Bad Local Read/Write Performance, Hardware Issue?

[Melona380]

I'm running FreeNas on a Dell Poweredge R200, I mounted a 5TB NTFS Disk and I Have a 4TB Disk with 2.85TB full in ZFS. I am currently copying the data from the 4TB disk to the 5TB Disk.

However I am getting only 25 MB/s

I am trying to find where it is bottle necking...

STATS FOR NERDS:

Dell Poweredge R200:

• 8 GB PC2-5300U
• 1x QuadCore Xeon @ 2.6Ghz
• DISKS: Boot(80GB 7200Rpm)(ZFS)
• DISKS: VM VOLUME GROUP (4x 1TB 7200Rpm SATA)(ZFS)
• DISKS: GENERAL NAS GROUP(4TB 7200Rpm SATA)(ZFS)
• DISKS: TEMP GEN NAS BACKUP(5TB 7200Rpm SATA)(NTFS)
• BOOT & General NAS: Drives are Connected to the Internal Motherboard SATA Controller
• VM Volume Group Drives are connected to a IO Crest SI-PEX40064 (4x SATA 3Gbps Controller)(PCIe x8)
• Backup Drive is connected to a IO Crest *I dont have the part number* (2x SATA 6Gbps Controller)(PCIe x8)

Notes: I have 2 proxmox Nodes using the NFS share Off the VM GROUP 24/7
Notes: I have 1 VM Currently reading and with minimal Write on the General NAS Disk (As a limitation of my switch the VM can only talk at 100 Mbps)
Notes:General NAS Disk is also mounted as a CIFS Share on one PC with no usage at the moment.

I am aware that NTFS will perform slower But should I really only get 25MB/s over the local Machine?

 

[Mirfster]

I mounted a 5TB NTFS Disk and I Have a 4TB Disk with 2.85TB full in ZFS. I am currently copying the data from the 4TB disk to the 5TB Disk.

Can you elaborate on how you *mounted* the 5TB NTFS drive?

 

[Melona380]

@Mirfster The drive was formatted NTFS on the FreeNAS box using gpart and then mounted via

Code:

kldload fuse
ntfs-3g /dev/ada0p1 /media/bk

 

[Mirfster]

So I would assume you also did a "mkdir" for "bk" as well?

Code:

kldload fuse
mkdir /media/bk
ntfs-3g /dev/ada0p1 /media/bk

** I personally would have done it under "/mnt" instead, but meh...

Anyways, I have not personally needed to mount a NTFS drive; but I think that since 9.3 FreeNAS doesn't really support NTFS that well. Might be mainly for just Read Access.

The fact that you are able to mount and write to a NTFS drive seems to kind of blow my theory out of the water, but perhaps the underlying system is not doing it as well as expected.

There are others here who do actually use external drives (USB or eSATA) to perform monthly backups, but I am not sure if they are using NTFS. Off the top of my head I would ping @Arwen since I believe she is doing such a thing (but not sure of the drive file format).

 

[Melona380]

So I would assume you also did a "mkdir" for "bk" as well?

Code:

kldload fuse
mkdir /media/bk
ntfs-3g /dev/ada0p1 /media/bk

** I personally would have done it under "/mnt" instead, but meh...

Anyways, I have not personally needed to mount a NTFS drive; but I think that since 9.3 FreeNAS doesn't really support NTFS that well. Might be mainly for just Read Access.

The fact that you are able to mount and write to a NTFS drive seems to kind of blow my theory out of the water, but perhaps the underlying system is not doing it as well as expected.

There are others here who do actually use external drives (USB or eSATA) to perform monthly backups, but I am not sure if they are using NTFS. Off the top of my head I would ping @Arwen since I believe she is doing such a thing (but not sure of the drive file format).

@Mirfster, yes I did Mkdir bk...

I personally didn't want to mess with the /mnt given that it was used by FreeNAS itsself.

I did read that FreeNAS has lost support for ntfs... Given that I know that you can mount it "Temporally" via the webUI to copy its data over. If I am correct, it was the support to use NTFS as a persistent volume like a ZFS volume.

My problem is I need to make a backup of the data on the 5TB drive, that is Windows readable.

I guess to Clarify, I am looking for where my performance goes... I know NTFS is slower on linux, however with 6GB/s bandwidth even that does not account for the 25 MB/s

 

[Melona380]

JUST FOR THE RECORD... If it is a hardware issue,

Would it be worth it to migrate FreeNAS to a

HP Proliant ML350 G5

• 2x QuadCore Xeon 2450 @2.50Ghz
• 32GB DDR2 1333 RAM
• 10 HDD spaces 3.5in
• 3x 1GB NICs
• Boot off of Flash Media

Would this Provide a Noticeable performance difference?

 

[Mirfster]

While the HP Proliant ML350 G5 does seem like a more robust system for FreeNAS, I am not sure if it would help with NTFS drive(s)....

Maybe consider using both machines; one as the main FreeNAS and the other as a backup (using RSync or whatever desired method). You could even install a Windows OS on the other box and direct connect the NICs (if you have an extra NIC). Then you would have another layer of redundancy... Just a thought..

 

[SweetAndLow]

Test the theoretical max read speed of your NTFS disk with something like dd if=/media/bk/some file.vmdk of=/dev/null also do a similar test to your zfs pool but with writes and a non compressed dataset. Example dd if =/dev/zero of=/mnt/poolname/datasetname/testfile bs=1M count=8000

 

[Arwen]

...
There are others here who do actually use external drives (USB or eSATA) to perform monthly backups, but I am not sure if they are using NTFS. Off the top of my head I would ping @Arwen since I believe she is doing such a thing (but not sure of the drive file format).

My backup eSATA drive, (Seagate 8TB Archive / SMR), uses ZFS. Since it was new technology, (SMR),
I wanted to verify data using ZFS' scrubs.

As for speed, I can burst as high as 90MegaBytes per second. Though averages is 25MBps - 30MBps
due to SMR required data moves and re-writes.

My guess about Melona380's speed, is that it's a combination of;

• FUSE
• NTFS module, (meaning not opimized for Unix and not native MS-Windows)