I just thought I would quickly upload some Windows CIFs Initial Performance Comparisons between Oracle Solaris Express 11 versus FreeNAS 0.7/8.0, these tests are conducted from a Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit Workstation, connected via 1Gbe network interface card into a HP ProCurve v1810-24 switch. The NAS installation is using the same HP ProLiant MicroServer hardware and standard 7,200rpm SATA drives. The only difference is the operating system, which I’ve just thrown together without tweaking or fine tuning. I’m using the stock AMD SATA controller, no hardware RAID. Tests were performed using CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo.
Conclusion, out of the box, Oracle Solaris 11 clearly is the superior performer to FreeNAS, it does not really surprise me considering the commericial development of Solaris, compared to Freebsd, which is what FreeNAS is/was based on. I think I have decided what SAN, I’ll be tweaking in the future, to provide a faster solution for providing NFS and iSCSI solutions for VMware vSphere 4.x and 5.0. I’m sure given the time, it may be possible to tweak FreeNAS, but the stability of the operating system has to be seriosuly questioned. (especially when the bge0 driver in FreeBSD is broke! and resets with a Watchdog timeout issue).