Hi guys... FreeNAS/BSD n00b here, and diving straight in :)
My hardware profile is at the end...
I set up 5 x 2Tb drives as a single RAID-Z2 pool (played with 512K and 4096K formatting) and added the SSD as a cache drive... I was happy with the transfer rates...
I then set up a SCSI device extent using the whole ~5TB ZFS Volume.
My current server setup is an older MS Windows Home Server machine (not 2011) with about 8 x 1 and 1.5Tb drives using WHS drive extender.
I installed the Microsoft iSCSI initiator and set up a dedicated connection between the WHS and FreeNAS machines using the second gigabit NIC installed on both machines. Both NICs are autodetect, and no crossover cable was required -- and both connected at 1Gbps without issue.
WHS was then able to see the FreeNAS iSCSI target, and formatted it successfully...
As a test, I then used 'robocopy D:\Shares\Videos E:\FreeNAS\Videos /mir' (E:\ being the iSCSI target)
Now, here's my question --
With a network meter installed, I would only get a maximum write speed of about 47Mb/s for about 2-3 seconds, then it would bottom out down to 0Mb/s for a second before picking back up again...
Reading was much much worse -- in fact reading back what was written was resulting in a network transfer speed of around 10Mb/s... (I can't rule out the write speed of the WHS machine as it was reading the files from FreeNAS, so I'll deal with this issue separately)
I haven't had much of a chance to play/tweak/investigate -- I only started playing with FreeNAS last night -- but are these typical figures/behaviours?
Do any of you guys have similar setups? What kind of performance should I expect from a dedicated gigabit connection with a low-overhead protocol like iSCSI?
Where would you recommend I direct my attention first?
Thanks
Dave
-------------------------------------
FreeNAS 8.2.0-Beta4-X64
HP Microserver N40L (8Gb ECC RAM)
2 x 2Tb WD-EARS (4k sectors)
2 x 2Tb Hitachi
1 x 2Tb Seagate Barracuda
1 x 60Gb Corsair SSD
Koutech IO-PESA111 PCIe SATA/eSATA 2 channel controller
Intel Gigabit CT PCIe Network Adapter EXPI9301CTBLK
My hardware profile is at the end...
I set up 5 x 2Tb drives as a single RAID-Z2 pool (played with 512K and 4096K formatting) and added the SSD as a cache drive... I was happy with the transfer rates...
I then set up a SCSI device extent using the whole ~5TB ZFS Volume.
My current server setup is an older MS Windows Home Server machine (not 2011) with about 8 x 1 and 1.5Tb drives using WHS drive extender.
I installed the Microsoft iSCSI initiator and set up a dedicated connection between the WHS and FreeNAS machines using the second gigabit NIC installed on both machines. Both NICs are autodetect, and no crossover cable was required -- and both connected at 1Gbps without issue.
WHS was then able to see the FreeNAS iSCSI target, and formatted it successfully...
As a test, I then used 'robocopy D:\Shares\Videos E:\FreeNAS\Videos /mir' (E:\ being the iSCSI target)
Now, here's my question --
With a network meter installed, I would only get a maximum write speed of about 47Mb/s for about 2-3 seconds, then it would bottom out down to 0Mb/s for a second before picking back up again...
Reading was much much worse -- in fact reading back what was written was resulting in a network transfer speed of around 10Mb/s... (I can't rule out the write speed of the WHS machine as it was reading the files from FreeNAS, so I'll deal with this issue separately)
I haven't had much of a chance to play/tweak/investigate -- I only started playing with FreeNAS last night -- but are these typical figures/behaviours?
Do any of you guys have similar setups? What kind of performance should I expect from a dedicated gigabit connection with a low-overhead protocol like iSCSI?
Where would you recommend I direct my attention first?
Thanks
Dave
-------------------------------------
FreeNAS 8.2.0-Beta4-X64
HP Microserver N40L (8Gb ECC RAM)
2 x 2Tb WD-EARS (4k sectors)
2 x 2Tb Hitachi
1 x 2Tb Seagate Barracuda
1 x 60Gb Corsair SSD
Koutech IO-PESA111 PCIe SATA/eSATA 2 channel controller
Intel Gigabit CT PCIe Network Adapter EXPI9301CTBLK
