First attempt, couple of questions

[blueman]

Hi All,

I finished my first FreeNAS build a few hours ago, and everything is looking good so far, just copying all my data over from my old computer for backup.

2 questions I have though:

1. Transfer speed. I am using CIFS to transfer data between my machines and the FreeNAS server (all Windows based), I have a Billion 7800n modem/router with gigabit ethernet, a gigabit ethernet card in the FreeNAS server (a HP Proliant Microserver) and a gigabit ethernet card in the other 2 machines I am transferring data from. I set the server up in a ZFS raidz1 setup. I am averaging about 30MB/s according to Windows, but it varies between about 5MB/s slowest to 85MB/s fastest. Are these speeds reasonable for my hardware? I thought they might be a bit quicker? I found a couple of guides with speed tweaks but they were all for version 7 of FreeNAS and the options are no longer in the web config as far as I could see. Can anyone recommend a way I can maximise my speed?

2. I wanted to know if there was a way to 'sync' certain data between my desktop and the FreeNAS server. For example, set it up so that I am 'syncing' my documents folder, so that any time I change a file or add a file to Documents on my desktop, the change would also be made to the FreeNAS server? I saw rsync in the options and wondered if it may be able to do the job?

Other than that everything is going well! Thanks in advance for any help you experts may be able to offer

 

[Milhouse]

How much memory (RAM) is in your Microserver? Are the CIFS speed you mention when copying data to the FreeNAS (writing) or when reading data from it?

 

[blueman]

How much memory (RAM) is in your Microserver? Are the CIFS speed you mention when copying data to the FreeNAS (writing) or when reading data from it?

Thanks for the reply and sorry for my lack of information in the OP!

Ram is 8GB non-ecc. The speed was writing data to the FreeNAS. I have 4x Samsung HD204UI 2TB drives in a raid-z1 setup.

Let me know if you need any more info

 

[b1ghen]

You said it was a backup of your old computer, I assume this means varied file sizes? If so going down to 5MB/s for small files is not uncommon and 85MB/s on large files sounds ok to me.
If you could try with just large files and see what kind of speeds you get then?

 

[Milhouse]

It's also a bit pointless trying to diagnose CIFS (or any other higher level) performance problem without first confirming how effectively your network and disks are performing.

To that end I would suggest using iperf to confirm the baseline performance of your network between server and client, and a simple dd read/write test for ballpark disk performance, eg.:

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/share/zero.dat bs=1M count=10000
dd of=/dev/null if=/mnt/share/zero.dat bs=1M count=10000

For the kind of disk performance you should be getting from an HP Microserver, see this thread for results I obtained with an N36L, 4GB RAM and 4x 1TB Samsung HD103SJ drives.

I've always had problems with the built-in Broadcom NIC you find in the Microserver, whereas others have not seen the same problems, so your mileage may vary, hopefully you're luck but if you see it timing out and resetting under iperf (ie. under heavy load) then your best (only?) option is to disable it in the BIOS and drop in a replacement NIC (I'd suggest a cheap Intel CT NIC). Don't waste time trying to work around what is a fairly well known FreeBSD issue with Broadcom NICs.

 

[5teve]

Hi

Have a look in this section of the forum for my post regarding the n40l with the same issue. The tweaks I added made a big difference although its still a spiky transfer its reaching around 90mb sec average so data transfer when backing up is fast.

I am replying on my phone otherwise I'd link everything for you.

Steve