I decided to use ZFS as my filesystem for data integrity reliability, the usual reasons. I have 2 pools, both mirrors, both with ashift=12: main which consists of the SSDs contains the OS and programs as well as any VMs I decide to create, and vault which consists of the 2 WD Reds, which holds my data.
Performance is horrible. I can’t get over 200MB/s on either pool in sequential reads and for encrypted datasets it’s even worse (55MB/s on both pools)! I’m testing with fio and caching disabled on the datasets. At these speeds, it won’t even keep up with a gigabit NIC. I have no idea what’s going wrong, I thought the SIMD issue was fixed with zfs-0.8.3. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks.
You can get an inland professional SSD at the Micro Center for about $20-25 for your OS drive. They are good and reliable.
One thing to note is that ZFS does a lot of mem copy’s. Faster ram greatly improves performance. If you can’t get your home server running faster with other methods you may want to try a 3rd gen Ryzen and 3200 mhz ECC memory… Looks like you RAM is on the QVL. Double check your RAM settings are correct in the BIOS. That could make a big difference to and easily cause bad performance…
I’d think it’s more likely that AsMedia SATA controller is just shitting itself. I’d say try putting an HBA (LSI 9211-8i/9207-8i are cheap) into it and see if it fixes things.
Even if the flash has bigger read cells, I’m assuming some sort of firmware shenanigans like CoW, block remap, and write consolidation. That work s well enough for journalingfilesystems, but overlap/copy/conflict with what zfs is doing. For instance this controller is compressing data to speed up operations, but most zfs pools are going to do that anyways.
That and no cheap drive that’s 70% full will match the performance out of the box with almost nothing on it.