A few weeks ago I decided to use Solaris as the basis of my home NAS. After learning about the benefits of ZFS I just couldn't let myself use anything else.
Setting up the RAIDZ storage (4x500GB in my case) is the easy part. The hard part is making all that storage available to the Windows and Mac clients on my network. So I set about reading all about it. It took me a while to realise that "Samba" and "SMB" were not the same thing. I see things more clearly now that I have made that distinction! What isn't clear though is the performance difference between these two, specifically with a very fast link, i.e. gigabit ethernet. I tried to find a performance comparison, but came up with nothing. I am not interested in how each performs as a multi-user database server, or as a domain controller for a large number of users. I care about single-user raw speed in a small workgroup environment. That is, how fast can I read and write big (>> 10 MiB) files to and from this thing, assuming that only one user is doing this at a time. Because it looks good on paper, I tried CIFS/SMB (i.e. svc:/network/smb/server) first, but I am not impressed. It wouldn't saturate fast ethernet, nevermind gigabit. Not only is the performance abysmal, but I can't make the Mac play nice with it. I just get error -36 or error -50 when trying to connect. Thanks Apple for such informative error codes. So far it doesn't look good for CIFS. I don't much care that it is in-kernel and a "first class citizen" and all that. Make it work and make it fast and we'll talk. Next I'll try Samba. When I have some real numbers to publish, I will. With my test results I will also publish a step-by-step to setting up each service. Has anyone else done a comparison like this? Would you like to share your results, or perhaps any tips, tricks, or tweaks to improve performance of either SMB or Samba? p.s. Details of my Solaris box: O/S: SXDE 1/08 (64 bit) CPU: AMD X2 at 2.4 GHz Asus M2A-VM motherboard (AMD 690G) 2 GB DDR2 dual channel RAM (minus 128 MB for MB video) On-board Realtek Gigabit ethernet on PCI-express (rge driver) 1 x 80 GB PATA disk for O/S 4 x 500 GB SATA disk (Seagate Baracuda 7200.11, 32 MiB cache) for RAIDZ - RAIDZ writes using dd from /dev/zero at about 75 MiB/s - RAIDZ reads using dd to /dev/null at about 150 MiB/s - ftp read in excess of 50 MiB/s (limited by disk speed on receiving end) p.p.s. I asked this question elsewhere but someone pointed me here, so if you notice the duplicate threads, that's why. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
