Fr Jonah
Dabbler
- Joined
- May 3, 2014
- Messages
- 24
We are configuring our new freenas install and I've been reading the manual and forums to learn more about freenas. We have a successful installation on a Rackable c1000 unit with 16 drive SAS expander... so far, we have only 4 x 1TB drives configured in a RaidZ2 array plus one 60GB SSD installed in the internal drive slot of the c1000. We boot from a 4GB flash drive. The system specs are as follow:
2 x 2.33GHz Intel Xeon processors
16GB ECC RAM
4 x 1TB WD Re4 Enterprise HDDs
1 x 60GB SSD
We operate a printshop with 3 networked large-format printers and most of our network traffic is transferring ultra high resolution images from server to computer for Photoshop layouts, image manipulation, etc. Our image file sizes range from 10MB to 6GB (for single PSB image files). Obviously, transfer of layouts and images can be quite slow, so we are trying to find that happy medium of data redundancy and performance... Which brings me to my questions, which, as of now, consist of the following:
1. Is Raidz2 the best configuration for our workflow or should we be working off mirrored sets (i.e. 2 mirrored vdevs in one zpool)...?
2. Is there any performance advantage to adding a few additional drives? I was thinking of adding 2 more 1TB Re4 drives to create one zpool of around 4TB and expand the overall capacity in the future by adding new vdevs as needed... any thoughts/advice?
3. And to the main question from the post title: since we have that 60GB ssd just sitting there (not being used for anything right now), would setting that drive up as an L2ARC benefit our performance (on the basis of the workflow described above)? We basically only have 2 people accessing the network at a time right now and 95% of the network traffic is related to transferring these image files from computer to computer for manipulation/print preparation.
Thank you in advance for your advice and help!
2 x 2.33GHz Intel Xeon processors
16GB ECC RAM
4 x 1TB WD Re4 Enterprise HDDs
1 x 60GB SSD
We operate a printshop with 3 networked large-format printers and most of our network traffic is transferring ultra high resolution images from server to computer for Photoshop layouts, image manipulation, etc. Our image file sizes range from 10MB to 6GB (for single PSB image files). Obviously, transfer of layouts and images can be quite slow, so we are trying to find that happy medium of data redundancy and performance... Which brings me to my questions, which, as of now, consist of the following:
1. Is Raidz2 the best configuration for our workflow or should we be working off mirrored sets (i.e. 2 mirrored vdevs in one zpool)...?
2. Is there any performance advantage to adding a few additional drives? I was thinking of adding 2 more 1TB Re4 drives to create one zpool of around 4TB and expand the overall capacity in the future by adding new vdevs as needed... any thoughts/advice?
3. And to the main question from the post title: since we have that 60GB ssd just sitting there (not being used for anything right now), would setting that drive up as an L2ARC benefit our performance (on the basis of the workflow described above)? We basically only have 2 people accessing the network at a time right now and 95% of the network traffic is related to transferring these image files from computer to computer for manipulation/print preparation.
Thank you in advance for your advice and help!