Issues copying/importing data to ZFS, Import, Mount and Rsync, all methods freeze my system

[baumer28]

Asrock 970 Extreme 3
AMD 8320 Black 8 Core
32 Gig Patriot DDR3 1866MHz Viper III
(3) WD Red 4 TB
(1) WD Black 1 TB

Good afternoon, I have been struggling with getting any sort of data to import to FreeNas. I installed a bare metal install of FreeNAS-11.2-U5. The RAM is brand new and tested with Memtest with no issues. I am guessing this might be a hardware issue as it seems the issues only occur with zfs specifically, but I was hoping someone could help me troubleshoot. Can anyone recommend some steps I can perform to monitor what might be causing this? Its almost as if the drive is running out of space(which cannot be possible as the data is 1TB at most) or the swap is filling up, but these are just guesses.

I really appreciate your time.

 

[melloa]

Although you posted some of your specs, I'd recommend you expand a little as you are experiencing issues copying the files to your server.

- NICs
- raidz configuration, status, etc.
- network tests to/from workstation/server (try iperf)
- pool performance (several posts out there with how-tos, including this one.

 

[baumer28]

One thing I should have mentioned, the file transfers are all local(the disk I am importing is connected to the system via sata3, same as all drives). I have tried importing the disk through the gui, mounting the drive and transfering the files using rsync.. Might be a dumb question but. I manually created a zfs pool outside of freenas using partedmagic boot usb, then created a zfs file system, mounted this file system locally. Then I set up an rsync -rv --stats --progress /files /zfs/mount and the system still freezes. Question, is this a common practice for file transfer to a zfs file system?

 

[baumer28]

Solved the problem, the freeze was due to rsync maxing out the disk IO. Adding ionice to rsync, I was able to complete the transfers sucessfully with out issue. Example ionice -c3 rsync -aSv /from/dir/. /to/dir/. Watching IO using iotop during the transfers. You can also add 'nice' to this command with priority flags. Note, ensure you test this before performing. Hope this might help others who might experience this issue.