Hello people,
Alright, my RAID/ZFS drama continues. The thing was working perfectly for
a few months, and now performance has turned abysmal. It's a 16TB array
running as a media server. If there's one client streaming data, no
problem. Even two. But add a bunch of little things accessing the pool and
it crawls. You hit Play on a video and there's a 5 second delay before
starting. Skip a music track, again, 5 second delay. Kinda risiculous,
right?
No errors anywhere, zpool srub found nothing wrong, etc. The server's load
average, though, is always super high (like >4, sometimes up to 6), a lot
of waiting for IO.
The only idea I have is that using the system's built-in SATA to run eight
3tb harddrives is not able to keep up with demands. So I'm thinking of
getting a nice SATA expeansion card to off-load some of the processing off
the CPU, hopefully that'll help.
So, a couple questions:
1. Can anyone think of any other reason the filesystem is suddenly acting
like this? It was fine when there was less data on it.
2. I feel it should be seemless to move the ZFS pool/drive array from one
SATA connection to another. I this correct? The array uses two separate
SATA connections, but I figure worst case I plug them in in the wrong
order, it fails, I reverse them and restart and no problem. Is this
true? I don't want to nuke my ZFS pool...
3. Can anyone recommend a good SATA card with e-SATA ports? I have one
that came with the drive enclosure but it is not Linux compatible.
Thanks!