Poor hard drive performance

[virtual-liquid]

I installed freenas 8, and after a few initial settings. I had 5 HD's up and running. I then moved all of my data from one of my 1tb (ntfs) drives to a 300gb (zfs) freshly made drive with no problem, I used the command cp -v -r /mnt/tools1 /mnt/tools2, the transfer took about 45 minutes or so. I then formatted my 1tb as a zfs drive, and got it set back up. Then proceeded to move the 300gb drive ( tools2) back to the 1tb drive (tools1 ) same command but reverse cp -v -r /mnt/tools2 /mnt/tools1 .. but this time it would come to a screeching hault after a few gigs of file transfter, and crawl to less then a few kb's a second. I tried multiple ways to fix this with no success. Any ideas on what I might be doing wrong.

just a few things I noticed, the files it seems to freeze on each time are different, but are always a small file, although one time it was a 40gb file. The network connectivity seems to stop working as well, I can not access it via my mapped drives, but the webgui is still working, but slow.

 

[joeschmuck]

To help we need some basic information, I wish everyone would include this info as it makes assistance a little bit easier at times.

Which version of FreeNAS are you running?
List your system specs (RAM, CPU+speed, motherboard model, any interface cards, etc...)
Your hard drives and their connection to the computer and how are they arranged as ZFS pools

Give as much as possible.

My first thought is your Swap file is half used, maybe you have a small amount of RAM. ZFS requires a lot of RAM to work well unfortunately.

-Joe

 

[virtual-liquid]

Ok, yes sorry was in a rush and forgot some info..
I just took scren shots, hope its ok.

the hard drive are setup in a non raid format, I did not do raidz or anything like that

my hard drive that is 230gb (tools2) is IDE connected to motherboard, my hard drive that is 1tb (tools) is sata also connected to mobo, the others that I have are not relevant as they are connected to a IDE pci controller, and are still empty or not in use (tools4)

system info

hard drive

hard drive usage

Hopefully this info will help, let me know what else I might be able to tell you.

 

[virtual-liquid]

Also, I am going to run memcheck to see If i have some bad ram, you gave me an idea earlier with your first post.

 

[virtual-liquid]

forgot this.

 

[joeschmuck]

I'm not an expert on ZFS but I'm gaining ground. I believe your issue is the amount of RAM you are running. For FreeNAS 8.x there is a minimum recommended amount of 6GB. You only have 2.5GB.

I just don't think you have enough RAM to pull it off. If you are not looking to create ZFS raids and based on your limited RAM, I would recommend you create UFS formatted drives vice ZFS. Your speed would improve hand over fist. If you really want ZFS you should upgrade your RAM to 4GB minimum. Even doing that, transferring files within the machine between two different ZFS drives will still take longer than normal but it likely would not crash.

I know this isn't want you want to hear but I hope it helps. The only other thing I can think of is use the 32-bit version but I don't think that will help too much but it's worth a shot.

If someone else things I got this wrong, please chime in.

 

[virtual-liquid]

Honestly, I just want simple file storage, that is a bit better than what I was running.. Windows xp pro file sharing :( yuck ... ufs, zfs, ntfs, makes no difference to me. Thank you very much for your imput, I will try to convert things around to work with my hardware. I did run a memcheck on my pc, and it was 100% ok. So It is probably just a lack of memory.

 

[joeschmuck]

You can't really use NTFS on FreeNAS, it has minimal support and was only incorporated so people could migrate files from that format to UFS or ZFS. I recommend UFS for your situation unless you could expand your RAM.

Good Luck.

 

[virtual-liquid]

Due to my hardware constrictions, I have decided to switch to a different version, 0.7.5, I have it up and running for the most part, Ill move my questions to a freenas 7 forum for further assistance :) thank you much for all your help.