ZFS performance best practice?

[actyler1001]

Hi all, I am new to NAS4Free and the forum. Great product, I've been impressed so far. I have a question about allocating disks in such a way that grants best performance.. I do still want "some" level of disk failure support, but performance is the focus.

So, the question is if I have 6 disks, would I get better performance creating two 3 disk RAID-z single vdev's for the zpool or would it perform better to put all disks in a single RAID-Z single, double, or tipple vdev? I realize that double allows for more than one disk failure, but I'm not sure if it grants any performance increase. In affect, if I go the route of creating two RAID-Z Single vdevs under one zpool I can still lose two disks.. Only if they are the right disks... In the past I have heard a best practice in storage is to create multiple RAID 5 (which seems similar to RAID-Z single) groups rather than one big one. I guess it creates more I/O queues... I just wasn't sure if ZFS effectively load balances between multiple vdev's?

Thanks!

[crowi]

It depends on what you want to achieve with your NAS and how the IOPS erformance is important for your tasks. Pleas give more information for better advices, i.e. what kind of data, disk size, number of users, etc.

For a start, please read:
http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/in ... iderations

Personally I would go for a RaidZ2 setup (i.e. equivalent to RAID6) with 6 disks.
Here's a article why: http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-5 ... g-in-2009/

[actyler1001]

Thanks for your reply. I'm using it for iSCSI connectivity to a VMware ESXi cluster almost exclusively and am interested in maximizing performance across as many spindles as possible. RAID 10 in the past was my "go to" for this purpose. At the moment I have 6, 1 TB 7200 RPM drives. Cheap and slow.