Best SATA drive for FreeNAS SLOG - Intel S3710 or S4600?

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T_Minus

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Feb 15, 2015
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Can one of these optane drives be used in a PCI-E adapter on an older supermicro x9 machine?
yep! Funtin adapter should work fine.

I'm about to try one on an Intel E5 v1/2 board and see how it improves some drives :)
 

fohdeesha

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I use Optane 32GB as ZIL on a PCIe M.2 adapter on a SuperMicro X8 motherboard. Works very well. 200x better sync write performance :) I am on FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE.
I was planning on doing the exact same on a new ZFS build, but this STH article and others: https://www.servethehome.com/intel-optane-memory-m-2-16gb-32gb-work-servers-zfs-cache-devices/

warn that it's very slow for an NVMe drive and more importantly has incredibly poor write endurance - 100GB/day - they do NOT recommend them for use as an SLOG device

not sure what else to look at, I don't do many sync writes so I don't want to dump $400 on a big boy Optane, but would still like something small there to reliably boost sync writes out of the sub 5MB/s range

EDIT: just realized the 58GB Optane 800P is only $100, and has much better write endurance, guess I'll go with that
 
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BackupProphet

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What I do is turn off sync write for areas there is no need, for example ISO files of different Linux/Windows distributions. But for databases or virtual machines, having sync enabled is a good idea.

It is not slow at all, performs better than my Intel S3700. Endurance may be an issue, but it is a cheap start until the big Optane drives becomes more affordable.
 
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svtkobra7

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Jan 2, 2017
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Optane! Interesting thread here ATM : SLOG benchmarking and finding the best SLOG

Optane 280GB (as 20GB vDisk) v. S3700 100GB = Optane less than 1/10 of the latency and almost 10x the sync write speed at 8192 kbytes.

Optane 900p - 280GB (20GB vDisk)
Code:
diskinfo -wS /dev/nvd2
/dev/nvd2
          512             # sectorsize
          21474836480     # mediasize in bytes (20G)
          41943040        # mediasize in sectors
          0               # stripesize
          0               # stripeoffset
          Virtual disk    # Disk descr.
          VMWare NVME-0001        # Disk ident.

Synchronous random writes:
           0.5 kbytes:     45.2 usec/IO =     10.8 Mbytes/s
             1 kbytes:     47.6 usec/IO =     20.5 Mbytes/s
             2 kbytes:     46.5 usec/IO =     42.0 Mbytes/s
             4 kbytes:     44.6 usec/IO =     87.5 Mbytes/s
             8 kbytes:     47.0 usec/IO =    166.2 Mbytes/s
            16 kbytes:     49.8 usec/IO =    314.0 Mbytes/s
            32 kbytes:     58.6 usec/IO =    533.5 Mbytes/s
            64 kbytes:     76.4 usec/IO =    818.3 Mbytes/s
           128 kbytes:    114.6 usec/IO =   1091.1 Mbytes/s
           256 kbytes:    178.9 usec/IO =   1397.5 Mbytes/s
           512 kbytes:    294.3 usec/IO =   1699.2 Mbytes/s
          1024 kbytes:    527.2 usec/IO =   1896.7 Mbytes/s
          2048 kbytes:    981.7 usec/IO =   2037.3 Mbytes/s
          4096 kbytes:   1896.4 usec/IO =   2109.2 Mbytes/s
          8192 kbytes:   3739.1 usec/IO =   2139.6 Mbytes/s
S3700 - 100GB
Code:
root@Carmel-SANG2:~ # diskinfo -wS /dev/da7
/dev/da7
        512             # sectorsize
        100030242816    # mediasize in bytes (93G)
        195371568       # mediasize in sectors
        0               # stripesize
        0               # stripeoffset
        12161           # Cylinders according to firmware.
        255             # Heads according to firmware.
        63              # Sectors according to firmware.
        ATA INTEL SSDSC2BA10    # Disk descr.
        BTTV3452001M100FGN      # Disk ident.
        id1,enc@n500304800139d9fd/type@0/slot@1/elmdesc@Slot_01 # Physical path
        Not_Zoned       # Zone Mode

Synchronous random writes:
         0.5 kbytes:    301.8 usec/IO =      1.6 Mbytes/s
           1 kbytes:    294.7 usec/IO =      3.3 Mbytes/s
           2 kbytes:    265.3 usec/IO =      7.4 Mbytes/s
           4 kbytes:    176.9 usec/IO =     22.1 Mbytes/s
           8 kbytes:    191.4 usec/IO =     40.8 Mbytes/s
          16 kbytes:    235.7 usec/IO =     66.3 Mbytes/s
          32 kbytes:    300.8 usec/IO =    103.9 Mbytes/s
          64 kbytes:    433.2 usec/IO =    144.3 Mbytes/s
         128 kbytes:    686.3 usec/IO =    182.1 Mbytes/s
         256 kbytes:   1265.0 usec/IO =    197.6 Mbytes/s
         512 kbytes:   2489.4 usec/IO =    200.8 Mbytes/s
        1024 kbytes:   4998.6 usec/IO =    200.1 Mbytes/s
        2048 kbytes:  10029.3 usec/IO =    199.4 Mbytes/s
        4096 kbytes:  20055.8 usec/IO =    199.4 Mbytes/s
        8192 kbytes:  40179.3 usec/IO =    199.1 Mbytes/s
 
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BackupProphet

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The most interesting numbers here are the difference at
4kb which is a good default for ZVOLs, especially SQL Server demands 4kb record size and refuse to work on larger record sizes. Because of this you also hardly get a benefit from the transparent ZFS compression :(
8kb which is the typical recordsize for NFS and the default block size for databases like PostgreSQL and Oracle
16kb is the default block size for MySQL

I usually give PostgreSQL a record size of 32kb as it will compress a lot better, and I dont have a heavy OLTP workload. If you have a heavy OLTP workload you should use a 8kb recordsize.

The other sizes are a lot less interesting.

EDIT: Actually recent NFS clients use an optimized block size for communication
 
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Rand__

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VSAN uses 64KB slices so interesting for moving between that and ZFS storage imho :)


also that might actually depend on nfs if I think about it ... makes me wonder whether nfs dynamically adapts...