Created on 01-03-2014 – Last update on 17-03-2014
Testing the system
It is finally time to test my new system. But how do we test this system? Which parameters to test? What is good and what is not. For inspiration I looked at the following site/artikel http://nl.hardware.info/reviews/5197/pro-netgear-readynas-716-baas-boven-baas it is in Dutch but if you look at the pictures you will get it.
On the site they use the next two programs
The first program creates a set of files to test the NAS system. It will do this with video/photo fragments, office documents, files and a directory copys.
The second program is a straight through. It first write a file x times and then it read’s a file x times and the file has size of y.
For testing the network performance I used the following client system
- Intel Q6600
- Memory DDR2 8GB
- Gigabyte motherboard (GA-P35-DS3)
- NVIDIA Geforce 8600GTS
- 2x 500GB disk in RAID0
Settings Baseline
So, time to set a baseline of my new system. To start I will configure the disk that are in the system. Because this is the baseline I configure only single disk’s to measure the basics performance. So now tricks whit caching disk or something like that. Below are some picture of the setup.
and here how it is patitioned with a zfs partition. I also made a separte partition on the SSD drive
And here how it is partitioned with a FreeBSD-ZFS partition. I also made a separate partition on the SSD drive of 40GB because the disks itself are not that fast.The SSD disk is partition with the trim option enabled and aligned with 4k sectors.
The following I have set on the tuning tab under system. Memory tuning profile -> Performance tuning. And to be complete also a screen dump of the ZFS tuning tab.
Hardware baseline
Now before we test the network throughput we have to know have fast the hardware is inside the system. Luckily ZFSguru has a built-in performance benchmark test for the disks and the pools. Below are the simple disk benchmark tests for the HDD and the SSD and also a memory disk.
HHD -> Has a normal progress starting on the inner side of the disk with around 80MB/s and on the outer side of the disk running back till around 47MB/s
SSD -> I think the difference we see on the SSD disk on the first part (300MB/s) and on the secound part (500MB/s) is because the SSD uses MLC memory chips. That means it can save more bits by the same number of transistors. Most of the times it can store two bits of information per cell. The drawback of this technology is that of the two bits one is faster than the other. What result in the SSD graph.
MEM -> The throughput of the memory disk is around 2GB/s. I don’t know if this good or not for now
If we do the benchmarks on the different pools we get the next results.
The results are the same as of the disk benchmarks. This is not surprising when you consider that we do not use the techniques of ZFS caching.
Now we know the standard speed of our system, we can continue to benchmark how he does it on the network. We begin with the NAS Performance Tester to see what the raw network speed is.
Network Basline
First I have tested the system with the following three scenarios. No options, compression or deduplication. I have run the NAS Performance Tester once with the following option. 5 times a file of 4000MB shared with a samba share. And did this for both (identical) single disks.
After that I run de Intel NASPT tool. I run a full test on each identical disk a toke the average of that. The results are below.
Source used as reference.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_cell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandwidths
vSurf 