Performance Questions / Recommendations

kjparenteau

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Joined
Jul 13, 2012
Messages
70
Greetings! I am looking to expand a bit on my FreeNAS setup, but I am seeing some interesting numbers and thought I would ask for advice in the community. First, I know my hardware is not ideal and somewhat of a Frankenstein as many systems are, but here's what I have at the moment for reference.

FreeNAS 11.3-U3.2

HARDWARE

OptiPlex 9020 Motherboard in Corsair case
i5-3470S CPU @ 2.90GHz
16GB RAM
LSI 9211-8i (IT Mode) SAS SATA 8-port PCI-E 6Gb/s Controller Card
HDD's: 6x HGST 3TB NAS 7200 RPM
SSD's: 4x Samsung 2TB 850 Pro
Intel x540-T2 10GB Copper configured for iSCSI to Dell PowerEdge R620 with another Intel x540-T2 10GB Copper
Motherboard Limitations: 10 drives maximum. Will not recognize beyond 10, and subsequently will not pass additional drives to FreeNAS.

STORAGE POOLS
HDD: RAIDZ1 (Mixed use between SMB service, Plex Jail, and a zVOL for VMware)
SSD: RAIDZ1 (Entire pool is a zVOL for VMware)

Am I seeing these numbers correctly? Is there really any benefit to having SSD's for a storage pool when the numbers look better on the HDD side? Can I get better performance somehow? If I turn deduplication off on the SSD pool, I get some slightly faster reads as shown below. I am not a FreeNAS expert by any means, but it seems like in both pool scenarios, it is using the system RAM as cache, thus not showing the true performance differences.

THE QUESTION
How does this setup look? Can anyone tell me if something is glaringly out of place that would yield a better performance option? Should I pull the SSD drives and add a couple more 3TB drives to the HDD pool for RAIDZ2 and some more capacity and increased overall IOPS if the performance is so similar?

LONG TERM GOAL
Get an R720xd with 12x 3.5" drive bays with dual procs and 128GB RAM or so to replace the Frankenstein I have now.


Thank you in advance for any suggestions or advise! Here's the performance numbers.
Kevin


HDD (NO DEDUPLICATION)
FreeNAS HDD.png



SSD (WITH DEDUPLICATION)
FreeNAS SSD (Deduplication).png



SSD (NO DEDUPLICATION)
FreeNAS SSD (No Deduplication).png
 
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