Hey all,
I'm about to pull the trigger on my new FreeNAS Mini, so I just want to check that, for my use case, it's a good system that will get decent speeds, be reliable, and generally be awesome. After some thought, I'm debating using the FreeNAS Mini as an ESXi datastore as well. Accordingly, to protect my data, I will make sure that the NFS shares are synchronous; to ensure adequate performance, I was going to include an SLOG (Intel 313 20GB SSD).
The ESXi host will also include some Seagate drives for local storage and backups, but its primary datastore will be on the FreeNAS host.
My understanding, based on research on the forums and judicious application of the search function, is the following:
- As a PCIe device, I can just attach this SSD to the FreeNAS Mini's spare slot.
- SLOG will not help with asynchronous writes, such as CIFS, or NFS shares set to asynch mode. Therefore, for SAMBA shares and Windows shares, it won't help at all. Although the Mini should be able to saturate Gigabit ethernet in that configuration anyway.
- With the SSD I mentioned above, on a FreeNAS Mini with 4x4gb WD Red drives in a RaidZ configuration, without an SLOG I will probably get 2-5mb a second. With the SLOG, I should be getting about 80mb/s through the GigE connection.
- Because my FreeNAS Mini will have 32gb of RAM, I should allocate no more than 4gb of the SSD to SLOG (8% of my system RAM). The rest will be L2ARC.
My conclusion is that the SLOG will greatly increase synchronous write performance. Read performance should be unaffected (or slightly boosted due to the L2ARC increase), largely because except for heavy use situations, it will be capped by the GigE connection.
This was going to be an after-purchase enhancement, if I do decide to make the FreeNAS box an ESXi host, that'll come later. It's optional. I just want to make sure that I've researched everything correctly and that my data is protected, but fast.
I'm about to pull the trigger on my new FreeNAS Mini, so I just want to check that, for my use case, it's a good system that will get decent speeds, be reliable, and generally be awesome. After some thought, I'm debating using the FreeNAS Mini as an ESXi datastore as well. Accordingly, to protect my data, I will make sure that the NFS shares are synchronous; to ensure adequate performance, I was going to include an SLOG (Intel 313 20GB SSD).
The ESXi host will also include some Seagate drives for local storage and backups, but its primary datastore will be on the FreeNAS host.
My understanding, based on research on the forums and judicious application of the search function, is the following:
- As a PCIe device, I can just attach this SSD to the FreeNAS Mini's spare slot.
- SLOG will not help with asynchronous writes, such as CIFS, or NFS shares set to asynch mode. Therefore, for SAMBA shares and Windows shares, it won't help at all. Although the Mini should be able to saturate Gigabit ethernet in that configuration anyway.
- With the SSD I mentioned above, on a FreeNAS Mini with 4x4gb WD Red drives in a RaidZ configuration, without an SLOG I will probably get 2-5mb a second. With the SLOG, I should be getting about 80mb/s through the GigE connection.
- Because my FreeNAS Mini will have 32gb of RAM, I should allocate no more than 4gb of the SSD to SLOG (8% of my system RAM). The rest will be L2ARC.
My conclusion is that the SLOG will greatly increase synchronous write performance. Read performance should be unaffected (or slightly boosted due to the L2ARC increase), largely because except for heavy use situations, it will be capped by the GigE connection.
This was going to be an after-purchase enhancement, if I do decide to make the FreeNAS box an ESXi host, that'll come later. It's optional. I just want to make sure that I've researched everything correctly and that my data is protected, but fast.
