UPDATED WITH BOTH iSCSI & AFP RESULTS
I’ve recently setup a ZFS raidz with 7 disks using NexentaStor, natively this doesn’t come with AFP, but I managed to get a package and get this all working (which i’ll demo in an upcoming tutorial), one thing i noticed however is that I could never find any benchmarks that tested the general use of a NAS… i.e. using CIFS or AFP over a network to another machine and testing performance. There are literally 0 AFP benchmarks for NexentaStor due to its non-native support. So here it is
Test Environment:
NAS: 7 SAMSUNG Spinspoint F3 2tb Hard drives connected via SATA & SATA-II, in a ZFS raidz running on NexentaStor 3
Network: 1000BaseT Gigabit LAN
Test Machine: MacMini with 1gb memory (disk tests are cached in memory for speed) running XBench to benchmark
…
So the results are decent (90MB/s) however on the box itself I can reach speeds of around 170MB/s (today after some tweaking i got it up to 310MB/s :))… perhaps 90MB/s is reaching the limit for Gbit LAN, if I have time at any point i’ll try using link aggregation for a 2gbit test (which i hear works well over AFP)
Since the AFP test i’ve also setup iSCSI and achieved the following results with the same hardware setup and using COMSTAR iSCSI built into ZFS:
