Should I put FreeNAS on a ReadyNAS?

[dannieboiz]

I spent quite some time playing with the ReadyNAS 4200. Now that I have all my data on there, I find that the performance is not very consistence. I was getting 110 Mbps U/D with or without LACP my transfer speed seems to have dropped to half of that now. Looking for something that work more consistence.

I've been reading about various opensource NAS OS and I think FreeNAS fit the bill. Would like to set it all up and never look at it again for a long time moving 5Tb around isn't fun to do. My NAS runs a nightly backup to a local server holding about 2.5Tb of can't afford to lose data which back up to Carbonite.

The readynas hardware
Motherboard OEM version of the SuperMicro X8SI6-F with integrated LSI SAS 2008
8Gb ECC RAM
CPU- X3450
12 Bay

would I be able to make freenas utilize all 12 ports?

This is installed for my home use, need to stream/share to Windows and Mac

Features I'd like:
Dual Drives redundant currently have 6 drives, 2x 1tb and 4x 2tb
FTP
Plex
Real time monitoring of the NAS system resources
Transmission (I believe I saw this add on)

 

[jgreco]

You're never going to get good performance out of it. Basically the X8 and the Lynnfield CPU are 5 year old technology. 8GB is going to be rather tight - for FreeNAS, 8GB is the smallest supported amount of RAM.

ZFS is a very heavyweight system. It is intended to implement many of the features of an enterprise grade SAN platform, normally done in dedicated hardware, with the resources of a server CPU and memory.

Also, you're likely to notice performance start to fall off as your pool fills. If you have 5TB of data on a RAIDZ1 of 4 2TB drives, which is only about 6TB of usable space, your system is essentially full, and performance is going to suffer. This will be the same under ReadyNAS, FreeNAS, or any other ZFS based system. Performance is obtained by throwing excess resources at the system, which the system can then make good use of.

 

[esamett]

You have plenty of power for a "home system" where you are limited to GB networking. 8GB ram is the "minimum" recommended for ZFS. If you want more performance then...

 

[jgreco]

You have plenty of power for a "home system" where you are limited to GB networking.

That wasn't the question though. He wanted to know if FreeNAS would fix his ReadyNAS reduced performance issues. It isn't likely to. Underneath, the ReadyNAS is running a customized version of Nexenta, AFAIK.

There are lots of things that could be contributing to the problems, but I listed the ones that are most likely directly contributing to the problem.

Assuming the pool is filling, one option is to replace the drives with larger drives. My vague recollection is that Netgear is forcing people to buy the Netgear-branded disks at a substantial markup. If the pool is nearly full, adding more space may relieve pressure and increase performance. If the pool isn't nearly full, then adding more memory might help, because 8GB is not a ton for Nexenta.

 

[esamett]

Sorry for answering wrong question.