Choosing a NAS?

[alsenior]

nope raid 5 over 3 disks

[Jay]

very nice.

[alsenior]

very nice.

did you see the update. Correct drive this time

[spoon_]

did you see the update. Correct drive this time

Can you re-run your tests for SMB with 4GB files please?

We don't want cache getting in a way

[jim]

Openfiler was giving me a bit of GPT related grief, so for the moment I've switched over to Server 2008 R2, just running a 3.7TB span for the moment. Hopefully that will do the trick until June when I'll have more time to re-jig everything.

Out of interest, which hardware RAID levels are supported out of the box by the N36L? Some of the material I found last night indicated it was only 0 and 1, which sounds a bit rubbish. Not necessarily surprising, but definitely a bit rubbish

[alsenior]

Can you re-run your tests for SMB with 4GB files please?

We don't want cache getting in a way

Any recommended benchmarks. Atto only goes up to 2 GB

[spoon_]

Any recommended benchmarks. Atto only goes up to 2 GB

That should be sufficient assuming your RAID doesn't have that much cache

Crystal Disk Mark seems like a good tool though.

[badass]

Openfiler was giving me a bit of GPT related grief, so for the moment I've switched over to Server 2008 R2, just running a 3.7TB span for the moment. Hopefully that will do the trick until June when I'll have more time to re-jig everything.

Out of interest, which hardware RAID levels are supported out of the box by the N36L? Some of the material I found last night indicated it was only 0 and 1, which sounds a bit rubbish. Not necessarily surprising, but definitely a bit rubbish

Correct. RAID-0 and RAID-1 only.
You cannot use the onboard RAID with Vmware ESXi but it does wirk with it in AHCI mode.

[jim]

Okay, great. I was mulling over a hybrid RAID 10 of some sort, hence the question, but I think I'm going to go for a RAID 6, as originally suggested by yourself and splash.

RAID 0 was making me feel edgy, so I bit the bullet and bought a stack more hard drives to get RAID 6 going.

[aidanjt]

If you're wondering about Linux software RAID performance:


That's RAID5 over 3x2TB WD Blacks.

[badass]

Running the following:
Windows XP workstation<--->ESXi4.1<--->iSCSI<--->Windows Server 2008 R2 iSCSI Target on sincle vCPU<--->Software (2008 R2) Mirrored pair of EagerZeroedthick 25 GB disks<--->HDD's in the server itself Via ESXi4.1U1

Sequential:
Read: 20MB/sec
Write: 20MB/sec
512K Random: the same
4K random read/write ~0.3 MB/Sec

Replace the Server 2008 R2 and iSCSI with FreeNAS and NFS
Sequential:
Read: ~30MB/sec
Write: ~17MB/sec
512K Random ~same as above
4K random read/write: Around 1MB/Sec

Replace the Server 2008 R2 and iSCSI with Nexentartor 3.0.0 community and NFS
Sequential:
Read: ~30MB/sec
Write: ~30MB/Sec
512K random: as above
4k random read/write: around 4MB/Sec. I suspect the ARC was really kicking in there.

Openfiler was showing more like Nexentastor figures.


Problems
Nexentastor:
3.0.0:
Downloaded the virtual appliance.
Using IE8 to access the web interface crashes the whole appliance, takes the disks offline and it sometimes loses data. This is a known bug it seems
Performance was very variable. Using Storage Vmotion was often enough to crash the appliance, taking all disks offline. They usually reappeared a while after it had failed. Could also cause the appliance to lose data.
Tried updating via internet. Didn't work.
Downloaded 3.0.4 and tried to update. Had to mess around with text files and work a whole load of pointless stuff out so did a fresh install to a new VM.
Went through setup, went to config webpage and got some stupid proxy error. Seems not uncommon based on their own forums.
At this point, I decided it was just so unbelievable poorly made I couldn't be bothered trying to fix this broken product any further.

FreeNAS 8.0RC5
Simulated a drive failure to test a ZFS mirror on it.
Everything worked fine but there was no way to tell the drive had failed. Gave up.

Openfiler 2.99:
Couldn't even create a mirror. Was fine to create RAID-0 but that wasn't what I wanted. Gave up.

Windows Server 2008 R2
Seems to work OK. Haven't tested drive failure yet. Really easy to set up. Performance very poor.


Apologies for the completely unscientific setup. I have been doing this with limited time and with optimisation, I'm sure the figures can be much higher. Using SMB on Nexentastor, a large file trnasfer started at 4MB/sec, then kept climbing until it hit over 50MB/sec. Also, I was so annoyed at Nexentastor and the huge amount of time spent trying to work around the extremely poor design/testing I had little patience with the other options. I'm sure if I had spent the time of FreeNAS or Openfiler that I had on Nexentastor, I would probably have a nice working system on either by now.

[alsenior]

This is a 3 drive raid 5 with slow ass seagate lp drives



this is with 5 Wd-re2gp's

[Jay]

thats nuts. How can a 3 drive RAID 5 array get rates like that!

What switch are you using?

[aidanjt]

I created mine with Ubuntu's installer, I believe it uses something like this: "mdadm --create /dev/md0 --metadata=0.90 -l5 -c64 -n3 /dev/sd{a,b,c}1".

[badass]

I must be glutton for punishment. I'm downloading Freenas 8.0 release right now

[Splash]

Just as an FYI for those who have been watching this thread and kicking themselves for missing the deal: it's been extended (again!) until the end of May. (source)