FreeNAS Write Speed

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.