Hi everyone!
I’m Franklin Hua, Technical Marketing Manager for Synology America, the American division of Synology Inc. Here, I’ll be posting topics for SMB/SME applications, or of scientific discussion.
So, here’s my first post, a video showing how the performance of the RS3411xs achieving 1000MB/Sec and 100,000 IOPS in Iometer.
Storage Hardware
1x RS3411xs
2x RX1211
1x Intel X520-DA2 10GbE in RS3411xs
10x WD30EZRS
24x WD30EZRX
34x 3TB drives -> Single RAID-5 Volume, 1-disk Redundant, about 90TiB Usable.
10GbE Switch – Netgear XSM7224S
2x Benching Computers
Intel Core i5-2400
4GB DDR3 RAM
Intel X520-DA2 10GbE NIC
Procedure
Enable Link Aggregation on both the switch and the RS3411xs.
Set MTU for 9000
Set IOMeter on computer two to be controlled by Iometer on computer one
2x Iometer 16GiB Targets mapped over samba
100,000 IOPS reached with 4K IOP
1000MB/Sec reached with 32K IOP
Have a good day everyone
–Franklin
Hi Franklin,
.
Thanks for the great video and demonstration. However … as you already show the system with consumer HDDs, I would have preferred the network connection also to be with the 4 GB NICs in Link Aggregation mode … I’m not sure that people who use consumer HDDs do have the budget for 10 GB NICs
Will the performance be the same on the DS3611xs versus the RS3411xs? I would guess they use the same CPU/Memory configuration?
While waiting for my DS3611xs to arrive (the DX1211 is already here), could you let me know long it took to create this one single RAID5 volume?
Thanks and looking forward to play with the beast soon myself
Pascal
Hi Pascal
Hope this helps
-Franklin
Dear Franklin,
Thanks a lot for your reply. This is very helpful.
-Pascal
Just as a followup Pascal – with DSM 3.2 (currently as a public Beta) – we now have Quick Volume Build available for the SHR, where the volume will be accessible a lot sooner. So, with regards to my previous example of 34x3TB Drives, the volume will be accessible in hours, so you may start using the storage a lot sooner-the complete consistency check will be handled in the background.
-Franklin
100’000 iops ????? this is ridiculouis… i’m not aware of any common harddrive (except ssd) able to deliver more than 350-400 iops. i am refering to high-end double attached fibre-channel disks as used in high-end systems from hp, hds and others.
so how the hell do you want to achieve that many iops with 68 disks only ???
or are you talking about iops against the 10gbit adapters cache ?
Hi Sandro
You are correct that there are many layers of cache involved which can help increase IOPS performance, such as HDD Cache, and System RAM, to name a couple of examples. However, even if drives are known to have a limited mechanical Random Performance – their Sequential performance is much higher – that is what is measured here in this video.
For example – if we take a Seagate ST31000528AS drive, we can calculate that theoretically has around 80 IOPS of performance, using the following formula
HDD_THEORETICAL_IOPS = T * (I / [ S + L])
As a side note, 10K RPM Drives will have around 140 IOPS, and 15K RPM drives will have around 180 IOPS.
So, we know mechanically what this drive is capable of; however, once I bench this drive directly attached to my computer using IOMeter, I get the following results
Sequential IOPS Performance
6000 Write, 21000 Read
Random IOPS Performance
250 Write, 300 Read
This shows that the various levels of cache will ultimately influence the final resulting performance, as the random performance of the ST31000528AS drive is not near the 80 IOPS which is mathematically predicted.
What you’re seeing in the video is the performance of 34 drives working together in concert – which is how we over 100,000 IOPS using 4KB Sequential IOPS Performance.
For further specifics of performance results, please refer to the RS3411xs Performance Results page, which does include performance measured for sequential and random performance.
Hope this helps.
-Franklin
What brand/model ethernet switch did you use for the test? Does Synology have any published recommendations on switches that support link aggregation?
Thanks.
John
Hi John
I used a Netgear XSM7224S 10GbE Switch for the performance test. The current list of compatible Link Aggregation switches is available here. Note that our engineering department is still testing various 10GbE switches – so the list will be updated when our testing is completed. But for the most part, using a switch that supports IEEE 802.1AX-2008 with LACP should suffice.
Have a good day
-Franklin
Hi Franklin,
I have been CS406, DS207, DS1010+ and now RS3411 user.
I am using ST31500341AS x 6 for raid 5 and it works fine. I read this blog and noticed that you are using WD hdd which is also not on Official Synology RS3411 compatible HDD. The official list only state all different of enterprise drive but not desktop drive like those you and me using.
I would like to know what is your opinion on the reliability and also the performance of using various disk which some has features like NCQ, TLER etc on RS3411. I am thinking of changing out all HDD to something bigger but cannot decide on using green drive or something like ES.2 or RE4.
tks
sam
Hi Sam
Thanks for being a long time support of the Synology DiskStation!
About your questions, I’ve used the WD Drive as I wanted to show what the RS3411RPxs was capable of using a drive that was not intended for performance applications.
Concerning your second question, actually, it’s in queue as a topic to discuss the various technology differences out there with HDDs, and when to use what drive for what application. Nevertheless, if you’re looking for high resiliency against hardware failure, I would suggest Enterprise-class drives.
Enterprise-class drives are often used for businesses where they cannot suffer a disk failure, or loss of availability with their data. Any loss of availability would result in that business losing thousands of dollars per second. So, of you need this availability, then I would suggest considering Enterprise-class drives.
In terms of compatibility and support, I would strongly suggest that you use Enterprise-Class drives within the RS3411xs, as these are the drives which have gone through our compatibility testing. Using non-tested drives may result in abnormal behavior which could place your data at risk.
Hope this helps
-Franklin