Performance issue with HP N54L

[sandreas]

Hello,

I am using FreeNAS 9.3 (FreeNAS-9.3-STABLE-201602031011) and one of my disks is showing an error (44 unreadable sectors/blocks... pending). The pool is not degraded, but there seems to be something wrong with the disk. A scrub did not help.

Now i would like to do a full backup to an external disk, before i send back the defective device (3 years warranty). All really important data is already backed up, but now i see a serious performance issue while full backup is running.

Strategy:

• 6TB external usb drive is mounted locally with ntfs-3g
• rsync should copy all files of my home folder to the external drive with -av --progress

I know, that USB 2.0 is not really fast and NTFS is not the best filesystem to use, but i see an average performance of 5MB / s, which in my opinion is far too slow, event under bad circumstances.

What could be the problem?

Hardware:

• HP N54L
• 16GB RAM (Kingston ECC)
• 5x3TB WD EFRX (Red Edition)

Top-Output:

Code:

CPU:  8.4% user,  0.0% nice,  6.9% system,  0.2% interrupt, 84.5% idle
Mem: 389M Active, 12G Inact, 2888M Wired, 261M Cache, 1633M Buf, 263M Free
ARC: 2092M Total, 249M MFU, 1785M MRU, 34M Anon, 10M Header, 15M Other
Swap: 10G Total, 4380K Used, 10G Free

Config:
1 zfspool RAIDZ, status:

Code:

zpool status
  pool: freenas-boot
state: ONLINE
  scan: scrub repaired 0 in 0h1m with 0 errors on Sun Jan 31 03:46:42 2016
config:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        freenas-boot  ONLINE       0     0     0
          da0p2     ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

  pool: zfsroot
state: ONLINE
  scan: scrub repaired 379M in 40h33m with 0 errors on Mon Feb 22 09:50:25 2016
config:

        NAME                                            STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        zfsroot                                         ONLINE       0     0     0
          raidz1-0                                      ONLINE       0     0     0
            gptid/xxx  ONLINE       0     0     0
            gptid/xxx  ONLINE       0     0     0
            gptid/xxx  ONLINE       0     0     0
            gptid/xxx  ONLINE       0     0     0
            gptid/xxx  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

 

[gpsguy]

You already know what the problem is and you have a bad drive in the pool.

If you want to use NTFS, hang the USB drive off a Windows machine and copy the data over the wire.

I know, that USB 2.0 is not really fast and NTFS is not the best filesystem to use, but i see an average performance of 5MB / s, which in my opinion is far too slow, event under bad circumstances.

BTW, Since you have 5 drives in your N54L, are you running one of the hacked BIOS's that allow you to use the ODD and eSATA drive in AHCI mode?

 

[sandreas]

Ok, seems to be the bad drive...

If you want to use NTFS, hang the USB drive off a Windows machine and copy the data over the wire.

Ok... unfortunately this is not faster...

BTW, Since you have 5 drives in your N54L, are you running one of the hacked BIOS's that allow you to use the ODD and eSATA drive in AHCI mode?

No hacked BIOS... why did you ask?

 

[gpsguy]

While you were able to mount the drive locally with nags-3g it's not intended that you write to it. Even trying to import a NTFS drive to copy data onto a ZFS pool is often problematic.

If your 5th drive is connected to either the ODD or eSATA port and you are using the stock BIOS they are running in a SATA IDE mode.

By using one of the hacked BIOS's, they can be configured for AHCI (like the standard bays).

I am curios as to which drive is failing. Is it the one in the ODD bay?


Sent from my phone

 

[sandreas]

If your 5th drive is connected to either the ODD or eSATA port and you are using the stock BIOS they are running in a SATA IDE mode.

Yeah i was not brave enough to flash the hacked bios :) Besides not having the full speed, is there any other Problem with running on SATA IDE mode?

I am curios as to which drive is failing. Is it the one in the ODD bay?

Not 100% sure, but i don't think so. The drive with errors is ada1... the odd bay should either be ada0 or ada4.