Test disk speeds in Freenas?

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Phimp

Gawd
Joined
Dec 9, 2006
Messages
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FreeNAS box has three wd7500aacs drives in raid5.
over gigabit lan it transfers at 20 MB/s FROM it, and 15 MB/s TO it.

The read speed of my drive on the computer that's transferring files to and from it is 65 MB/s average, not sure what the write speed is, so I'm assuming the write speed to the freenas box is limited by the write speed of the raid5 array?

How can I bench the disk read/write speeds via the Shell in FreeNAS? Can't seem to find any viable way.

Should a software raid5 of three wd7500aacs drives have a write speed of ~15 MB/s???

I've tested with both Samba and FTP - same results all around.
 
Motherboard: ECG A740GM-M
Processor: AMD LE-1600 2.2Ghz AM2 45w
Memory: Kingston 1GB DDR2 800
NIC: Rosewill RC-400-LX Gigabit
Drives: 3 x WD7500AACS in Software Raid-5
Switch: Dlink DGS-2205

The other pc is of better specs and is using a Dlink DGE-530T Gigabit NIC

So I'm thinking it's either limited by Freenas because it's lame like that, the card not working in full GigE or some crap, or the read/write of the array.

I'm installing Ubuntu on a spare drive right now to see if that's any better. But with having to create/format the array, I won't find out till tomorrow morning.

If Ubuntu is faster, I'll have to buy an 8GB CF Card and an IDE to CF adapter for it.

I'll then decapitate the desktop and such and set up a torrent app and webmin..
I just hate webmin so much over the awesome freenas interface that I'd almost rather just deal with the slow speeds with freenas.
 
That thing should be alot faster then what you said in the OP, i think its just freenas, freenas is usually slow. Ubuntu should be faster, but just use ubuntu server and mdadm. Here is the command(s):
Code: 
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install mdadm
$ sudo mdadm -C /dev/md0 --level=raid5 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1
$ mdadm -Es | grep md0  >>/etc/mdadm.conf
and to test the speed you use this:
Code: 
$ sudo apt-get install hdparm
$ hdparm -Tt /dev/md0
 
Ya, that's what I figured.
I'm just so at a loss with mdadm and how to use it at all.
So I'd be able to setup the array by following tutorials or the command you listed with changing the drive paths and such, but if a drive ever fails, I have no idea how to find out, how to replace it, how to rebuild it. Every tutorial I've found or list of commands for it don't really explain a whole lot, like what parameters you need to change to fit your setup and such.

and webmin looks like a donkey's ballsack. but whatever, ill live.

TorrentFlux should work on Ubuntu Server right? I've tested it out on Ubuntu Desktop already.

And I should use the latest release: v 8.04 ?
should I spring for the 64 bit version?
 
Phimp said:
Ya, that's what I figured.
I'm just so at a loss with mdadm and how to use it at all.
So I'd be able to setup the array by following tutorials or the command you listed with changing the drive paths and such, but if a drive ever fails, I have no idea how to find out, how to replace it, how to rebuild it. Every tutorial I've found or list of commands for it don't really explain a whole lot, like what parameters you need to change to fit your setup and such.

and webmin looks like a donkey's ballsack. but whatever, ill live.

TorrentFlux should work on Ubuntu Server right? I've tested it out on Ubuntu Desktop already.

And I should use the latest release: v 8.04 ?
should I spring for the 64 bit version?
Click to expand...

Lol, donkey's ballsack, but torrentflux works good on ubuntu server its just a a pain in the ass to install.

To check the array:
Code: 
$ mdadm --detail /dev/md0
I dont know the commands to repair. Also after you make the array you have to format with:
Code: 
$ sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/md0
Then Mount:
Code: 
$ mount /dev/md0
If u need more just ask.
There is no need for 64 bit because you dont have 4GB or more ram.
And sure you could use the latest release, you just wont be able to make root the only user like what you could do in 6.06 when your setting up the users.
 
Thanks for the info! Much appreciated!
I'm sure I'll run into a brick wall soon enough and need to ask something regarding mdadm. lol

UPDATE:
I earlier had a bunch of stuff about not being able to fully install Ubuntu Server. I ended up using 6.06 and it went smoothly.
Once installed though, "sudo fdisk -l" only shows the boot drive and it's partitions...
It's not recognizing my three sata drives.
motherboard controller/driver issue?
lame.
 
From what I have read that your southbridge isnt supported, so that means your sata wont work.
 
Alright, this is getting damn frustrating now.

I've tried four different versions of Ubuntu Server Edition.

8.04
Goes to a blank screen halfway through installation without warning and is unresponsive to keystrokes

7,10
Installs fine, but after installation, when booting it says "Alert! /dev/disk/by-uuid/d69352c0-89*blahblahblah*6f does not exist. Dropping to a shell!" Then proceeds to BusyBox. I've tried editing the grub line to root=/dev/hda1, hdb1, hdc1, sda1, etc etc. tried everything.

