TasMot
Dabbler
- Joined
- Sep 15, 2011
- Messages
- 14
I am using my FreeNAS 8.3.0 box as a backup for my ESXi boxes. I have 6 WD 2TB drives in a raidz2 pool. The problem is that when the backups run at night, I am slowing down at the NAS. Since this is actually Windows backups (mix of 2003, 2008, XP, and 7), it is fairly large writes. It is mostly incremental backups, but there are once a week full backups. The backups start at 11:00pm and are sometimes still running when I logon at 8:00am. My thought that since so much writing is going on from ESXi (which does the synchronous write thing) that some ZIL would help. I've read a bunch of posts about using a ZIL and it seems that an enterprise SLC SSD is desirable due to the massive number of writes that will occur. They are way out of the budget (expensive to start with and 2 in a mirror raid are needed). My next thought is that I could fairly cheaply add some additional RAM and create a Ramdisk to use. I KNOW, volatile due to power outages. I think I have that solved. I have a the FreeNAS box on a UPS. The UPS only needs to last 30 seconds until the standby generator automatically turns on.
With the power problem solved, will this ramdisk work as expected and reduce the time needed for the backups? If so, how do I create the ramdisk at startup and then point the raidz2 at it to use? If so, I have the 6 2TB disks which give me a usable 8TB of storage. What size should I make the ramdisk. I have 8 GB of ram in the machine. It will go up to 32GB. Thanks for your help. tom
With the power problem solved, will this ramdisk work as expected and reduce the time needed for the backups? If so, how do I create the ramdisk at startup and then point the raidz2 at it to use? If so, I have the 6 2TB disks which give me a usable 8TB of storage. What size should I make the ramdisk. I have 8 GB of ram in the machine. It will go up to 32GB. Thanks for your help. tom