Category Archives: ZFS

FreeNAS tuning and benchmarking

To be able to trully test the performance of the drives in a NAS I need a proper tool that runs on the NAS unit itself. I’ve seen a lot bench-marking done with bonnie++ but installing it in FreeNAS wasn’t straightforward.
First you need to install a jail, then you compile the program from source. FreeNAS is set up quite nicely to do this, so it’s not too much trouble, but figuring out this info took some time.
Some links for future reference:
https://blog.pivotal.io/labs/labs/high-performing-mid-range-nas-server
https://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas_jails.html
http://louwrentius.com/74tb-diy-nas-based-on-zfs-on-linux.html

ZFS performance

Playing with ZFS (and FreeNAS) again.
I was wondering which way I should setup the RAID array for maximum throughput (speed), and with a bit of searching came across a fantastic article (found here)

The author does many comparisons of RAID 10, and 5 (raidz1), 6 (raidz2), for up to 24 drives to show how performance scales with # of drives as well as which raid is chosen.

Also since ZFS offers realtime compression, there are comparisons of with compression on (both lz4 and lzjb) and no compression.

Excellent read and great reference. Saves me a bunch of time.

For my 4 x 1TB drives, I’m going with a raidz1 (RAID5) with compression turned on to lz4. I can’t wait to see what kind of throughput I can get out of these disks.
Sadly I will be limited by the 1Gb ethernet connection at around 100MB/s transfer speeds.

I could always bond a couple of 1Gb connections to increase the network capability….

ZFS for home storage, and backups

I took the plunge and moved part of my home storage to FreeNAS using ZFS to manage the files on it.

Now comes the tough part of managing a file system I know nothing about how to use (which on paper seems excellent).

This list of articles/blogs may help:

A Home Fileserver using ZFS