My FreeNAS box and it's performance.

[TheOtis]

So we don't have a server section and this isn't exactly a troubleshooting question, so I'm assuming this would be the correct forum for this. I know we don't get many server/networking threads on here, so I'm not expecting a ton of responses....

Over the past couple of months I threw together this guy...

AMD Athlon X2 4800+
An HP AM2+ mobo I traded a guy old laptop RAM and HDD for.
2GB of OCZ DDR2 800 @ 4-4-4-12
2x 1TB Western Digital Blues
SATAIII PCI-E 4x controller card (attached to a PCI-E 16x slot)
Kingston DT160 4GB (FreeNAS embedded 7.2.5543 installed on it)
Thermaltake 430W PSU
Thermaltake WingMA case

The parts that were purchased new for this were the hard drives, USB flash drive, SATAIII controller card, and case. Didn't look for a SATA III card in particular, just ended up being the one my local parts store had. This build was really just to get a good base for a file server where I wouldn't need to be in it hundreds of dollars and a starting point to build on over time when money allows for it.

My infrastructure (I cringe calling it that, as it's weak sauce), is a Netgear Wireless Draft N router and a Netgear 5 port gigabit switch. Modem to router, switch to router, server and computers to switch.

The hard drives are set up in a ZFS storage pool in a RAID1 with a stand by time of ten minutes.

On writes, I can get bursts up to 40-50MB/s with sustained around 30-35MB/s. Reads are around 50-60MB/s burts and 30-40MB/s sustained.

For a consumer grade NAS and switch, are these acceptable reads/writes? As far as I understand, the CPU and RAM I have should be fine, would their be any need to upgrade to something newer? I know they're only WD Blue's, but would I need to go with a different switch and a hardware RAID5 array with WD Blacks or SAS to see a big bump in performance? Raptors aren't an option as I'll need to move to 2TB disks in the next year.

It's not that I'm dissatisfied with the performance, I would just like to see my file transfers to be more towards the 100MB/s mark. Or is that just a dream and I'd need fiber in home to see those transfer rates?

 

[lz.steve]

Geez, 10 mins of typing only to screw up the post.

I can give you my experience.

I have a Qnap II with 2 2TB Hitachi 3GPS mirrored drives.
I have an iMac with a 2TB USB2.0 Hitachi attached to it, and my LAN is a GB switch.

I can create a 1GB file on the iMac as follows:
SJFiMAC:~ stevefer$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=./testfile bs=1m count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes transferred in 9.966318 secs (107737064 bytes/sec) 107MB/sec
So yes you can hit those speeds but that is internal connections.

On the QNAP:
[/share/MD0_DATA] # time dd if=/dev/zero of=./testfile bs=1M count=1024 20 MB/sec

1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out

real 0m54.094s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m28.230s
Yes, 5x slower or why it's faster to simply retype the data!

On the external USB drive:
SJFiMAC:HItachiTimeMachine stevefer$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=./testfile bs=1m count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes transferred in 37.057392 secs (28975105 bytes/sec) 28.9 MB/sec

real 0m37.432s
user 0m0.002s
sys 0m0.852s

Faster than the Qnap again.

I then transferred a 14G file from my daughter's PC to the iMac:
Transferred 13.47GB file via finder from Rachel's PC to iMac in 3:38 or 66.3MB/sec

Transferred the same file back to the Qnap:
Transferred the same file from finder to Qnap and it took days, well 23 minutes. Yes, 23 f***ing minutes!
A blistering 10.5MB/sec

Random thoughts:
The Qnap is several years old
You might get better speeds, but 100MB/sec could be a reach.
I'm not using jumbo frames (Mr Jobs decides iMac (i5 '09) users should not have that option)
The fact that the Qnap could not create the files internally as fast as the iMac, tells me the processor is the issue.
The network was not the bottleneck since I got up to 66Mbs on a theoretical limit of 125MB/s

SO, that is why my lightroom imports are so slow, and why I have spent all day researching NAS solutions and hitting this thread.

YMMV.

Steve

 

[TheOtis]

Wow, that was a better response than I had hoped for haha, thanks for letting me know what your experience, I appreciate it!

I think I've determined it's because of Samba. From what I've come to understand is it delivers lack luster transfer rates. Only a third of my bandwidth is being used. I'm going to try transfering via SSH or possibly iSCSI if I felt like spending a morning looking into it and setting it up. I do plan on going with a different switch relatively soon though, as it was only $40 and I'd like one that would allow me to learn a bit more about routers and play around with it.