FreeNAS vs Windows Server 2012 R2 Storage Performance

[Sevilla]

Anyone have any experience comparing FREENAS performance (talking standard 20+TB 5 drive array in Raid Z no SSD flash cache) vs the same hardware but running in Server 2012 R2 as a storage pool? I currently have a 1GbE network, but will be upgrading to a 10GbE soon.

 

Can't seem to find a decent comparison, and currently I'm weighing my options.

[jde3]

Windows pry would win? It's doing a lot less work. They have shittier programmers though so you never know. You are also hobbling ZFS in the test.

 

ZFS is about data integrity not really performance, but as it works out it's performance isn't bad. A more fair test would be between Windows and UFS.

[leadeater]

ZFS RAIDZ1 vs Storage Spaces Single Parity then ZFS would win by a lot, that's an area where Storage Spaces is rather crap at. Storage Spaces Dual Parity is actually Erasure Coding so performs a bit better but realistically if it's not a cold low access archive you have to use a Journal SSD or Tiering if you want to use Parity with Storage Spaces.

Edited July 15, 2018 by leadeater

[jde3]

3 minutes ago, leadeater said:

ZFS RAIDZ1 vs Storage Spaces Single Parity then ZFS would win by a lot, that's an area when Storage Spaces is rather crap at. Storage Spaces Dual Parity is actually Erasure Coding so performs a bit better but realistically if it's not a cold low access archive you have to use a Journal SSD or Tiering if you want to use Parity with Storage Spaces.

Just... wow. and I thought RaidZ1 was a dog..

[leadeater]

42 minutes ago, jde3 said:

Just... wow. and I thought RaidZ1 was a dog..

This one is much older and slower, have to be careful not to spook it else it'll die .

[Sevilla]

So to add a bit of info, I'd be using this as a file server which holds documents/media/etc. It also is being used to hold data for a Plex server.

 

Clearly it's never really expected to have super crazy heavy use, but I'd like to ensure performance remains the same as it is now, or is better. Currently on Freenas 11U5 and it runs fine without issues but considering moving this and other servers I have at home to a Windows Server house (cause Im crazy).

[jde3]

18 minutes ago, Sevilla said:

So to add a bit of info, I'd be using this as a file server which holds documents/media/etc. It also is being used to hold data for a Plex server.

 

Clearly it's never really expected to have super crazy heavy use, but I'd like to ensure performance remains the same as it is now, or is better. Currently on Freenas 11U5 and it runs fine without issues but considering moving this and other servers I have at home to a Windows Server house (cause Im crazy).

Why? You hate your data or something? What did that poor data ever do to you?

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, Sevilla said:

So to add a bit of info, I'd be using this as a file server which holds documents/media/etc. It also is being used to hold data for a Plex server.

 

Clearly it's never really expected to have super crazy heavy use, but I'd like to ensure performance remains the same as it is now, or is better. Currently on Freenas 11U5 and it runs fine without issues but considering moving this and other servers I have at home to a Windows Server house (cause Im crazy).

You'd barely get over 100MB/s write using pure Storage Spaces Parity so networking over 1Gbps would be a bit of a waste, read performance will still be excellent though.

 

Storage Spaces Two-Way Mirror is used when you need performance, it's much like RAID 10. Anyway to get a parity configuration to work with good performance for both read and write you need to a bit more complex setup than just adding HDDs to a pool, it's the really big downside to Storage Spaces in that regard. The easiest method is to put an SSD in the system, add it to the pool then set it's mode to Journal (write-back cache).

 

If you need a more complex configuration it does it exceptionally well but it's not cheap nor easy to do correctly or well documented.