[Ed note: See this thread for the details behind this summary.]
Well for SMB performance on my hardware I would have to say FreeNAS .69 did the best overall. At times EON did perform better but so far my performance has been inconsistent.
As for pros and cons...
FreeNAS .69 is fairly easy to use and had excellent performance with larger smb buffer sizes on my hardware. Along with that a good amount of hardware is supported. Cons would be that FreeNAS .7 RC1 had much slower read performance than .69 and that ZFS support is still in its infancy.
EON takes a good bit more work to get setup but ZFS support is native and mature. With the default buffer sizes in the smb.conf file performance is more consistent but does not allow for max performance with a single client. Larger buffer sizes caused inconsistent performance. Overall hardware support is a bit limited.
Currently I would use FreeNAS .69 due to the better performance and ease of use over EON. More consistent performance and possibly a few scripts to increase ease of use would definitely make the match up more even though.
Now I do want to point out that for my testing I was using the native file system in FreeNAS versus ZFS in EON. If it was FreeNAS ZFS vs EON ZFS I don't doubt EON would come out ahead. Also the majority of my tests were using a single OS drive and a single data drive. (no raid) On top of all of that my conclusions and results are only based on my hardware so take them with a grain of salt.
00Roush
Well for SMB performance on my hardware I would have to say FreeNAS .69 did the best overall. At times EON did perform better but so far my performance has been inconsistent.
As for pros and cons...
FreeNAS .69 is fairly easy to use and had excellent performance with larger smb buffer sizes on my hardware. Along with that a good amount of hardware is supported. Cons would be that FreeNAS .7 RC1 had much slower read performance than .69 and that ZFS support is still in its infancy.
EON takes a good bit more work to get setup but ZFS support is native and mature. With the default buffer sizes in the smb.conf file performance is more consistent but does not allow for max performance with a single client. Larger buffer sizes caused inconsistent performance. Overall hardware support is a bit limited.
Currently I would use FreeNAS .69 due to the better performance and ease of use over EON. More consistent performance and possibly a few scripts to increase ease of use would definitely make the match up more even though.
Now I do want to point out that for my testing I was using the native file system in FreeNAS versus ZFS in EON. If it was FreeNAS ZFS vs EON ZFS I don't doubt EON would come out ahead. Also the majority of my tests were using a single OS drive and a single data drive. (no raid) On top of all of that my conclusions and results are only based on my hardware so take them with a grain of salt.
00Roush