Optimizing NAS performance

[wolverex]

Hi everyone, I just joined the forum, WIN! Thank you for reading my post!

Anyway I just got a new NAS and have finished building the RAID 5 on 3 disks.
I chose stripe size of 1024kB, or 1MB. File system XFS.

I have some IOzone scans that I did just now

Sorry but what is a record size? Is is the size of the IO request?
I am curious to know if stripe size and record size affect performance and if they should be matched.

i understand that Windows picks 64kB by default when handling transfers after reading the test methodology revision on SmallNetBuilder.

FTP transfers are much faster , 10-20MB/sec faster for read and writes. My application is storage and retrieval of large movies and CD/DVD ISO images from all Windows PCs through the Windows Network Protocol (SMB i believe?)

Any comments on how I have set up my NAS? XFS and 1024 stripe size.

 

[00Roush]

You are correct record size in Iozone is the size of the I/O requested. From there the OS can either use that size or break it down. For example if you are running Iozone on an Win XP machine the maximum I/O size the OS supports is 64k. So if you use 128k record size in Iozone the OS will have to break it down to two 64k I/Os.

As for stripe size... I believe Sammynl did a few tests on that. http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=1685 Basically he came to the conclusion that 64k was best. I believe I have seen other info saying this is a good size to use.

Are you comparing your FTP results to file copies or your Iozone results? Just remember that your client OS can greatly affect your performance with standard file transfers. I can explain in more detail if you would like.

00Roush