Asrock E350M1 Transfer speeds 30-40 MB/s

[kcgoatboy]

Hello, Some background information. I know a fair amount about computers but am a noob to the world of FreeNAS and FreeBSD.

System Specs:
Mobo: Asrock E350M1
Nic: Onboard Realtek RTL8111E
Mem: 8gb(2x4) non ECC
HDD: TBD
16gb Thumbdrive for Freenas

Before I ask my question I will start off by saying that I know this is not optimal CPU, mem (both size and non ECC) and a cruddy NIC . This nas box will NOT be for data backup. All information on the nas can be recreated. I plan on using it solely for a media storage device to distribute dvd and blu ray ISOs to my HTPCs. No transcoding will be done on the nas box. I will only be using one HTPC for movie watching at a time.

Currently I am waiting for my WD reds to come in the mail but I had a 5400rpm laptop drive laying around so I installed that so I can start to learn freenas while I wait. While transferring files from a win7 machine I am getting speeds between 25MB/s and 35MB/s averaging around 35. I get pretty much the same speeds if I use ftp to transfer the files (dvd iso). My CPU load is only between 30-40%. If is boot from a Ubuntu drive my transfer speeds are faster but not much, 30-45MB/s. From my research 25MB/s would be more than enough for DVD iso, and good enough for non 3d blu ray isos.

I know with this NIC I won't get anywhere close to the theoretical 133MB/s transfer speeds. When my drives (4x4TB) come in I plan on having two zpools with two drives per pool with the two drives in each respective pool just mirroring each other. I don't need the performance boost from striping across drives nor do I have the mem to do that. Even though the data can be recreated a simple mirror might allow me the benefit of not having to rerip part of my collection.

After this long post I finally get to my question. Would these transfer speeds be about what I expect from my hardware? Like I said earlier the speed should be sufficient for my needs I just didn't know if I was missing something. I know an Intel Nic card is cheap and would increase performance but I am still deciding if I am going to go with FreeNAS or maybe Ubuntu. If I go Ubuntu I probably would get a sata pci card so I could still have 4 drives just for storage. I'm leaning towards FreeNAS because of ease of setup/use and I don't need the server to do any transcoding.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Hi kcgoatboy,

Glad to see that you've dropped the caveats in there about the choice of hardware (weak CPU, non-ECC, cruddy NIC) to fend off the immediate responses you'd get otherwise, which would mostly be people biting your head off for not building to spec. ;)

As of FreeNAS 9.2.1, I believe, lz4 compression is enabled by default on pool creation. While LZ4 is a very efficient algorithm and has an early-abort feature for incompressible data, such as your videos, it's still going to keep triggering the attempt to compress. This might be causing your problems.

25MB/s should be more than enough for both BD and DVD ISOs - remember that you're calculating MB (megaBYTEs) and most video codecs are measured in Mbps (megaBITs) - so a 25MB/s sustained stream is 200Mbps. Most commercial BDs are encoded with a total bitrate between 30 and 40Mbps - even a 3D encode at double that is well within your current capacity.

For your drive configuration, there's nothing stopping you from using a single zpool with either a 2x2 mirror setup or a 2+2 RAIDZ2; but if you're dealing with all transient data that you can rebuild if it fails, you could make four zpools of a single drive each. If you lose a drive, you only lose what's on it, and you get maximum capacity. Bear in mind that you have absolutely no data resiliency in this case.

The short answer for "is this what to expect" is yes. You've got a weak CPU, a Realtek NIC, and an old 5400rpm laptop drive. But it'll do what you're asking.

Cheers!

 

[joelmusicman]

In your case you might actually want to consider RAIDZ1, just expect to rebuild the pool if a drive fails (since you have your media backed up elsewhere). However, if you're talking about DVD copies that your backup is the physical media, don't overlook the time it took you to rip all of that stuff to the HDD, and consider upgrading to an ECC machine with Intel NIC, which is doable for about $330 (E3C224D2I, G3220, 8GB ECC RAM).

If all you're after is a performance boost, simply upgrading to an add-on Intel NIC could probably help there as they're known to be less demanding of the CPU than Realtek. If you get to 80-100ish MB/s for large file transfers with the 4 drive pool you're maxing real-world Gigabit speeds though...

Also, as HoneyBadger mentioned, the actual requirements for streaming videos are pretty low. Watching my network graph in the GUI while my Raspbmc client streams a 720p x264 video, it has spurts of about 4-5 Mbit/s as it buffers, then sits idle for about twice as long before fetching another slice.

