Performance issues: Configuration, or Hardware?

[Pavocracy]

Hello All,

I am looking for some guidance around the performance issues I am having with my truenas core machine. I am currently running version 12.0-U8.1. This is running on old consumer hardware, specifically a Gigabyte motherboard with a Intel Core i7 930 CPU and 24gb of DDR3 non ecc ram and some LSI 9211-8i cards. As for the configuration, its more or less out of the box settings.

Given that it is old hardware and just on gigabit Ethernet, I did not put any effort into trying to optimize for performance, except for the fact that when I was setting up my pool, I used mirrored vdevs with my WD red 5400rpm drives, firstly because I want to be able to expand the pool as I buy more drives, and secondly because I had read around that it seems to be the most recommended setup for pools in the community.

However, I am getting far less speed out of this as I had imagined I would (unless I am falling into the dreaded speed measurement trap, I thought these drives could do much better even just on their own). Writing to the NAS, truenas reports a speed of 20-25 MiB/s, and coping from the NAS, windows reports 10 MB/s. Is this what you would expect for the given information above? I thought the drives would be capable of much more, and I also thought that mirrored vdevs increase the speed per mirror, because TrueNAS writes to all of the mirrors at once?

If this does seem to suggest a problem, what are the steps I need to take to try and identify where my bottleneck is?

 

[Samuel Tai]

What model Red drives do you have, and how full is your pool?

 

[Pavocracy]

I can't seem to edit the post. Quick additions/corrections: I meant am I falling into the unit of measurement trap around the speed. The pool is setup with SMB. And I was confused about the speed difference testing, both cases I was writing to the NAS not copying. the 25MiB/s was writing from my linux machine, and the 10MB/s was writing from my windows machine.

@Samuel Tai I have these: https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-red-sata-hdd#WD40EFAX

 

[Pavocracy]

Also the pool is not quite half full

 

[Davvo]

What is your exact motherboard? Could be a realtek nic, which is prone to similar issues.

 

[Samuel Tai]

Your Red disks are SMR, which are known to have poor performance with ZFS.

Update: WD Red SMR Drive Compatibility with ZFS

Thanks to the FreeNAS community, we uncovered and reported on a ZFS compatibility issue with some capacities (6TB and under) of WD Red drives that use SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) technology. Most HDDs use CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) technology which works well with ZFS. Below is...

www.truenas.com