Best way to organize volumes

[John Weissberg]

I have a FreeNAS running on a Supermicro server with 16 disk slots. There are 2 powerful multi-core CPUs and over 100Gb of RAM. There are about 10 different clients connected to the FreeNAS simultaneously and usage is heavy. If you look at our data, there are 3 different "silos" of data.

Currently, we have 1 large zpool built from spinning HDD and all 3 "silos" are on the same zpool. There is 1 silo of data that we want to accelerate READ access as much as possible.

I am considering creating 3 different zpools of 4 disks each. One of the zpools would be made from SSD instead of HDD. We would place 1 silo of data onto each different zpool. The silo where we really want to accelerate read access would be placed onto the zpool made from SSD.

My question is whether any of these changes would really improve speed.

Would storing each data silo on its own zpool make the system faster overall?
Would using SSD result in much faster READ speed for the clients (or will the speed bump from the SSD be lost in all sorts of other bottlenecks in the system) ?

 

[Nick2253]

You are probably ultimately limited by your network speed. What kind of a network do you have set up?

Usually, splitting data into different pools will not increase your speed. This reduces the number of vdevs per pool, and the more vdevs, the more performance. The big reason you might want to split into separate pools is because you're trying to limit the performance hit from one silo's use on another silo. Different storage types (SSD vs HDD) are another good reason to split into separate pools.

Depending on your network, SSDs won't necessarily give you more bandwidth, but they can dramatically increase your IOPS. If your reads/writes are lots of small files, this may be well worth it.

I would suggest that increases network performance and increasing the number of vdevs in your pool are two easy ways to improve performance for your clients.