I have been using Xpenology for a while, but as the project is practically abandoned, DSM6 is getting older and possibly vulnerable. Besides that, my home-lab test server (NAS) has been turning into my actual college and work data store server. I am now concerned about the potential data loss because of using this unofficial NAS OS.
The issue comes when trying to find an OS that offers a similar performance as DSM does. My current hardware configuration is an Intel 6700K CPU, 32GB RAM, LSI HBA 2308 controller, 6 x 3TB disks RAID6 + 2 x 250GB Mirror read/write cache, and a 10gb/s optical fibre network adapter. The actual performance when copying a file is about 1GB/s for the first 5GB, and about 400MB/s for the remaining data. I use this NAS for storing general home/office-like data. So, from simple Word documents to 10GB video clips. No databases or any other stuff that requires specific features.
I have already tried with TrueNAS, Ubuntu, Debian, Windows Server, FreeNAS, OpenMediaVault, and probably some others. However, and unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get close to the copy speeds gotten with the current DSM setup. With those systems, I used different packages and/or/of software-based RAID. I tried configuring the RAID Cache when possible, and also tried different RAID types. All results with inferior performance than DSM.
I hope some of you have tried configuring a similar setup and have good news. Thank you!
What speeds were you getting with TrueNAS (Scale/Core?) ?
If the Xpen is working for you, consider getting your backups watertight so you can recover if there is a disaster and kicking the can down the road? Or sell some of the kit and get and get a Syno with a PCI slot and re-use some of your hardware?
I would say to give TrueNAS Core (FreeBSD) or TrueNAS Scale (Debian) another try, whichever you prefer. Do RAID-z2 on the 6 HDDs.
For the write cache, keep in mind that ZIL (SLOG) will only gain you write performance if you do sync writes. The ZIL is just a place for data to get written (synced) to while it still resides in memory, before it gets committed to your main pool with a normal write transaction. So if you have small files, or if you do a lot of async writes, with ZIL you gain nothing other than more drives to do useless writes on.
Don’t use ZIL. You have enough RAM (32 GB) to write to and then write to disk, especially if you don’t do sync writes.
ZIL is a good feature to have when you are running a NFS server with sync mounts and use them for things like databases, or when you run iSCSI targets for other network devices.
Don’t use L2ARC either. L2ARC is useful only when you read data that is too big to fit in your RAM, but that it would fit on your SSD. You don’t have that kind of big data.
Give ZFS another go without either read or write caching.
I assume you mean when you copy a file onto the NAS from an external source.
Do you frequently copy files so large? Have you tried using the NAS for a week and not benchmarking it, to see if you can actually live with it?
Just by the way: Xpenology is alive and kicking and updating all the time. For loaders you can use ARC, or XX. Both support the latest DSM (7.2.x) for most devices. I’m quite happy with it. Only thing missing for me is easier network/sata/fan control support.