Pool questions

TrueNAS General
1

Hello guys,

I’m just about to build all flash based NAS. I’ve got two important questions.

  1. Do I need to setup sVDEV for faster metadata and directory traversal?
  2. Do I need to setup SLOG? I plan to use one of the pool for torrenting.
  3. As I’m using it for torrenting, should I use synchronous settings for pool?
  4. Any specific dataset record size for faster performance for torrenting use case?

I plan to put all active downloads in SSD pool and once completed, they get moved to HDD and then seed the file i need to share with the user i want.

Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.

Thanks

2
  1. Depends on how many files you want to store
  2. Depends on if you plan to use sync writes
  3. Afaik not needed for torrenting (correct me if i’m wrong)
1 Like
3

No need for any of that in my opignion on an all flash system.

2 Likes
4

3-4. You don’t need sync write for torrents. Regarding the recordsize, it depends on the size of the files. I would personally go with 1-4M for big files. Also, zfs (just as any CoW filesystem) is not very well suited for torrents. Although, your separate SSD pool for active downloads should help.

1 Like
5

For an all flash pool, suppose there might be a use case where a sVDEV is useful (tiers of flash speed) but for your average SOHO application, I see little to no benefit.

SLOGs speed up sync writes (especially for HDD-based Pools) and should feature power loss protection. Hence the use of Optane, battery-backed RAM, and like solutions. For an all-flash SOHO system, the use case seems remote.

If a SLOG is indicated due to database integrity and like reasons, then you’ll have to pay some big bucks for a SLOG that can keep up with an all flash array. More likely than not, a SLOG would slow a multi-VDEV flash array down, rather than up.

In other words, unless you have a specific need for a SLOG that you can articulate, chances are that you don’t need one for a large, all-flash array.

Can’t speak to the torrenting questions because I have zero experience with same. Your pipes to the internet better be fat, symmetric to take advantage of the flash arrays.

6

What kind of Linux File System would be the best for torrenting? Should I use TrueNAS or Ubuntu would be better suited for this purpose?

7

Could you please clarify whether I would need the SLOG or not?

8

Only if you use sync writes. Otherwise no.

4 Likes
9

Don’t know. I, for one, plan to use lvm with ext4 (in proxmox) for active downloads and then move them to truenas. Somewhat similar to your setup, an ssd-pool should mitigate the fragmentation issue. However, I still didn’t migrate my transmission setup from the old ext4 NAS.

Also, there are claims that with recordsize>=1M, fragmentation would be no issue. I’m interested in the topic myself and don’t have a solution.

10

Okay and is sync writes necessary for torrenting?

11

No.

12

TBH, torrents are the last thing you want sync writes for. They even have a built-in checksum for mitigating all sorts of outages and data integrity issues…

1 Like
13

That’s what i thought. Any suggestions on the torrenting server setup?

14

Hmm. On the normal OS where ZFS is not used, the writes happens in sync or async mode?

15

It depends on the client app.

16

qBittorrent

17

Qbittorrent doesn’t need or require sync writes.

1 Like
18

Great.

@swc-phil Mind sharing your torrenting setup? I’m just starting with it.

19

As I said, I still didn’t migrate my setup from my old NAS to truenas. So this won’t help you.

20

I have a similar setup implemented, a 4 NVMe pool in Raidz1, you don’t need any special setup, I have 2x qBittorrents instances running (over a 10Gbe network), and they hardly tickle the pool.

The question is where are you going to run the qBittorrent application.? One of mine is running on a Ubuntu desktop, and it uses a lot of CPU resources, whereas the other which runs in an LXC container with web access hardly uses any CPU.

I also use the same pool as my Windows MyDocs & Downloads storage, and as an iSCSI storage, and I’ve never noticed any slowdown in disk access.

1 Like