Slow transfer speeds for first 15-20 seconds ...

[00Roush]

You mentioned having to reinit the disk... Does that mean you are using RAID functions of the Adaptec card or you are just in JBOD mode? Just wondering.

It sounds like you might be running Linux on your client. What method were you using to test your read/write speeds to CIFS share? CP command? I was wondering because it could be that the client file copy engine (what ever program you are using to copy files with) is not setup to provide the best performance to/from a CIFS network share. One other thing I was thinking about was if Linux worked really well as a CIFS client. I always was under the impression that NFS was the better protocol to use under unix/linux... CIFS was always there so that Windows shares could be accessed but it never seemed like it was tuned for performance. Just my own past observations. Been a long time since I tested Unix/Linux as a client.

00Roush

[psechser]

You mentioned having to reinit the disk... Does that mean you are using RAID functions of the Adaptec card or you are just in JBOD mode? Just wondering.

It sounds like you might be running Linux on your client. What method were you using to test your read/write speeds to CIFS share? CP command? I was wondering because it could be that the client file copy engine (what ever program you are using to copy files with) is not setup to provide the best performance to/from a CIFS network share. One other thing I was thinking about was if Linux worked really well as a CIFS client. I always was under the impression that NFS was the better protocol to use under unix/linux... CIFS was always there so that Windows shares could be accessed but it never seemed like it was tuned for performance. Just my own past observations. Been a long time since I tested Unix/Linux as a client.

00Roush

no, not using any controller RAID function ... they are all set as individual arrays (array with one disk as the controller doesn't know individual disks without arrays). But this setting hasn't changed compared to earlier configs.

I only use the normal Windows Explorer, other apps like UltraExplorer or similar haven't shown any difference. it really seems to be something with my windows system ...

[psechser]

ok .. finally after a long time of silence I decided to do something about it. I wanted to speed up my transfer rate and at the same time get my power consumption of my NAS server down. Unfortunately I didn't run all tests at all the various steps to compare ,,, Anyways, here's what I did:

First I reinstalled Window7 Ultimate on my desktop (fresh install, not upgrade or repair ....)
Then I purchased a new board and AMD's new low power CPU: board is an F2A85-V Pro and CPU is an AMD A10-6700T. Installed latest 9.2 NAS4Free and connected a 500 GB SATA disk directly to the board and transferred a large file from my W7 to that disk resulting in a great speed of 60 - 70 MB/s (hurrah!)

So, I replaced the board of my NAS server with that new board, but left my old 8-port SATA controller in to still host my ZFS raid of my 8 * 2 TB disks. Again transferred same file (size: 2.5 GB) to the NAS: disappointing speeds. I can't remember exactly what it was, but also saw, that the total power consumption was still too high. That was the point when I decided to kick out the controller.

ZPOOL EXPORT ZFS
Kicked out the old controller
connected 7 out of my 8 disks to the board directly (board only has 7 SATA connectors)
added a Promise 4310 4-port SATA controller and conneced the last ZFS disk as well as the 500GB Sata disk as a system disk to that controller
booted up
ZPOOL IMPORT ZFS (nicely imported and reassigned disk names)

I did not do anything with the disks nor the other controller, just a direct migration.

Again copied the same test file from W7 to that config ... and guess what: I get speeds up to 85 MB/s (jappajappaduuuuuu ...). And I also got the power consumption down by another 30W.

As I made changes without the intermediate tests I presume, the real problem was a bad W7 installation along with that old controller ... And I could reduce my total power consumption from 160W down to 99W in idle mode. Forgot to measure previous config under load (would expect it to havin gone up to almost 200W, but new config consumes 120- 130 W under full load.

I left ZFS still on old version, though. Once I am sure everything is fine, I'll upgrade and will see, whether that has any impact to performance ... stay tuned

cheers
Peter

[00Roush]

Great to hear you are seeing better speeds and that you got your issues sorted out. And lowered overall power consumption as well!

I am always trying to eek out better performance... By chance do you know how fast your drive is in your Win 7 machine? If it is capable I would think you could possibly see speeds of 100-110 MB/sec with a couple of tweaks. If your interested try changing CIFS/SMB Send/Receive Buffer Sizes to 0 and then installing ZFS Kernel Tune extension. For my setup those tweaks took me from 70-90 MB/sec read/write to 100-110 MB/sec read/write.

Again great to hear N4F is working better. Let us know how it goes if you end up changing the ZFS version.

00Roush

[psechser]

I haven't used in Win7, but I have seen those > 100 MB/s peaks occasionally. ZFS kernel tune is installed ... but whenever I played around with send/receive buffers, things keep to turn out badly, i.e. transfer rates went down (earlier versions) ...

I am still hesitant upgrading to latest ZFS version, though. On the other hand, no particular reason at the moment, not to ...

good point ... will upgrade ..

Peter