BUILD Onboard NIC

[swbartley]

I have a crappy internal transfer speed as I'm using the on board NIC on my supermicro x8sil-F and I need a recommendation. I read that intel would be the better choice however there are a lot of server cards to pick from and and I don't see the difference between a $100-$300+ NIC besides the number of ports. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Rand]

Hm...
Dual Intel® 82574L Gigabit Ethernet Controllers

Those shouldnt be *crappy* even if onboard?
And usually any Intel Gigabit adapter would be ok even the cheap ones; I would recommend to examine the issue more closely though before shelling out lots of money.

 

[joeschmuck]

How do you know it's the NIC? I am asking because I'm sure you would rather not spend your money on a NIC and find out you gained nothing.
1) How did you determine your transfer speeds and what are they?
2) List your hardware ans your pool configuration.
As for spending money on a NIC, you could buy a $30 Intel NIC that plug into one of your slots, no need to spend a ton of money.

 

[swbartley]

Hm...
Dual Intel® 82574L Gigabit Ethernet Controllers

Those shouldnt be *crappy* even if onboard?
And usually any Intel Gigabit adapter would be ok even the cheap ones; I would recommend to examine the issue more closely though before shelling out lots of money.

I don't have both LAN ports connected I do have my IPMI connected and 1 LAN port.

 

[swbartley]

How do you know it's the NIC? I am asking because I'm sure you would rather not spend your money on a NIC and find out you gained nothing.
1) How did you determine your transfer speeds and what are they?
2) List your hardware ans your pool configuration.
As for spending money on a NIC, you could buy a $30 Intel NIC that plug into one of your slots, no need to spend a ton of money.

I verified my transfer speed when I was moving files and the speed was 800 kb/sec
supermicro x8sil-f
intel Xeon 2.4 GHz
16GB ECC Ram
(3) 2TB WD Red RaidZ
HighPoint 3540
FreeNAS-9.2.1.2

 

[Rand]

I don't have both LAN ports connected I do have my IPMI connected and 1 LAN port.

Have you disabled IPMI traffic sharing to the non IPMI ports? That is a known reason for bad performance (ie set to IPMI interface only)

I verified my transfer speed when I was moving files and the speed was 800 kb/sec

So how does that verify that none of your drives are faulty?
Or that you have tons of ECC errors?

Have you run iperf to test the raw network speed?
Whats your client's spec/nic? Is it affecting all clients?

 

[gpsguy]

Are you mixing hardware RAID (HighPoint 3540) with ZFS? With 6 onboard SATA connections, you'd be better off using them instead. Search the manual (.pdf) for "hardware RAID" and see why it's not recommended.

If you need additional ports for future expansion, pick up an IBM M1015 ($100 on ebay) and flash it to IT mode.

In addition to Rand's question, do all your network connections support gigabit ethernet? If yes, connect a client computer directly to the server and run your performance tests.

Hopefully you're not doing this wirelessly. If so, lousy performance is the norm.

Given that you are using 9.2.1.2, I'd upgrade it. The developers were building 9.2.1.4.1 last night.

 

[swbartley]

Have you disabled IPMI traffic sharing to the non IPMI ports? That is a known reason for bad performance (ie set to IPMI interface only)


So how does that verify that none of your drives are faulty?
Or that you have tons of ECC errors?

Have you run iperf to test the raw network speed?
Whats your client's spec/nic? Is it affecting all clients?

The IPMI feature is not installed on my freenas to configure.

Excuse my responses but I'm a little new to freenas but I wasn't assuming after a week with a brand new install with all this new hardware that I would have faulty drivers and ECC errors as im learning this stuff on the fly.:(

I have not run iperf to test my speed however my nic is a 3Com 3c200-T. I do have other devices but there's nothing for them to access yet I dumping all my data from my main computer to the NAS

 

[swbartley]

Are you mixing hardware RAID (HighPoint 3540) with ZFS? With 6 onboard SATA connections, you'd be better off using them instead. Search the manual (.pdf) for "hardware RAID" and see why it's not recommended.

If you need additional ports for future expansion, pick up an IBM M1015 ($100 on ebay) and flash it to IT mode.

In addition to Rand's question, do all your network connections support gigabit ethernet? If yes, connect a client computer directly to the server and run your performance tests.

Hopefully you're not doing this wirelessly. If so, lousy performance is the norm.

Given that you are using 9.2.1.2, I'd upgrade it. The developers were building 9.2.1.4.1 last night.

I did not do a hardware RAID but I am running ZFS however I plan on installing 16 HDs so what I did was look at what would be compatible from the FreeBSD website before I made the purchase. I didn't want to buy two RAID cards if I could buy one.

Yes all of my connections support gigabit ethernet but I am not doing this wireless. I will update freenas as I just noticed the update yesterday.

 

[joeschmuck]

There is a lot to consider for a speed test but do not assume you have a hardware failure just yet. You need to know your network speed capability to ensure it's not a bottleneck, test the internal performance of your FreeNAS machine, and then perform some external speed tests. My first suggestion would be to do a dd test...

This test will tell you how well your internal speed is. The results shown below match up with my SATA II drives. Please post your results in code brackets. The test took me about 5 minutes, your time will vary.

Code:

    dd if=/dev/zero of=tmp.dat bs=2048k count=50k
    51200+0 records in
    51200+0 records out
    107374182400 bytes transferred in 336.745898 secs (318858175 bytes/sec)
   
    dd of=/dev/zero if=tmp.dat bs=2048k count=50k
    51200+0 records in
    51200+0 records out
    107374182400 bytes transferred in 287.611204 secs (373331014 bytes/sec)

 

[Rand]

The IPMI feature is not installed on my freenas to configure.

IPMI - Its a BIOS setting:)
Your 3com NIC - i assume in the client? That would be a possible upgrade as that card seems to be quite old - found a negative review on Amazon from 2006;)
If the other tests (Joe's) look ok run iperf and check your network speed.