I got an email from a user on the FreeNAS help forum asking me if I had tested the write speed of my ZFS RAID array.
He was upset that he was only getting 45 MB/second.
So I tested it:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=mytestfile.out bs=1000 count=1000000
1000000+0 records in
1000000+0 records out
1000000000 bytes transferred in 49.676133 secs (20130391 bytes/sec)
Pretty abysmal.
I’m running on three 500GB IDE drives plugged into three Promise Ultra100 TX2 dual channel IDE controllers on a 2.3GHz Xeon with 1 GB of RAM, so it’s not the speediest of hardware.
Just for grins I tested the read performance by reversing the dd command:
# dd of=/dev/null if=mytestfile.out bs=1000
1000000+0 records in
1000000+0 records out
1000000000 bytes transferred in 21.032432 secs (47545619 bytes/sec)
As you would expect, the read performance is much better than the write.
I had run a whole bunch of tests on the hardware when I was building my OpenFiler box, I suppose I should run those tests again using FreeNAS.
I’ll have to figure out how to get bonnie++ running under FreeBSD.
