![]() ![]() Tests are performed using the 3-disk pool. In the example below, I simulate a copy of a 50 GB test file from the Gen8 towards a test system using NFS. This is confirmed when performing the actual network file transfers. The result does show that the pool is more than capable of sustaining gigabit network transfer speeds. I would have liked to test with an additional 2 TB drive what kind of performance would be achieved with four drives but I only have three. The performance is clearly better even there's one disk less in the VDEV. Write dd if=/dev/zero of=/testpool/test.bin bs=1M count=50000 conv=syncĥ2428800000 bytes (52 GB) copied, 169.572 s, 309 MB/s Test with 3-disk RAIDZ VDEVĪfter the previous test I wondered what would happen if I would exclude the older 1 TB disk and create a pool with just the 3 x 2 TB drives. I had to run my tests with the disk I had zfs listīecause a NAS will face data transfers that are sequential in nature, I've done some tests with 'dd' to measure this performance. Please note that reportedly FreeNAS also runs perfectly fine on this box. I'm running Debian Jessie with the latest stable ZFS-on-Linux 0.6.4. The Microserver Gen8 takes about 1 minute and 50 seconds just to pass the BIOS boot process and start booting the operating system (you will hear a beep). Booting from USB stick is also an option, although a regular 2.5" hard drive or SSD is probably more reliable (flash wear) and faster. I myself used an old 2.5" hard drive with a SATA-to-USB converter which I stuck in the case (use double-sided tape or velcro to mount it to the PSU). ![]() The big question here is what happens if you encounter read errors or other drive problems that ZFS could handle, but would be a reason for the RAID controller to kick a drive off the SATA bus. The unconfigured drives will just be passed as AHCI devices to the OS and thus can be used in your ZFS array. You do need to put the boot drive in a RAID volume in order to be able to boot from the fifth SATA port. The fifth SATA port is also bootable if you enable the on-board RAID controller, but do not configure any RAID arrays with the drives you plan to use with ZFS (Thanks Mikko Rytilahti). This is not recommended as you lose the benefits of AHCI such as hot-swap of disks and there are probably also performance penalties. The fifth SATA port is bootable if you configure SATA to operate in Legacy mode. However, only the four 3.5" drive bays are bootable. This mode is probably the best mode for ZFS as there seems to be no RAID controller firmware active between the disks and ZFS. The fifth SATA port is not bootable if you disable the on-board RAID controller and run in pure AHCI mode. If you want to use all four drive slots for storage, you need to boot this machine from either the fifth internal SATA port, the internal USB 2.0 port or the microSD card slot. ![]() This table gives you a quick overview of the netto storage capacity you would get depending on the chosen drive size and redundancy. The Gen8 has room for 4 x 3.5" hard drives so with todays large disk sizes you can pack quite a bit of storage inside this compact machine. The Gen8 can be found fairly cheap on the European market at around 240 Euro including taxes and if you put in an extra 8 GB of memory on top of the 2 GB installed you have a total of 10 GB, which is more than enough to support ZFS. Please note that the G1610T version of the Microserver Gen8 does not ship with a DVD/CD drive as depicted in the image above. The Microserver Gen8 can be a better solution than the offerings of - for example - Synology or QNAP because you can create a more reliable system based on ECC-memory and ZFS.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |