FreeNAS support and experience with HGST Ultrastar He12

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cfheoh

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Dec 21, 2017
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Hi everyone,

I am building a ~100TB box with a Quanta D51BV-2U. This is a 12-slot chassis and for a client in the CG/Animation space. The drive I plan to use will be HGST Ultrastar He12 (P/N: HUH721212ALE600 or LE604).

I have not seen anyone using this drive with FreeNAS and I seek those who has. Can anyone share the driver support, performance and reliability of this drive with FreeNAS?

Appreciate your valuable advice and sharing. Thank you

/CF
 

pricklypunter

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Nov 10, 2015
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I don't have experience of that drive, but for that sort of performance level, I have to ask, why FreeNAS? Are there other reasons, GUI, utils etc?

I would think if its purely for storage/ filing, there would be much better options out there without the bloat :)
 
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cfheoh

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Dec 21, 2017
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I don't have experience of that drive, but for that sort of performance level, I have to ask, why FreeNAS? Are there other reasons, GUI, utils etc?

I would think if its purely for storage/ filing, there would be much better options out there without the bloat :)
Thank you for your reply.

I resell NetApp but their price is too cost prohibitive. I have built up FreeNAS (to sell) up to 60TB or so, and they are working great with the HGST 6TB drives. But this new opportunity is asking for a 100+TB requirement.

Got some replies from the FreeNAS forums. The SAS/SATA drivers are good to go, and I might give the 12TB drives a try.

Thanks for your help

/CF
 

cfheoh

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Drives will work but if you want to move files quickly, FreeNAS isn't the fastest.
From my past experience, running with 2 x 10GbE to 40 workstations networked with 1GbE ports yielded an average of 70-75MB/sec of throughput at the client side. It was decent performance and I haven't got any performance related issues from the end users for 16 months now. I am glad the FreeNAS worked out well ... so far.

Of course, NetApp can run much faster but comes with a hefty price. The client isn't exactly ready to invest in a NetApp.

[PLEASE ADVISE] I would really appreciate if you can share your pointers of better solutions out there.

Thank you
/CF
 

MiniKnight

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Mar 30, 2012
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From my past experience, running with 2 x 10GbE to 40 workstations networked with 1GbE ports yielded an average of 70-75MB/sec of throughput at the client side. It was decent performance and I haven't got any performance related issues from the end users for 16 months now. I am glad the FreeNAS worked out well ... so far.

Of course, NetApp can run much faster but comes with a hefty price. The client isn't exactly ready to invest in a NetApp.

[PLEASE ADVISE] I would really appreciate if you can share your pointers of better solutions out there.

Thank you
/CF
If you just need 75MB/s then FreeNAS can do OK. I thought you were doing video production where we're seeing mostly 10G to each workstation if not more. If all you have is 100MB files, people won't notice. If you're moving 100GB files, the upgrade is enormous.

How many concurrent at 75MB/s each?
 
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cfheoh

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If you just need 75MB/s then FreeNAS can do OK. I thought you were doing video production where we're seeing mostly 10G to each workstation if not more. If all you have is 100MB files, people won't notice. If you're moving 100GB files, the upgrade is enormous.

Yes, post production, especially now with 4K resolution, demands 600-800MB/sec. We advise our clients to separate that from FreeNAS.

How many concurrent at 75MB/s each?
- It's a mix, but we have less than 5.
 

gea

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Dec 31, 2010
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For my ZFS filers I always prefer the HGST HE SAS drives. I mostly use the 6/8GB models as they are cheaper per GB. If you want performance you want many of them as iops of a ZFS pool scale with vdevs while sequential performance scale with number of datadisks.

From my tests the genuine Solaris ZFS v37 is the fastest ZFS regarding pool performance, sequential resilvering performance and SMB performance. The last is probably due the kernelbased SMB server that is often faster than SAMBA.

Oracle Solaris 11.3 is even faster than OmniOS, a free Solaris that is a fork of an early Solaris 11 with Open-ZFS v5000, one of the fastest, stabelst and minimalisticst Open-ZFS servers as it is stripped down to core storage features (iSCSI/FC, NFS and SMB) from Solaris - no additonal 3rd party services needed (and often not available like the many home services ex Plex and others on FreeNAS)

I have no current ZFS performance comparisons between BSD, Linux and Solarish regarding ZFS and SMB performance but have done a test series between Solaris and OmniOS Open-ZFS with a 4 disk basic pool of the HGST.

From my tests Windows was always a critical point regarding driver (use always newest from Intel) and driver settings lile MTU and Int throtteling.

see my performance out of 4 x HGST HE8 related to disk type and RAM.
http://napp-it.org/doc/downloads/optane_slog_pool_performane.pdf
 
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cfheoh

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For my ZFS filers I always prefer the HGST HE SAS drives. I mostly use the 6/8GB models as they are cheaper per GB. If you want performance you want many of them as iops of a ZFS pool scale with vdevs while sequential performance scale with number of datadisks.

From my tests the genuine Solaris ZFS v37 is the fastest ZFS regarding pool performance, sequential resilvering performance and SMB performance. The last is probably due the kernelbased SMB server that is often faster than SAMBA.

Oracle Solaris 11.3 is even faster than OmniOS, a free Solaris that is a fork of an early Solaris 11 with Open-ZFS v5000, one of the fastest, stabelst and minimalisticst Open-ZFS servers as it is stripped down to core storage features (iSCSI/FC, NFS and SMB) from Solaris - no additonal 3rd party services needed (and often not available like the many home services ex Plex and others on FreeNAS)

I have no current ZFS performance comparisons between BSD, Linux and Solarish regarding ZFS and SMB performance but have done a test series between Solaris and OmniOS Open-ZFS with a 4 disk basic pool of the HGST.

From my tests Windows was always a critical point regarding driver (use always newest from Intel) and driver settings lile MTU and Int throtteling.

see my performance out of 4 x HGST HE8 related to disk type and RAM.
http://napp-it.org/doc/downloads/optane_slog_pool_performane.pdf
Thanks for sharing your experience. It is good knowledge.

I gave up on OpenSolaris years ago, after b134. Right now, most of the opportunities I work on are usually very cost conscious, and I try to provide the hardware with the most attractive price.

I am also aware of the flakiness of SAMBA, even v4. The native kernel based SMB is definitely more reliable, but again, we update our customers about their choices. As I mentioned before, I resell NetApp, and the end user can opt for a better technology in ONTAP. But I don't like the CDOT very much. It's not 7-mode anymore.

Nice chatting with you. Thank you