Expected speeds (SMB share) vs. reality in 1GbE/10GbE link

[ohboi]

I was reading today a lot of threads regarding things such as "slow speeds over 10gbe" or "slow SMB speeds" and some other, and I came to a conclusion my head is going to blow up.

Here is my plan - NAS will serve mainly just 1 PC - a replacement for internal drives with a data storage (photos (both RAW and compressed), camera video footages and compressed blu-ray ripped shows)

Server component list should go something like this:
- Ryzen MB (whether a consumer with a guaranteed ECC support or Asrock X470D4U) + Ryzen 1600 (a newer "AF" version which is pretty much on par with 2600), so a quite good single-threaded performance
- 32GB of ECC RAM (I am not 100% decided on ECC yet, I am especially torn on this after reading this article, I could almost double the RAM from the savings if I wouldn't get ECC)
- 8x 4TB HDD (WD Red) in 2xRaidZ or 1xRaidZ2 (still thinking about speed/IOPS/failure resistance trade-offs of one over another) via Dell H200 HBA
- shared via SMB (whichever the latest version will be available in FreeNAS).

I made a simple test within my PC - copying a 5GB video from NVMe SSD to HDD (4TB WD Red) back and forth and sequential speeds for HDD were 105MB/s (read) and 130MB/s (write).

I was wondering about this:
- is it safe to assume SMB share will fully saturate 1Gbit connection (directly interconnected)? let's assume what I would be moving around is not cached in RAM beforehand
- if it will not, what does it mean? would that be a matter of a misconfiguration of some sort?
- could I expect a feasible (worth an added cost) increase in speeds in this scenario when upgrading the connection to 5GbE or 10GbE?

I have a side intention as well, mostly to get more information about FreeNAS and SMB because during today I found 50% of posts saying SMB is very slow and single-threaded with terrible speed assumptions and then some like SMB can saturate even 40GbE link. Is the other 50% of post because SMB can be actually configured (maybe something what this article outlined?) to perform well?

 

[toadman]

It will for sure saturate a 1g connection. I am running on an old AMD system and it keeps up no issue. And that's on a virtualized platform with FreeNAS as a VM.

I haven't tested how far it will scale up from there to 2.5, 5, and/or 10.

 

[SweetAndLow]

1gbps is easy to max out. 2gbps is also very easy to max out. 5gbps is usually possible. 10gbps takes some tuning and you need a fast pool. And this is all about streaming writes. The second you start doing random IO everything changes. Personally I think iops is way more important than maxing out a network connection.

 

[ohboi]

Do you think prioritizing IOPS with my intention of using it would be worth it? I guess 2 stripped RaidZ1 pools could double the IOPS (from what I read in the iXSystems' white paper) compared to a single RaidZ2. Could I expect sequential reads to be somewhere in line with write speeds or is that whole another topic?

From what you said, what is a fast pool in your understanding? A pool with as much streaming writes as possible or rather that and lots of RAM and even some Optane SSD cache on top of it?