New 576TB NAS, pool & RAID planning (SA3600 + 2 exp)

[moarspace]

Hi,
This isn't my first NAS rodeo, but first time we're giving Synology a serious chance at our company. The hardware arrives in a few days, and I want to plan the volume makeup ahead of time.

SA3600 (128GB RAM) + 2 x RS1222sas expansion chassis, full with 36 x 16TB Toshiba enterprise drives. Intel 2x40Gbps NIC into our 10GbE storage network.
Everything is off the Kosher list, to keep the hardware and Syno support happy. (Toshiba HDDs also looked good in Backblaze stats, and I understand Syno's own brand is "modded" Toshibas.) Top-of-the-line in Syno world... yet it was way cheaper than "big iron" NAS prices.

• Our use case is a "big dumb" NAS for large video files, over SMB. Large sequential R/W is what we care about. No hyperscaling, no VMs...
  Usually we have a share for each project, taking up 20-70TB, roughly 1,000 files per TB. Biggest share so far is at 130TB and counting.
  
  
• What are some best practices for this use case, and this many drives? My hunch says 12-drive RAID6 (or SHR2) groups with 2 parity drives and 1 hot spare in each. But can Syno do global spares? etc.
  
  
• Is there a way to do one big volume across all the drives? Syno themselves give conflicting advice re spanning volumes across chassis. Of course I wouldn't want a 36-drive RAID group with 2-drive redundancy... so is there a good solution? (Raid 60?)
  Being stuck with 3 smaller volumes will definitely be a detriment since it will limit our flexibility in assigning the space to different projects.
  
  
• When it comes to how much to fill up your volume, what is the recommendation with Syno RAID / SHR? How does it behave between 80% and 100% compared to e.g. ZFS?

I searched around and to my surprise, aside from very basic primers, couldn't find any useful guide on the above.

Thanks!

 

[Lewis]

Nice, beefy machine, only thing is that AFAIR that NAS don't support SHR or SHR-2, so you'd have to use "regular" RAID5 or RAID6

 

[Rusty]

What are some best practices for this use case, and this many drives? My hunch says 12-drive RAID6 (or SHR2) groups with 2 parity drives and 1 hot spare in each.

As a response to both 2nd and 3rd bullet. Wouldn't suggest making one volume for sure, but depending on your needs it would be safer to go with smaller volumes (2-3) for sure. Regarding redundancy, RAID6 with 12 drives should be rock solid with 1 hot spare.

When it comes to how much to fill up your volume, what is the recommendation with Syno RAID / SHR?

SHR type should be avoided, and on this model it is not even supported, so conventional types only.