Ram & HD Speed

[Bidule0hm]

Just a data point: I have a 8 drives RAID-Z3 and I was able to stream 3 HD movies to 3 devices and doing copies from and to the NAS without any problem. The CPU (an i3-4360) was under 20 % load.

 

[depasseg]

Just a data point: I have a 8 drives RAID-Z3 and I was able to stream 3 HD movies to 3 devices and doing copies from and to the NAS without any problem. The CPU (an i3-4360) was under 20 % load.

Cifs share?

 

[Bidule0hm]

Yep ;)

And MiniDLNA for the streams.

 

[AVB]

With my old box (3.5Ghz 6 core AMD, eight 3TB drives in raidZ2) running cifs share I also was able to stream full blu-ray iso to 3 different screens simultaneously over a 1Gb network in my house. As a disclaimer I never did it for 3 full 2hr movies but just to test to see if it could do it. I do 2 simultaneously quite regularly though. With the new box even though the (dual) CPU speed is lower at 3 Ghz it still can do 3 at once but I have A LOT more horsepower under the hood now.

 

[Wallybanger]

Ok, thanks guys, those are pretty good benchmarks. @Bidule0hm, it sounds like your system is pretty much exactly what I want to build except I'll step up to something that can do 64gb of ram some time in the future.
Is the CPU load indicative of max data throughput? Is it possible that the HDDs could be approaching max IO while the CPU isn't being fully utilized or would you see the CPU go to 100%?

 

[Bidule0hm]

My bottleneck is by far my network, if I had a 10G network the bottleneck would probably be the CPU and/or the drives ;)

 

[Wallybanger]

My bottleneck is by far my network, if I had a 10G network the bottleneck would probably be the CPU and/or the drives ;)

Ok, that's good to know. So, for future-proofing for 10G, do you think it would be a good idea to go with 7200rpm drives?

 

[Bidule0hm]

No, 7200 RPM drives don't do much and they eat more power so they're also more difficult to keep cool. If you want speed you need striped mirrors, or at least multiple RAID-Zx striped together ;)