NAS device recommendations due to a very slow rsync

So I found in a closet an old

$ head -5 /proc/cpuinfo
system type             : Atheros AR9341 rev 1
machine                 : TP-LINK TL-MR3420 v2
processor               : 0
cpu model               : MIPS 74Kc V4.12
BogoMIPS                : 266.64

and flashed

$ grep REL /etc/os-release
OPENWRT_RELEASE="OpenWrt 19.07.7 r11306-c4a6851c72"

on it, hoping to transform it a poor man's NAS, but the result is disappointing: the speed is lacking. With a plugged external hdd (ext4 fs) I get (via ethernet):

upload method MB/s
scp, sftp or rsync (ssh) 1.3
to rsyncd (no encryption) 5
samba 3.6 6.7

One 9.4G directory that I was going to sync regularly has 326,410 files. After copying the directory to the "NAS", it now takes 22 (twenty two) minutes for rsync -a -n my_dir_on_laptop rsync://nas... for a dry run (when no actual data is being sent). Horrified, I tried the same op between 2 laptops, each of which has the same directory, & the dry run took ~5 seconds.

Here's my question:

What device are you guys using as a NAS that

  1. can eat at least 10 MB/s via ssh

  2. doesn't contain a potato CPU & able to operate reasonably fast on directories with up to 1M small files.

I don't care about wireless.

Thanks.

a small PC (mine's huge, but a small one would do too) :wink:

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I think a raspberry pi 4 should be performant enough for your needs.

As for what I use myself, I use a system with a 3570k@4.6ghz as a NAS which is very much overkill in the CPU department, but it has to also run Minecraft servers from time to time.

I generally move over my main rig's cpu / mobo to nas / server duty after upgrading.

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RockPro64 if you want a SBC, it's by far more capable than RPi4 otherwise any x86 based NAS will do just fine.

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I have two RPi4s in a mirrored glusterfs cluster as NAS. They're running raspbian though.

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A couple of optimizations for that system: ksmbd instead of samba, f2fs instead of ext4, and forcing rsync/ssh/scp to use chacha20-poly1305. It's probably not enough to get satisfactory results though. The issue with the platform is CPU speed (you can only do a 20MHz stable overclock IIRC) and the USB controller being slow as well.

A dedicated NAS would be better. There's https://kobol.io/ , but they're not selling right now.

There's https://www.crowdsupply.com/wiretrustee/wiretrustee-sata , but same situation.

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