FreeNas HDDs speed vs hardware RAID SDDs

[cirss]

Hi FreeNAS community :) Would like to share my storage experience: hardware RAID SSDs vs FreeNAS old rust spinning SATA HDDs....

Hardware and soft used:

1) 4 years old, everyday in use HP ML350p Gen8 server, 2xXeon 2630v2, 64GB RAM, with 420i raid 1GB cache raid controller, configured: 2x240GB SSDs as RAID1 (drive C: in screen shots) + 4x240GB SSDs, as RAID10 (drive S: in screen shots), Win 2012R2, hardware cost ~1300 eur vs,

2) 10 years old backup server IMB x3650 M1, 2xXeon 5450, 48GB RAM, 6x2TB Seagate SATA 7.2k rpms HDDs, as RAIDZ x3 + M1015 flash to IT mode SAS/SATA HUB, FreeNAS 11.0 U4 (drive X: in screen shots), cost ~400 eur

Test file size 2GB and 500MB. Connection between servers QLE2462 2x4Gbps fibre channel.

Comments are welcome...

 

[kdragon75]

Yeah... 5218 MB/s = 41,744 mb/s so how did you get 41gb/s from two 4gb fibre channel interfaces? Even the 1474MB/s = 11+gb/s. Smells like some local caching... Still interesting.

 

[cirss]

There is a 1GB raid cache on local SSDs for windows machine. The idea was to show that old server with FreeNAS and HDDs keeps up quite well with much modern hardware with SSDs windows server. For example, if file is above raid cache size then difference is tiny, and even better on remote FreeNAS HDDs. Of course FreeNAS also do caching in arc, but in real life conditions there no much difference, except cost. Pic 1 (c: local SSD) v.s Pic 3 (x: remote HDD).

 

[kdragon75]

I see, I thought both setups were running FreeNAS. Yeah this does a decent job of showing what FreeNAS can do with "low end" hardware.