jgreco
Resident Grinch
- Joined
- May 29, 2011
- Messages
- 18,680
Yeah, that's basically going to be a recipe for unhappiness.
Fundamentally it is kind of a shock... most users are used to moving from one OS and/or filesystem to another and seeing only modest differences. Many filesystems were designed back in the day when 32MB (read: MB not GB) was a large RAM system and 1TB was an unthinkably large amount of disk. Filesystems usually didn't try to do things like additional checksum protection of data, adding a complex volume manager layer, or rely on large amounts of cache being present.
So it is a shock to swap in ZFS and suddenly you have this big heavy beast of an enterprise grade high performance filesystem ... and you were naturally expecting that it was going to be just that ... super high performance. But ZFS isn't magic. It's an enterprise grade high performance filesystem, yes. But the way it does that is to eat CPU and memory resources. Calculating checksums and performing RAID parity calculations isn't computationally free. This is likely to be the largest, heaviest footprint filesystem you've ever used. And FreeNAS itself has been tuned to work well on larger platforms, which kind of squeezes small guys even harder.
Most of us here understand the frustration. FreeNAS isn't necessarily a good choice if you're looking to repurpose old hardware into a high performance NAS. Most of the time, it is at best a compromise. We feel your pain.
Fundamentally it is kind of a shock... most users are used to moving from one OS and/or filesystem to another and seeing only modest differences. Many filesystems were designed back in the day when 32MB (read: MB not GB) was a large RAM system and 1TB was an unthinkably large amount of disk. Filesystems usually didn't try to do things like additional checksum protection of data, adding a complex volume manager layer, or rely on large amounts of cache being present.
So it is a shock to swap in ZFS and suddenly you have this big heavy beast of an enterprise grade high performance filesystem ... and you were naturally expecting that it was going to be just that ... super high performance. But ZFS isn't magic. It's an enterprise grade high performance filesystem, yes. But the way it does that is to eat CPU and memory resources. Calculating checksums and performing RAID parity calculations isn't computationally free. This is likely to be the largest, heaviest footprint filesystem you've ever used. And FreeNAS itself has been tuned to work well on larger platforms, which kind of squeezes small guys even harder.
Most of us here understand the frustration. FreeNAS isn't necessarily a good choice if you're looking to repurpose old hardware into a high performance NAS. Most of the time, it is at best a compromise. We feel your pain.