Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:14:55 +1000 From: Danny Carroll <fbsd@dannysplace.net> To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Areca vs. ZFS performance testing. Message-ID: <490A782F.9060406@dannysplace.net>
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Hello all, I've just become the proud new owner of an Areca 1231-ML which I plan to use to set up an office server. I'm very curious as to how ZFS compares to a hardware solution so I plan to run some tests before I put this thing to work. The purpose of this email is to find out if anyone would like to see specific things tested as well as perhaps get some advice on how to get the most information out of the tests. My setup: Supermicro X7SBE board with 2Gb ram and an E6550 Core 2 Duo. FreeBSD 7.0-Stable compiled with amd64 sources from mid August. 1 x ST9120822AS 120gb disk (for the OS) For the array(s) 9 x ST31000340AS 1tb disks 1 x ST31000333AS 1tb disk (trying to swap this for a ST31000340AS) My thoughts are to do the following tests with bonnie++: 1 5 disk Areca Raid5 2 5 Disk ZFS RaidZ1 (Connected to Areca in JBOD mode) 3 5 Disk ZFS RaidZ1 (Connected to ICH9 On board SATA controller) 4 5 disk Areca Raid6 5 5 Disk ZFS RaidZ2 (Connected to Areca in JBOD mode) 6 5 Disk ZFS RaidZ2 (Connected to ICH9 On board SATA controller) 7 10 disk Areca Raid5 8 10 Disk ZFS RaidZ1 (Connected to Areca in JBOD mode) 9 10 disk Areca Raid6 10 10 Disk ZFS RaidZ2 (Connected to Areca in JBOD mode) My aim is to see what sort of performance gain you get by buying an Areca card for use in JBOD as well as seeing how ZFS compares to the hardware solution which offers write caching etc. I'm really only interested in testing ZFS's volume management performance, so for that reason I will also put ZFS on the Areca Raid drives. Not sure if it's a good idea to create 2 Raid drives and stripe them or simply use 1 large disk and give it to ZFS. Any thoughts on this setup as well as advice on what options to give to bonnie++ (or suggestions on another disk testing package) are very welcome. I do have some concern about the size of the eventual array and ZFS' use of system memory. Are there guidelines available that give advice on how much memory a box should have with large ZFS arrays? Can an AMD64 kernel make use of memory above 2g? -D
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