So I put together a FreeNAS box since I had some not too old drives crash and die while taking the data with them and wanted something better for serving files as well as to handle my Plex. Tonight when I decided to do a review on some drives I did a simple speed test. Basically I created a dataset(think folder) that did not have compression turned on to skew the results. I then told the system to tell me how long it took to write a hefty file. For the non geeks feel free to skip down to the explanation:
dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile bs=1024000 count=50000
50000+0 records in
50000+0 records out
51200000000 bytes transferred in 95.467597 secs (536307623 bytes/sec)
dd if=testfile of=/dev/zero bs=1024000 count=50000
50000+0 records in
50000+0 records out
51200000000 bytes transferred in 59.494667 secs (860581335 bytes/sec)
Explanation
That is a 47.68GB file (basically an entire BluRay Disc) written in 95.467597 seconds and read in 59.494667 seconds. In other terms write at 511.462805748MB/s and read at 820.714316368MB/s. That is SSD speeds and better from spinning hard drives and once you get to a certain file size on an SSD it will slow down since it takes longer to write to multiple depth cells and most SSD's that consumers buy are not SLC or SingleLevelCell drives. My Plex is very happy living there.
It is 7 drives that are 7200RPM in a ZFS raidZ3. Basically the pool of drives act as one big drive with the total capacity of around 4 drives with a fault tolerance of 3 failures. What actually slows down the speeds is the fault tolerance writes since much more data has to be written than it takes to read the same file.
Like most of my projects this has been a few years in the making. I buy a part here and a part here and pay it off as I can with a lot of used parts. In fact the only thing that was brand new was the drives. A good portion was Ebay used stuff and the rest were refurbished and/or open box. Nearly everything either had a rebate or some sort of cash back program with the drives being on sale.
Now who wants to watch a movie
dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile bs=1024000 count=50000
50000+0 records in
50000+0 records out
51200000000 bytes transferred in 95.467597 secs (536307623 bytes/sec)
dd if=testfile of=/dev/zero bs=1024000 count=50000
50000+0 records in
50000+0 records out
51200000000 bytes transferred in 59.494667 secs (860581335 bytes/sec)
Explanation
That is a 47.68GB file (basically an entire BluRay Disc) written in 95.467597 seconds and read in 59.494667 seconds. In other terms write at 511.462805748MB/s and read at 820.714316368MB/s. That is SSD speeds and better from spinning hard drives and once you get to a certain file size on an SSD it will slow down since it takes longer to write to multiple depth cells and most SSD's that consumers buy are not SLC or SingleLevelCell drives. My Plex is very happy living there.
It is 7 drives that are 7200RPM in a ZFS raidZ3. Basically the pool of drives act as one big drive with the total capacity of around 4 drives with a fault tolerance of 3 failures. What actually slows down the speeds is the fault tolerance writes since much more data has to be written than it takes to read the same file.
Like most of my projects this has been a few years in the making. I buy a part here and a part here and pay it off as I can with a lot of used parts. In fact the only thing that was brand new was the drives. A good portion was Ebay used stuff and the rest were refurbished and/or open box. Nearly everything either had a rebate or some sort of cash back program with the drives being on sale.
Now who wants to watch a movie