Read/Write performance of RAIDZ1 and Z2

[Neocleous]

Hi all,

I am about to set up FreeNAS to store my media collection and personal files but I need decent read write performance over my LAN as my Plex server sometimes serves up to 5 streams.

I have 9 2TB disks which I am going to configure in either Z1 or Z2 (I have a backup of all the data on two external drives and I understand the risks with RAID 5 and RAIDZ1)

I'm looking for the best way to configure the drives for the best balance between performance and redundancy as I would like around 100MB/s read, write isn't as important as I will only be dumping the data to it once.

I should point out that Plex Media Server will not be running on the FreeNAS machine.

 

[Pheran]

100MB/sec read is not a problem at all for 9 spindles - I get way more than that with RAIDZ2 across 8 spindles. Assuming that the rest of your hardware is up to snuff for FreeNAS, your read speed will be bottlenecked around 110MB/sec by your gigabit ethernet port, unless you are implementing 10Gbps. If I were you I'd just use RAIDZ2.

 

[Neocleous]

No I'm using Gigabit, so that being maxed out is fine. What are the write speeds like with RAIDZ2?

 

[Pheran]

No I'm using Gigabit, so that being maxed out is fine. What are the write speeds like with RAIDZ2?

With that number of spindles it should be higher than your gigabit port can support. I can do something like 500 MB/sec on my server (over 10Gbps), and that might not even be the limit because I suspect I'm maxing out the SSD on the other end of the copy.

 

[Neocleous]

Thanks for the reply, that's exactly what I needed to know