17 December 2015

10gbps over SMB on a 45Drives Storinator

If you missed the last LinusTechTips video that featured Unraid, you'll want to check it out, but he recently published another one showcasing how Unraid helped him achieve 10gbps throughput over SMB on his Storinator from 45drives.

If you missed the last LinusTechTips video that featured Unraid, you'll want to check it out, but he recently published another one showcasing how Unraid helped him achieve 10gbps throughput over SMB on his Storinator from 45drives. Linus first showcased the hardware in a video earlier this year where he went over his goals / needs for the box and how he was hoping to saturate a 10gbps network connection during SMB transfers from his editor workstations. However, after completing his initial ZFS setup using FreeNAS, two things were discovered:

  1. Changing the ZFS configuration once it's set and data is in place is a pain.
  2. Performance for a single SMB write operation only achieved ~450MB/s (approx. 3.6gbps)

After building two temporary repositories to hold copies of all the data previously configured on the 45drives unit, Linus made a number of efforts to tweak the FreeNAS configuration in an effort to improve write performance further. After numerous attempts and no change, he decided to reach out to us at see if we could help improve things for him a bit. With a little bit of network and SMB tuning, we were able to get over a 2x performance improvement to network transfers. Combined with the simple expansion capabilities with Unraid and ease of configuration, Linus was very happy with the end results.

One of the really exciting parts of this video was the fact that Linus was using an unreleased copy of Unraid OS 6.2 for this and a few other videos he's been doing lately. Curious about the new features? See if you can spot them in the video and tell us what you found on the forum!

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