Large File Storage Build

[wayne_sw]

I have searched around but haven't came up with a particular guide for what I'm wanting to do.

I have a T610 server with H700 controller. I have yet to buy drives for it yet but I am curious, has anyone seen a guide for setting up a NAS box strictly for large file storage? I've read through a lot of the tuning guides and best practice pages but they all seem to assume the files are small documents/music/movies etc. I'm not sure if it makes a difference storing large files, just thought I'd ask.

We store system images, usually Macrium or Acronis system images, and archive them off to tape back after a month or two. Most images range from 25 to 100+ GB's in a single file.

 

[Dice]

There are some tweaks that can be made in this regard, there was a thread about it a year ago or so.
I don't recall much further. Mayhaps @Bidule0hm does.

 

[Bidule0hm]

Well, small or large files, it doesn't make a lot of (if any) difference AFAIK.

The only thing I can see related to that is the lost space on misaligned pools you can't really recover if the files are very small (think kB) but no problem with larger files, see this thread for more info.

 

[Dice]

there was a thread about it a year ago or so.

...rehhh, would need another year to that counter.
Where the hell did that year go?

 

[Chris Moore]

I have searched around but haven't came up with a particular guide for what I'm wanting to do.

I have a T610 server with H700 controller. I have yet to buy drives for it yet but I am curious, has anyone seen a guide for setting up a NAS box strictly for large file storage? I've read through a lot of the tuning guides and best practice pages but they all seem to assume the files are small documents/music/movies etc. I'm not sure if it makes a difference storing large files, just thought I'd ask.

We store system images, usually Macrium or Acronis system images, and archive them off to tape back after a month or two. Most images range from 25 to 100+ GB's in a single file.

You will need to replace the H700, if I recall correctly, that is a hardware RAID card.
Were you thinking of connecting disk shelves?
How much storage do you require?

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[Mirfster]

You will need to replace the H700, if I recall correctly, that is a hardware RAID card.

Agreed, that card has got to go. Need to get a real HBA.

 

[Chris Moore]

Most images range from 25 to 100+ GB's in a single file.

That isn't really very big. I wouldn't expect you to need any optimization for that. Small files present the biggest problem with regard to speed reading and writing them, but files that large would be pretty easy and I have thousands of large files 600GB and up on my NAS with no difficulty.

Here are some guides that will help you get started:

Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

Terminology and Abbreviations Primer
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/terminology-and-abbreviations-primer.28174/

FreeNAS® Quick Hardware Guide
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/freenas®-quick-hardware-guide.7/

Hardware Recommendations Guide Rev 1e) 2017-05-06
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/hardware-recommendations-guide.12/

If you have questions, please ask so we have the opportunity to help.

 

[wayne_sw]

You will need to replace the H700, if I recall correctly, that is a hardware RAID card.
Were you thinking of connecting disk shelves?
How much storage do you require?

No particular amount of storage space required. We currently have a T300 with four 500GB zfs mirrored drives. I just bought four 4TB deskstar NAS drives and am planning to mirror them for 8TB of storage.
No disk shelves, its a tower model with hot swap bays.

Agreed, that card has got to go. Need to get a real HBA.

What is the downfall of using the the card? I was playing around the other day with some old drives and set them up individually in RAID0 in the controller.


I was testing with Macrium making a backup image of my workstation to the test server. Macrium reported it wrote 846 Mb/s and created a 41GB in 10m 41s. I just did a quick setup of an individual pool/dataset with a single 1TB WD Enterprise drive.

Chris, thanks for the links. I will read up on them this weekend.

 

[wayne_sw]

Is there a standard for measuring efficiency and throughput from a workstation to the server so we can compare apples to apples?
Here are my rudimentary notes on the data transfer:
All of these are done by making Macrium backups to the server

3620 C Drive Backup to 610NAS w/perc 6/I = Read 1.2 Gb/s Write 846 Mb/s 41GB @ 10:21
3620 C Drive Backup to 610NAS w/H700 with two 1TB in single pool = Read 1.3 Gb/s Write 840 Mb/s 41GB @ 10:20
3620 C Drive Backup to 610NAS w/H700 in single pool/single dataset config = Read 1.3 Gb/s Write 847 Mb/s 41GB @ 9:53
3620 C Drive Backup to T300 = Read 1.1 Gb/s Write 655.2 Mb/s 41GB @ 11:36
3620 C Drive Backup to 610NAS w/H700 in single pool/dataset config with 1mb element stripe in raid controller = Read 1.2 Gb/s Write 844.7 Mb/s 41GB @ 10:13
3620 C Drive Backup to 310NAS w/perc 6/I = Read 1.2 Gb/s Write 845 Mb/s 41GB @ 10:21

So I guess my question is, am I going to get much better than what I have going already? It doesn't seem to matter what server or hard drive I use. In one of my tests I used a generic Toshiba 1TB 5400 drive and got the same speeds as a 1TB WD Enterprise 7200 drive. Am I at a bandwidth limit rather than being limited by hardware?

 

[Chris Moore]

The reason for the SAS HBA is FreeNAS being able to get full control of the drives for health monitoring. It is not about the access speed.

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