I recently ran across a series of blog entries on FreeNAS testing for speeds and such, located at a blog by a guy named Jake. His first post on the subject was pretty negative about FreeNAS in general, but it looks like he might have made a few mistakes that might be pretty common if you're new to FreeNAS. If you saw his previous blog post regarding FreeNAS performance rates, you might want to take a look - as he admits, some mistakes were made regarding those older tests that might have accidentally short-changed FreeNAS's capabilities.
The whole crux of his mistake seems to be a lack of RAM:
- FreeNAS needs RAM for ZFS to do what it does best
- A single spindle just isn't a good test for ZFS
- Didn't do my homework on FreeNAS or ZFS
- FreeNAS needs RAM - more than 3GB
- ...
So, the lesson here is, if you're trying out FreeNAS and aren't getting some of the results you were expecting, check your RAM.
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