Confused about write performance reports

[David Combs]

I'm new to FreeNAS, but I have done good bit of research prior to this install. I am doing some testing on a first install of 9.3.1 and I'm not sure how to interpret what I'm seeing. Under the reports tab, I'm seeing max write speeds of 39MB/s. That's not surprising, I haven't upgraded to the new SAS controller we intend to use. What confuses me is that I can move a 4GB file from a PC on the network to a CIFS share that I've mapped in 1 minute and 5 seconds. That math doesn't jive. 4Gb moved in one minute works out closer to 70MB/s.

Can anyone help me understand what I'm seeing here and if this is mis-reporting or mis-understanding?


Thanks in advance.

 

[Sakuru]

Please post the specs of your FreeNAS box. https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/forum-rules.22553/#post-134570/

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

How much RAM in that box? Your 4GB test file probably fits in the cache, and CIFS doesn't do sync writes.

 

[David Combs]

This is a pretty old Supermicro 6015V-MT 1U server we have retired from its previous role. To be clear, this is not going to be tier 1 storage. We are intending this device to be tier-2 storage dedicated to store archive data and disk to disk backups for our windows Hyper-V servers. I am open to a stripe configuration or Z1. If we lost a drive, we would simply replace it and re-run backups.

According to the FreeBSD hardware compatibility list, the onboard Intel ESB2 SATA 3.0Gbps Controller isn't supported, but it seems to working fine. Also, the hardware compatibility list doesn't show support for the two onboard Intel 82563EB Single-Port Gigabit Ethernet Controllers, but they are both configured as part of Link Aggregation device and working fine as well. Again, this was purely for testing purposes and establishing a baseline. The intention is to install a Supermicro AOC-S2308L-l8i+ Supermicro 8-port SAS Controller - Serial ATA/600 - PCI Express 3.0 x8 (LSI 2308 chipset) to match the WDC 6Gb/s drives that are installed.

The system specs are:
Supermicro X7DVL-i mobo
2 - Intel Xeon Quad Core E5410 2.33GHz Processors
16GB Ram
4 - Western Digital WD30EFRX 3TB NAS hard drives

Obviously, we are interested primarily in write speed, since this NAS will be backing up about 6TB of data.


Thanks for any light you can shed on the situation.