 

[kcgoatboy]

As of FreeNAS 9.2.1, I believe, lz4 compression is enabled by default on pool creation. While LZ4 is a very efficient algorithm and has an early-abort feature for incompressible data, such as your videos, it's still going to keep triggering the attempt to compress. This might be causing your problems.

I did forget to mention that the compression is turned off. It was weird, when I originally set it up I saw it was LZ4 at a ration of 1.04 and read up on the compressions levels I deleted the pool and created a new one with compression turned off. Now it says the ratio is 5.81. Anyways the speeds in my first post are with the compression turned off.

For your drive configuration, there's nothing stopping you from using a single zpool with either a 2x2 mirror setup or a 2+2 RAIDZ2

I did not know you could do a single zpool a 2x2 mirror setup. I'm a visual person, so when you use a windows box to copy over data or a htpc to access the videos, would it point to one dir or would you have 2 and have to choose which one? Basically with it being a single zpool would it look like one big dir but not use striping but still have a single redundancy per drive? And a 2+2 raidz2 would be a striped mirrored zpool?

One thing that did make me think a little was all the speeds I posted in my first post were me copying to the nas box. I copied data from the nas box and those speeds are much faster. I was getting between 65-100MB/s averaging 80 when I was copying off the nas box. I wonder if the old laptop hdd just has slow write speeds.

 

[HoneyBadger]

I did not know you could do a single zpool a 2x2 mirror setup. I'm a visual person, so when you use a windows box to copy over data or a htpc to access the videos, would it point to one dir or would you have 2 and have to choose which one? Basically with it being a single zpool would it look like one big dir but not use striping but still have a single redundancy per drive? And a 2+2 raidz2 would be a striped mirrored zpool?

From Windows or the HTPC, as long as you have a single shared from a single zpool, you'll just see it as one large directory. It's just the data underneath it that's affected by the striping/mirroring configuration.

A "2x2 mirror" zpool, consisting of two vdevs that are two disks in a mirror, looks like this:

And a "2+2 RAIDZ2" would look like this:

Both will actually give you the same amount of space in a 4-drive configuration. One difference is that in the first scenario (mirrors) you can only lose one disk from each vdev. If you lose both disks in one vdev, you're toast. In the RAIDZ2, you can lose any two disks and still be OK, since parity can rebuild the missing data from the other two.

Expansion is also an issue. With the first, you can get two more disks, add them as a new vdev, and you have another 4TB (in your case). With the latter, to keep the same level of resiliency, you'd have to add four disks as another RAIDZ2 vdev, but you'd be adding 8TB worth of space. More investment needed.

But in either case, you'll have a single zpool, and a single share, so from Windows/HTPC, you'll have a single path.

One thing that did make me think a little was all the speeds I posted in my first post were me copying to the nas box. I copied data from the nas box and those speeds are much faster. I was getting between 65-100MB/s averaging 80 when I was copying off the nas box. I wonder if the old laptop hdd just has slow write speeds.

It probably is just that you're running on a single 5400rpm drive.

 

[cyberjock]

I wouldn't have called it a 2x2 mirrored pool but a 4-disk RAIDZ2 vdev(or pool).. 2x2 raidz2 just sounds so weird.

 

[kcgoatboy]

Would a 2x2 mirrored pool be less dependent on memory both quantity and ECC since there is no striping involved? Or does ZFS just have higher mem requirements regardless of use? And I assume, hopefully correctly, that if I did want to do a 4-disk RAIDZ2 pool I really should have more mem and it be ECC even though I can recreate the data.

Thank you everyone, all the information has been helpful.

 

[cyberjock]

There is no difference for memory or ECC requirements. I mean, technically there is probably s very small amount of memory difference. But you aren't going to be able to quantify it in less RAM needed. And you definitely aren't going to be able to tell yourself you can buy less RAM. We're talking maybe 200MB tops difference. Not enough for you to ever validate.

 

[HoneyBadger]

I wouldn't have called it a 2x2 mirrored pool but a 4-disk RAIDZ2 vdev(or pool).. 2x2 raidz2 just sounds so weird.

Technically I called it a 2+2 (two plus two) RAIDZ2 - two data drives, two parity drives. ;)

And even with the fact that your data is replaceable, I wouldn't neglect what @joelmusicman said about the value of your time to re-rip and encode all of your discs. 8TB is a lot of movies.