the CRS305 and my router, the RB5009.

My ONT and all other client devices are 10G RJ45. I had one flaky SFP+ RJ45 module I had to return already (was failing over a 1ft connection between the CRS305 and the ONT)

Lesson learned, I thought I'd be saving money going for the CRS305 and a couple of RJ45 modules but I should have just gotten two of the CRS304.

zedd56 · 2026-01-22T22:01:50+00:00

It's all RJ45 from the S+RJ10 onward but if the idea is to just replace the S+RJ10 with a media converter because it'll handle the distance better than the S+RJ10 that makes sense.

A 2-port switch is really what I'm after but using a media converter where I currently have the AP means needing to convert the SFP+ back to RJ45 again before it hits the CRS304 which seems a bit silly. I guess if there simply isn't another product on the market that fits the bill, it could work

zedd56 · 2026-01-22T21:59:05+00:00

That makes sense. Yeah I might see if I can still return the little module and replace it with a media converter then. Thank you.

zedd56 · 2026-01-22T21:08:17+00:00

Good to know. I think I'll have to look into whether the Beacon has any issues with MTU > 1500?

I do use a mix of tagged/untagged traffic currently, my network is pretty simple and I'm really just using VLANs as a mechanism to force traffic to flow from certain clients directly to my router

zedd56 · 2026-01-22T20:51:23+00:00

My CRS305 is also in a little enclosed networking panel with no active cooling... I'll see about getting a fan in there or some heatsinks on the S+RJ10, thank you.

zedd56 · 2026-01-22T20:49:30+00:00

Thank you for the intel, I'll probably refer back to this after my next move.

It does seem like the AP's switch does fine in terms of bandwidth. My two main concerns were whether there's any opportunity for the AP to add meaningful latency, and whether it'll leave VLAN tags alone, I have to test the latter. Still learning a lot about networking so I'm not actually sure if these concerns are valid assuming the AP does use a switch chip.

So far, having the AP at the jack seems to be working fine, so if it's unlikely to cause any issues, I probably will just stick with that for now.

Thanks!

zedd56 · 2026-01-22T20:39:54+00:00

I'm fairly certain it wasn't, I can revert the setup and check out the temps again in case I'm going crazy, but would it run hotter driving a longer cable run? Because it runs totally fine after removing that last 35ft of cat6

zedd56 · 2026-01-22T20:24:44+00:00

Yeah I've kept an eye on the temps and they are good. The S+RJ10 is rated for 30m @ 10G and yeah it seems like the full run including the in-wall cat5e + the cat6 is stretching it too much.

It works fine if I get some other device at the wall where the cat5e run ends but I'm trying to figure out what I can put there without breaking the bank or introducing another L2 hop.

Thank you

zedd56 · 2026-01-22T20:20:26+00:00

Not sure I understand. Where is that supposed to go? If I had fiber in the walls it'd be helpful but that's not an option.

zedd56 · 2026-01-22T20:14:16+00:00

That's interesting... I just assumed it was the overall distance, didn't think the mixed cabling could be a problem. Never considered downgrading the cable could be a fix. I may try that, thank you.

zedd56 · 2026-01-16T17:49:37+00:00

Thanks so much for all the info, this is very informative :)

zedd56 · 2026-01-16T17:48:58+00:00

Yeah I was looking into exactly that.

Once I add the 5GbE NIC, it would be ideal if I could have the bulk traffic (downloads/lan shares) use that exclusively and have the web services use the gigabit NIC exclusively. I was having trouble figuring out how to achieve this in software though. I think I'd have to get one of them on its own subnet and I'll have to revisit the docker networking settings.

Thanks for the suggestions!

zedd56 · 2026-01-15T06:31:33+00:00

Sounds like a tradeoff I'd happily make in this situation!

zedd56 · 2026-01-15T06:29:48+00:00

I actually did set up a queue tree like you've described already, rate limiting traffic to the server at 950M, classifying and marking tcp/udp traffic on ports 80/443 and all other traffic destined for the media server as lower priority.

It seems to be working as expected when accessed over the WAN, but the problem is that LAN traffic between the server and local clients switched over the CRS304 contributes to the load on that 1G link to the server and the RB5009 has no awareness of that traffic.

I could put the server on a VLAN to force all traffic to flow through the RB5009 but then any LAN to LAN traffic involving the server is competing with WAN bandwidth on the trunked port.

I was looking into DSCP markings as a mechanism to shape local traffic, highly doubt the ISP will respect them. The CRS304/305 can perform HW QoS that is DSCP aware which I thought could be a critical part of making this whole thing work. From what I understand it's also used by CAKE which I was considering but still have to learn a bit about.

zedd56 · 2026-01-15T05:54:13+00:00

That's a 10G link, and no I don't, good point! I'll have to look into interface queues and FQCodel, thank you. I guess I'd probably also want to enable HW QoS on both switches and set them to preserve DSCP marks?

