FreeNAS to Synology?

GodAtum

GodAtum

GodAtum

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I have been running a 4 disk RAID connected to a Dell Perc6i, formatted in ZFS with Freenas, for a couple of years now and been mostly happy with it.

I was thinking of moving to a Synology RS814+ as I realy like the interface and ease of use in extending Hybrid RAID. Also I would be able to link aggregate the 4 NICs for faster speeds.

I am getting around 80-110 Mbps transfer rate atm. What do you think or do you think FreeNAS is better?
 
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I think the Synology devices are expensive for what they are, why do you need faster transfer rates?

I agree for ease of use the Synology OS is great, I had a DS414 (I think) and ran it on a HP Microserver also (much better performance imo)
 
I backup the VMs on my ESXI server regularly (which are 100s of GBs) and it is so slow. If I had enough money I would be tempted to set up a 10GbE!
 
I use NAS4FREE (visualized) and ZFS RAID (4*2TBytes) with an 30Gbyte SSD cache. The SSD helps to speed up the storage access. My bottle neck was networking and in the end I went for point to point (removing the switch latency) connections to my ESX servers (iSCSI and NFS). I've tried combining NICs but in my cases that didn't help much because of the way ESX shares NICs between VMs. You may have to use static IP roots to ensure the point to point connection are used by default for backups or storage traffic.
 
What sort of ZFS array?

IMHO you won't see any speed benefit moving to xpenology you hitting a limit of 80-110mb/s is you saturating gigabit ethernet.

A quick crystal disk mark bench on a Windows 7 vm on my ZFS array gives 400MB/s reads and writes approx (JBOD array 1 Samsung f1 1x wd red 1x wd blue connected to a SAS 6/ir).

Edit: Cheapest way to faster link speed would be Infiniband, cables and cards to do simple point-to-point can be done for less than £100
 
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Frozennova said:
What sort of ZFS array?
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Done know, I'm no expert just used the defaults when setting it up, also I watched a few Youtube videos on how to setup ZFS:D But don't enable data deduplication unless you have a powerful system, it crippled my 4 core VM:( It has to do a lot of work looking for blocks of data that are the same, deleting matching blocks and replacing with pointers or reconstructing blocks that change after a write! It works at the data/bit level not the file level. I don't really understand how it does it, some guy (or girl) with a brain the size of planet probably invented it?
 
ASE001 said:
Done know, I'm no expert just used the defaults when setting it up, also I watched a few Youtube videos on how to setup ZFS:D But don't enable data deduplication unless you have a powerful system, it crippled my 4 core VM:( It has to do a lot of work looking for blocks of data that are the same, deleting matching blocks and replacing with pointers or reconstructing blocks that change after a write! It works at the data/bit level not the file level. I don't really understand how it does it, some guy (or girl) with a brain the size of planet probably invented it?
Click to expand...

dedupe in ZFS requires **** loads of RAM, not so much CPU grunt.
 
GodAtum said:
Anyone had expereince with Windows Server 2012 r2 Storage Spaces? AD permissions in freeNAS is a really pain!
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I haven't tried to this with FreeNAS, but I got it to work with NAS4FREE.

It was quite a while back now and didn't make any notes. If I remember I got snippets of information from multiple sites that I put together to make it work.

Have look at this forum:
http://www.forums.nas4free.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=6637&sid=97a0fe73d53feb495ef026c2f4855572

These are the Auxiliary parameters I have setup:
create mask = 0664
directory mask = 0775
inheritacls=Yes
inheritowner=Yes
inheritpermissions=Yes
maparchive=No
mapreadonly=no
nfs4:acedup=merge
nfs4:chown=yes
nfs4:mode=special


But you also have to change permission on the folder being shared to AD domain administrators group

chown -R administrator:domain_admins /mnt/pool0/DataStore

See this site for more details:
http://n4f.siftusystems.com/index.php/2013/08/05/nas4free-and-windows-file-permissions-acls/

Hope this helps
 
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GodAtum said:
Anyone had expereince with Windows Server 2012 r2 Storage Spaces? AD permissions in freeNAS is a really pain!
Click to expand...

I think I miss read your post, I use Windows Server 2012 r2 Storage Server. I use it to provide iSCSI disks to my window test clusters, it's the only one that I've found to support iSCSI-3 persistent volumes correctly. Clustering in Server2012 only works with iSCSI-3 persistent volumes. I've also have used it to provide NFS storage to my ESX servers. It's fairly straight forward to setup and I haven't had any issues. But I don't get the same IO throughput as I do with NAS4FREE. I think this may be down to the excellent network stack incorporated in FreeBSD rather than the disk subsystem.
 
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