SATA II vs SATA III

[Aqxea]

Currently, I am running FreeNAS on a Dell R710 with six 2TB 7200rpm SATA drives in RAIDZ1.

I am in the process of upgrading a Dell R510 12 Bay server to run FreeNAS and was wondering if there would be a noticeable difference between 12x2TB SATA II drives vs SATA III.

I don't run any plugins or jails on my FreeNAS box but I do have a few iSCSI LUNs presented to my ESXi hosts. The R510 will have dual E5640s w/ 64GB RAM. HBA will be an LSI-9211-8i. That being said, now that FreeNAS 10 is close to being released, I will probably want to experiment with Docker and VMs.

I am wondering if there will be a noticeable difference in performance between the two.

I haven't decided if I will go with a single vdev with RAIDZ2 or two mirrored vdevs.

These are the two drives in question.

Western Digital RE WD2000FYYZ 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Enterprise Internal Hard Drive
Western Digital RE4 WD2003FYYS 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard

 

[Jailer]

and was wondering if there would be a noticeable difference between 12x2TB SATA II drives vs SATA III

Nope.

 

[snaptec]

One drive can handle maybe 150mb/s peak. That is about 1,2Gbit. Give yourself an answer.
If you are using a backplane with sas expander and connect it with 4x sata2 aka 3GB/s lanes you would get 12GB/s (app. 1500mb/s).
Then you may have a little bottleneck of 300mb/s. But only when you have 10gb/s + ethernet or running much vms, where you probably don't need the bandwidth as you have far to less iops