ZFS and external FireWire drives
We've been dabbling with options for external storage and just for the hell of it, decided to try out a couple of external (LaCie BigDisk Extreme Triple Interface) Firewire drives. The drives are connected to separate PCI-e FireWire 400 cards and were originally partitioned using fdisk and then formatted before adding to a zfs (mirrored) pool. We are using a T2000 (4core) on Solaris10 06/06.
I've noticed some problems with transfer speed (throughput) in other topics, so we have patched the kernel to include 118833-24.
To my great surprise we have been getting performance (see below) of up to 45MB/sec (yipee!!!). Unfortunately some files are falling back to the woefull speed of less than 1.5MB/sec (yech !!!). Is this normal / expected ? Why ?
Is there a tool I can use to monitor what is happening more closely ?
(Eg iostat or zfs iostat ?). Can you tune a ZFS pool ?
Any help/advice greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
Shaun
(Sorry I can't paste an image here, but the performance looks like this -)
fsize(MB) time(s)Mb/s
10.0520
20.0922.22222222
549.10.101832994
100.2835.71428571
200.5238.46153846
501.2639.68253968
1002.6437.87878788
2005.1738.68471954
500261.461.912338407
100023.243.10344828
20001278.51.564333203
30001391.12.156566746
40002501.651.598944697
50003735.11.338652245