7.04
Same as 7.10

6.06.2
Only detects 2 of my 6 sata ports




I think I may have to just tough it out with Freenas and the slow transfer speeds =(
 
You should also try Openfiler. Its like a better, more featured Freenas, its has iscsi, raid 5 and lots more and its based on Red Hat.
 
I'm giving one last running head start at Ubuntu Server 8.04, then I'll move on to Openfiler. Looks promising. I looked into it before, but I must have been looking at older screenshots cuz it looked like crap. mdadm support too! yummy!

Update I got Openfiler installed on a spare 6gb drive to test it out. I'm currently synchronizing the 1.36TB array. I'll let it go overnight and test speeds and such tomorrow, then post back.
 
Are you using a USB keyboard ? Its probably a hardware problem messing around with ur ubuntu installation
 
FreeNAS uses Samba for sharing files and Samba is just slow
 
priteshvarsani - nope, only thing connected is power, dvi (tried vga - it's onboard and has both), ethernet, and PS2 keyboard.

nitrobass24 - my thoughts exactly, but it also uses FTP and a few other protocols, and FTP was just as slow, if not slower.


Well, I have it all set up with Openfiler.
Code: 
hdparm -Tt /dev/md0
Timing cached reads:   3760 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1879.99 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:   346 MB in 3.00 seconds = 115.15 MB/sec

The disks on my main pc have write speed of ~50 MB/sec and read of ~60 MB/sec.

I tested using a 2.5 GB file.
Code: 
Samba to NAS:   33 MB/sec
Samba from NAS: 25 MB/sec
FTP to NAS:     16 MB/sec
FTP from NAS:   16 MB/sec

A.] Why the hell is Samba faster than FTP?!?! That's a first.
B.] Even at a max of 33 MB/sec, is that what I should expect typically from this setup?
 
I figured the Rosewill Gigabit nic may be the problem so I did a little testing between the two Gigabit nic's I have and the onboard Gigabit ethernet of the NAS pc.

The results confuse me...

I thought FTP was faster than Samba?

And

openfilertestsp3.jpg


Thoughts? Comments?
 
What OS does your PC run? Have you tried optimizing the TCP network settings on that box? You can isolate the network by creating a ram disk on the OF box and then running tests again. Also in my experience, good quality, dedicated nics will give the best performance.
 
How did you conduct the transfer tests?
- Have you tried different FTP software?
 
The PC is running Windows XP (all computers on the network that will be using the NAS daily will be XP or Vista). I've tried optimizing the TCP settings, not much of a change.
I suppose I can create a ram disk on both Openfiler AND the PC to test the network speed.
I have no idea how to create ram disks, but I'll search around.

I transfered 2GB+ files back and forth timing them for samba since they took about 2 minutes each time it was fairly accurate. And I used FlashFXP, SmartFTP, Firefox, and Windows Explorer for FTP - FlashFXP (the one I've always used) is the fastest by about 5 MB/s.

Well.. I transferred 189GB to the NAS over FTP in 2 hours 22 minutes and 22 seconds (2:22:22 - I thought that was a pretty crazy coincidence for having transferred ~19,000 files!)
about 130GB of mp3 and flac files, the rest was 1GB avi's.

27.51 MB/s average... not too terrible. I guess I can live with that.

But I'll do some testing with ram drives later after playing some Rock Band
punk.gif
 
Phimp said:
27.51 MB/s average... not too terrible. I guess I can live with that.[/IMG]
Click to expand...

Man thats must be sweet to get 27.5MB/s, I get 6.4MB/s on 100mbit. And also that 27.5MB/s is as fast as my laptop hdd if not faster.:eek:
 
Well, I've moved most of my data to it thus far (350GB-ish).

Once everything's moved over, I want to create images of two of my drives in my main PC (160GB for XP / 160GB for Vista). So I can create a Raid-0 with the two disks and install Vista/XP. I ran these two drives in Raid0 before and I noticed a considerable increase in most activities such as opening, copying, moving files and boot times decreased by a lot.
So I want to be able to create images of my drives so if anything goes wrong or if I ever want to, I can write the image to the drive and it will boot back into xp as is right now, only installed on one disk.

My first thought was DD to a tarball since it's simple&easy and effective. I wouldn't have to worry about whether it would work when i write the image back to the drive.

But are there any other choices I should consider? I'd like to backup two computers every month or so to the NAS as large images (only one image per computer at a time so I don't care if they take up 250GB each).
 
Just as a FYI, Samba is WAY faster than a native windows implementation if you compile in the correct parameters and disable the feature to look for filenames under multiple cases and disable Nagle's algorithm (TCP slowstart).

If slowstart is disabled and you have a clean link, FTP should be limited by your latency/bandwidth and should outperform SMB/Samba as it's a pure TCP transfer with no overhead.
 
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