I was wondering how Filers handle large files compared to small files. I am talking about storing music files to be accessed via the internet. Is the performance very good? I will be using a 700 series filer.
One way to look at it is that a filer/WAFL uses NVRAM to defer writes and coalesce disk updates to efficiently write large stripes to disk, paying attention to track writing and data locality to make later retrieval efficient. Small files are coalesced into large stripes. RAID overhead of parity updates is minimized (RAID is simply not a real performance issue in a filer - this came up again at a customer meeting the other day...)
Anyway. What's a big music file?
Strike the sentence "Small files are coalesced into large stripes." above and you have a description of large file write/read.
F760 can deliver a lot of aggregate read bandwidth directly off disk (uncached) - 60 MB/s? Write bandwidth is hovering lower, though we will be improving. (I assume you will be listening (reading off disk) to music more often than writing music).
F740 and F720 have lower sequential throughputs, but are dandy and may fit your requirements.
What are your requirements?
By the way, I think a large file is 100+ MBs.
Thanks
Jason Middlebrooks Systems Engineer Direct Connect Systems Phone: 770-933-9327x270 2264 Northwest Parkway, Suite I Pager: 888-502-1625 Marietta, GA 30067 Fax: 770-933-9272