Disk I/O write performance

[Vertex]

The situation is as follows. I got an old QNAP TS-459 Pro II (Raid 5) and I would like to make backups of some folders with rsync (compression turned off) to
my freshly installed TrueNAS-13.0-U3.1 instance. TrueNAS is running in a VM on a HP Proliant Microserver Gen8. The TrueNAS VM got
three virtual HDs 50/900/900 GB (physical 4 old HDs), in TrueNAS the 900GB HDs are mirrored. So far so good, the network speed looks
very good (s.screenshot)

but the disks write speed is awful low:

The TrueNAS VM got 8 GB memory and it is the only VM runnung on the server. When I started the backup, the disks where completely empty.
btw, the situation looks almost the same when I use samba.

It is pretty obvious, that the bottleneck is the disk, but I have no idea what I can do to improve the performance. The ZFS memory consumption seems pretty aggressiv.

I would be very happy if someone could point me in the right direction and give me some tuning tips - thank you in advance.

 

[Alecmascot]

The lan interface is in Megabits/second and the drives are in MegaBytes/second so it looks about right.

 

[jgreco]

TrueNAS CORE has a minimum memory requirement of 16GB. The system would likely go faster with more memory.

Also, not quite clear on how you are managing this trick on a Proliant Gen8 uServer. Please describe your hypervisor and setup, as it seems likely to be suboptimal. How did you pass thru the HDD controller?

 

[Davvo]

You want at least 16GB of RAM (especially for SCALE users btw).
Also why did you turn compression off? It's quite efficent.

Edit: looks like jgreco beat me.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Virtual HDDs are a no-no. You need to pass-through an HBA with HDDs attached to it into your VM.

More at https://www.truenas.com/community/t...ide-to-not-completely-losing-your-data.12714/

 

[Vertex]

@Alecmascot
Ups, you are right, I totally overlooked the different units Thank you,

@jgreco @Davvo
Mhm, that's bad, I thought I could give the old hardware a second life, at least for a while, but it turns out, that it does not make sense, it is too slow to be useful. TrueNAS looks pretty nice, I guess I am gonna put together some nice energy effiicient, and fast hardware for it.

@ChrisRJ
I know, it is just a temporary solution, I normally wouldn't run a NAS as virtual machine. The idea was to get familliar with TrueNAS.

Thank you very much for your quick response.

 

[jgreco]

Mhm, that's bad, I thought I could give the old hardware a second life, at least for a while, but it turns out, that it does not make sense, it is too slow to be useful.

I know there's a lot of bullchip YouTube junk about making your PC from 20 years ago into a NAS, but in practice there's a lot of issues with trying to do so.