I’ve been using Rockstor for a while now, and I’m really impressed with how it’s been performing as my home NAS solution. The flexibility and ease of use have been fantastic! I’m currently running a 4-bay setup with a combination of SSD and HDD drives using Btrfs, and the overall system is stable.
That said, I’ve noticed that the file transfer speeds are a bit slower than I expected, especially when moving large files between my PC and the Rockstor server. I’m using a 10Gb Ethernet connection, so I thought the transfer speeds would be faster.
I’m wondering if there’s something in my das storage configuration that I could optimize, or if there’s any setting I might have missed. I’ve already tinkered with the file transfer settings in the dashboard, but I’m hoping to get a little more speed.
If anyone has any tips or best practices for improving transfer speeds, I’d love to hear them! Thanks in advance for your help!
What kinds of transfer speeds are you getting and what are you expecting?
Also, what protocols do you use? SFTP? SAMBA? NFS?
Finally, how are your pools and shares set up w/r/t which disk is in which pool and the resp. RAID profiles. I only ask, because it’d be interesting to know if you notice a difference with files stored on the SSDs vs. the HDDs – but that may be a nonsense question, depending on how your pools are set up.
I don’t know anything about DAS, though. So I can’t help on that front.
I’ve done many speed tests with Rockstor on a 10G LAN and SAMBA. The maximum speed you will see with a 10G LAN is at the very start of the PC transfer and should be around 960 MBs. This happens when Rockstor has free cache available. As the cache fills, the speeds will decline to what the HDDs are capable of. That is usually around 120MBs per drive or for higher capactity faster drives, up to 240MBs average. If you have 2 drives in Raid-0, sustained transfers PC to NAS will be about 2X the normal disk sequencial write speeds. BUT, all this will happen ONLY if the PC drives being read are up to the task. Likewise, from NAS to PC, the sustained transfer speeds will only be as fast as Rockstor can read the pool and how fast the PC can store it.
Testing with SSDs on both ends, a sustainable 950-1000 MBs is possible will 3 SSDs in Raid-0 each side. One would think two SSDs witth R/W speeds over 500MBs would suffice, but the BTRFS overhead on a 3.4GHz Xeon CPU with 32G ECC mem is about 25% when maxed out with 2 drives, but 3 SSDs give enough headroom to sustain max 10G LAN speeds. Did a ton of testing and literally wore out 3 SSDs in less than 3 months. LOL! It was a lot of fun!
I also tested a lot with a fast M.2 1TB drive on the PC side and got the same results with 2 and 3 SSDs on the NAS side.
btrfs free space cache management which helps the read and write operations, has now moved to a default of using space_cache=v2 for mounting options. Depending on the age of your pool(s) (since you mentioned you’ve been using it for “a while”) it might still be on v1. I think somewhere in the 5.x Kernel line v2 became the default. If it’s still on v1 there is a process to convert it to the newer, more efficient version (I did it late last year, since my pool had been around since ~2017). I don’t know how much of a difference that makes (considering all the factors that @Tex1954 mentioned and whether his tests were using the newer or original version of managing the free space cache) but I also assume that any further development/optimization will be focusing on the v2.
Not to fear! All the testing will be redone with all your (Rockstor Developers) suggestions in a better more easily read format for publication! However, it has to wait until my NEW NAS is built with new parts and old NAS setup is upgraded to match. Then we will see what happens again on a 10G LAN setup!
I just bought a new larger 10G SFP+ Switch to integrate 5 setups, one of which will be for testing anything and everything y’all send my way. Eventually, I hope to be able to setup the test box so that someone can log into it and control it to their hearts desire over the internet for any reason.
I just built a nas system, when i was trying to get RTC Awake and WOL I found that if I used the on board eth port was giving me fits, so I used an network card from a build 20 years ago and that fixed a lot of ills, I can now stream HD tv shows from it! Happy days Indeed!
