4K drives in 8.0-RELEASE-amd64

[TravisT]

Just set up a VMWare FreeNAS box after using a solaris build for a little over a year. So far I'm very happy with the performance compared to the solaris box I was running.

I'm not a storage expert, but I'm using the 4k sector WD drives (3x 2TB) in a raidz pool. I just read that the 4k drives are not supported in the release I'm using. Because I'm using vmware, the drives were formatted individually with 8M blocks into vmdk files, then presented to FreeNAS as that. Should I consider upgrading to the beta build to better utilize the 4k drives? The performance is considerably better than the solaris box I was using, but if there is more performance to be had I'd be interested in moving that direction.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

 

[jenksdrummer]

Myself, I am using 4 WD20EARS drives (2TB advanced format 4K drives) - I'm using the jumper on pins 7 and 8 and they work fine - this is an "older OS" compatability setting for these drives.

FreeNAS 7.3 had the option of 4K format, and I didn't use them there and it seemed to work OK until I copied large files - but I suspect that was more ZFS related than drive issues.

 

[Adrian]

I have just set up a BETA2 system with 4 WD20EARS drives (2TB advanced format 4K drives) without the jumper on pins 7 and 8 and with the 4k option checked when creating the pool. All seems well, and a rudimentary write then read a 20 GB file gave quite good performance:

Code:

FreeNAS 8.0.1-BETA2
HP Microserver (120 watt), 8GB memory
4 * WD 2TB EADS drives, Advanced Formatting - 4k block size (WD20EARS-00MVWB0)
ZFS RAIDZ1, set up for 4k disk block size

Write 20 GB file - 54 MB/sec
Read 20 GB file - 248 MB/sec

:)

 

[Mike]

I have two WD20EARS, even a mix of made in Malaysia and Thailand, and with raw disks hooked up to a VMware VM in ZFS mirror mode and have been happy with the performance so far. A third drive is out of the budget for now and I really do not need the extra storage from a Raid5- or 10-like setup. With the 8.0 release, without 4kb sectors, performance seemed to be horrible @ 20mb/s up and down although this was also with VMware VMFS's instead of raw disks. With 8.0.2 and 4kb format they are flying at a constant ~75mb/s up and down while copying 200gb. With the mirror I've seen a few random dips in file transfers where the transfer seems to stop for a little bit (only visible in task manager), but on the other hand its only for a second or so and i'm running with way to less memory (1.5gb)

Somewhat disappointed with read speeds at those of a single disk, but what the hey, i've got redundancy. Oh, I didn't mess with the jumpers so I guess they start at sector 63.

Next up is a dedicated controller with ESXi pci-e passthrough, perhaps that nett's a few more iops or mb/s. More on that in the other topic.

 

[joeschmuck]

To the OP,
From what I'm reading you are using VMWare and have setup a pool of three hard drives, each formatted as virtual drives. I'm not certain you will see a difference in performance if you choose 4K sectors as it depends on where the vmdk files lay on the drive. If your vmdk files are not aligned from the start, how could you make it work at all, the alignment that is? So if you can align the drives native format (lets say in windows), then add the vmdk files, then format in VMWare while running FreeNAS and selecting 4k sectors, there might be hope.

Hopefully that made sense.

 

[TravisT]

Yea, I started thinking about that after I posted. I guess it wouldn't matter of how freenas formats the drives, as the actual disk format would be whatever VMWare formats with. I will have to double check to see how VMWare handles this, but all seems to be running well the way it is. If it isn't formatted correctly, I wonder if performance would increase.

I also have a PERC 5/i that I will be connecting to the drives, not sure how/if that will change anything as to formatting.

 

[jenksdrummer]

I have just set up a BETA2 system with 4 WD20EARS drives (2TB advanced format 4K drives) without the jumper on pins 7 and 8 and with the 4k option checked when creating the pool. All seems well, and a rudimentary write then read a 20 GB file gave quite good performance:

Code:

FreeNAS 8.0.1-BETA2
HP Microserver (120 watt), 8GB memory
4 * WD 2TB EADS drives, Advanced Formatting - 4k block size (WD20EARS-00MVWB0)
ZFS RAIDZ1, set up for 4k disk block size

Write 20 GB file - 54 MB/sec
Read 20 GB file - 248 MB/sec

:)

That's good to know about 4K support being there in BETA2 - I may have to give it a spin. Looks like you have the same setup I do...same system, same drives, same amount of memory...I really dig those MicroServers! :)