Re: Disk I/O slowness

> On 7/30/26 14:49, Casey Deccio wrote:
>
> Great ideas.  I originally did RAID5 because I wasn't sure how many 
> drives I wanted in the array, and I wondered if I might grow the array 
> at some point.  But I'll consider RAID 1 if I settle on three drives.
>
Something over 10yr ago I was running RAID5 on a Windows 7 box, as I 
recall, the disks were probably 500GB Seagate Baracuda as that is what I 
tended to buy in that era.  This was my second stab at RAID setup, and I 
was unimpressed with the performance. Writes were way slow and the pool 
kept randomly dropping disks.

My next RAID was RAIDZ with ZFS filesystem on FreeNAS (now TrueNAS), 
running the same disks moved from the Win7 box wiped+reformatted, much 
better performance. Now in recent years moved to Debian, and I've rarely 
tried anything else since, except for the occasional odd RAID0 or RAID1 
setup.

If your disks are SMR type then you might want to avoid ZFS. I think 
eventually, newer SMR disks will play nicer with ZFS than the first 
generations did. Maybe they're already there, I haven't followed SMR 
news recently.