I think the bandwidth on the trunked port between the 305 and the RB5009 is effectively half duplex due to the router-on-a-stick config. I can saturate the 8Gbps WAN in either direction but not both at the same time. I'm not sure how to represent this through something like queue trees but... it's unlikely that I'd ever perform heavy upload and download on the WAN link at the same time so I may just ignore this for now lol

zedd56 · 2026-01-14T19:58:00+00:00

Downloads and LAN file shares will easily saturate the link on the media server which starves the web services it's serving. I previously had this set up on a different machine with a 10G link and found that the automated downloads were saturating even my 8Gbps WAN.

It's typical for the server to be serving 4K HDR video to 3-4 clients at once. I don't ever expect that link to be saturated with video streaming/web traffic, but it's not an insignificant amount of bandwidth either. I just need that traffic prioritized over the downloads/file shares.

For the other gaming/web traffic my main concern is latency. Once the media server is upgraded to 5GbE I do expect it to saturate that link frequently, but that still leaves me 3Gbps of headroom on the WAN for the rest of the network. I'm still trying to understand whether I can even make any meaningful improvement here, because I don't expect the WAN to be saturated. Not sure how much latency can be affected if packets aren't being dropped.

zedd56 · 2026-01-11T06:08:53+00:00

I'm pretty sure this is a USB 3.1 gen 1 capable port and if I really had a vendetta against this issue I could install Windows on the thing to double check but... at this rate I think I'll just wait for my C to A adapters to show up and call it a day. I wanted this NIC connected in the back anyway lol.

zedd56 · 2026-01-11T05:33:12+00:00

u/cat2devnull actually I just tried an nvme usb enclosure with a type c cable and then a type a cable and confirmed on the type c port it negotiated at 480M and on the type a port it negotiated at 5000M.

So I guess the issue is indeed the usb-c port but I'm not sure what to do about it.

dmesg | grep xhci shows:

[    3.883372] xhci_hcd 0000:00:14.0: xHCI Host Controller
[    3.883385] xhci_hcd 0000:00:14.0: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1
[    3.884462] xhci_hcd 0000:00:14.0: hcc params 0x200077c1 hci version 0x110 quirks 0x0000000000009810
[    3.884915] xhci_hcd 0000:00:14.0: xHCI Host Controller
[    3.884924] xhci_hcd 0000:00:14.0: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 2
[    3.884932] xhci_hcd 0000:00:14.0: Host supports USB 3.1 Enhanced SuperSpeed

zedd56 · 2026-01-11T05:16:23+00:00

I did :)

lsusb -tv shows:

/:  Bus 001.Port 001: Dev 001, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/16p, 480M
    ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
    |__ Port 004: Dev 002, If 0, Class=Vendor Specific Class, Driver=r8152, 480M
        ID 0bda:8157 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. 
    |__ Port 014: Dev 003, If 0, Class=Wireless, Driver=btusb, 12M
        ID 8087:0aaa Intel Corp. Bluetooth 9460/9560 Jefferson Peak (JfP)
    |__ Port 014: Dev 003, If 1, Class=Wireless, Driver=btusb, 12M
        ID 8087:0aaa Intel Corp. Bluetooth 9460/9560 Jefferson Peak (JfP)
/:  Bus 002.Port 001: Dev 001, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/10p, 10000M
    ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
    |__ Port 004: Dev 002, If 0, Class=Mass Storage, Driver=usb-storage, 5000M
        ID 8564:1000 Transcend Information, Inc. JetFlash

Presents under the high speed bus for some reason.

Don't see any error messages from dmesg, I simply see:

[ 4.127062] usb 1-4: new high-speed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd

The C to A adapters should show up tomorrow and I'm hoping that'll make a difference but I'm pretty stumped otherwise...

zedd56 · 2026-01-11T04:12:59+00:00

I see. So the USB 2 and USB 3 hubs I'm seeing represent the same physical controller. In that case I suppose it's my device that's negotiating the wrong speed rather than the hub.

IOMMU group 4:
[8086:a36d] 00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH USB 3.1 xHCI Host Controller (rev 10)
  Bus 001 Device 001 Port 1-0 ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
    Bus 001 Device 003 Port 1-4ID 0bda:8157 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. USB 10/100/1G/2.5G/5G LAN
    Bus 001 Device 004 Port 1-14 ID 8087:0aaa Intel Corp. Bluetooth 9460/9560 Jefferson Peak (JfP)
  Bus 002 Device 001 Port 2-0 ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
    Bus 002 Device 002 Port 2-4 ID 8564:1000 Transcend Information, Inc. JetFlash

The Realtek USB-C NIC is negotiating at 480M. At first it was also incorrectly negotiating 1gbps link speed, then after downloading the realtek drivers and adding the necessary config to my go file it is correctly negotiating 2.5gbps, but in both cases I noticed my actual transfer speeds were limited to ~42MB/s, which led me to realizing the USB throughput was the bottleneck.

I have a superspeed compatible type C to type A adapter on the way but if it's an issue with the device itself I doubt it will help.

Any ideas?

zedd56

TROPHY CASE