HP N40L Performance

DeWalt on 07/11/2012 - 08:41

I bought myself an HP N40L and installed FreeNAS - mainly because it's free. Even with the 8gb of RAM, I could not sustain a transfer of more than 40mbytes a second. I read every forum, tried every parameter tweak etc. Nothing made a difference.

I have now updated to FreeNAS 8.3 (which was released a few days ago). Without changing a single setting, my performance has skyrocketed from ~40 megabytes a second to over 70 megabytes a second.

If you're running FreeNAS on the N40L, I highly recommend the update to version 8.3. Please make sure you have the experience to update the firmware - and SAVE your settings first, in case something goes wrong. You may need to "recover" your system.

Here's the link to the 64-bit binaries… Make sure you're running 64-bit FreeNAS if you use these binaries.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8.3.0/…

DeWalt

Computing HP NAS Server

Comments

  • crazyj on 07/11/2012 - 09:01

    Thanks for this! ps: how did you measure this?

    • DeWalt on 07/11/2012 - 16:50

      Hi Warwickjames,

      Under Windows 8, you are given the sustained transfer rate in a graphical form (ie. a real-time update). This also tells you the transfer rate of megabytes per second. I can also repeat a similar set of feedback under Linux - so it's not a "Windows 8" thing :)

      Hope that helps

      DeWalt

  • tonyjzx on 08/11/2012 - 09:26

    my n36l box is a pov setup (ie. 2gb, 4 x 2tb, cdrom, ati video) and the upg to 8.3 went surprisingly well

    the update to zfs v28 was a bit odd but faultless

    otherwise i notice the IF a bit slower but who cares - it does add more features

    • DeWalt on 08/11/2012 - 09:39

      Hi Tonyjzx,

      When I did my research, people were recommending that the systems have 8gb of RAM for zfs because it's memory hungry. I never tested this myself, but I paid a pittance for 8gbs … this might make the difference.

      I'm running my system off an 8gb USB disk. I also run WD green (ie. the slower) drives - and i'm still getting over 70mb/sec - which is fantastic for a cheap NAS.

  • tonyjzx on 08/11/2012 - 13:31

    i'm using 2 of the 1Gb ecc sticks (I got a 2nd stick for free)

    when i check mem usage half is idle

    mine runs off a old 2Gb usb stick

    never had a performance issue with it

    my other N40L box is fine too, it has 4Gb and when i was using it under freenas it had heaps of free mem also

    • DeWalt on 08/11/2012 - 13:37

      What performance are you getting (sustained)?
      I can point you to many forums discussing the performance issues with FreeNas and the N40L, so i'm surprised to hear you didn't have an issue. Maybe some are luckier than others :)

  • tonyjzx on 08/11/2012 - 15:10

    always about 40mb/sec

    i do have a cisco switch between my desktop, this server and windows server and there's never been a performance issue

    since like everyone else i sit on n300 wireless 99% of the times it barely matters

  • tonyjzx on 08/11/2012 - 20:30

    i'm home now and just did a test

    my i7 desktop with rtl card, 7200rpm sata

    cisco gbe

    my n36l with gbe, 7200rpm sata

    90Mb/sec on a 1Gb file sustained

    burns on 2Gb mem

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