Mac OS 10.12 Review: Uncovering the Mystery of Slow Write Speeds on 11.1 Instance

In our latest testing, we've encountered an intriguing issue with write speeds on a FreeNAS 11.1 instance when connected to a Mac OS 10.12 machine. The problem is that the write speeds are capped at a mere 600Mb/s, which is significantly slower than what we normally achieve. In this review, we'll delve into the details of our testing and explore possible solutions to resolve this issue.

To start with, let's outline the setup used for our tests. We have a FreeNAS system with three vdevs, each consisting of eight disks with zero TB used. The compression is set to its default setting, LZ4. Our benchmarking process involves running AJA System Test with 64GB file transfers at 4k resolution.

In our initial testing on the Mac OS 10.12 machine, we observed write speeds of around 800Mb/s and read speeds of approximately 1000Mb/s. This is consistent with our usual results for 10Gb Ethernet performance since FreeNAS 9.2.18. However, when we switched to a FreeNAS 11.1 instance, the write speeds dropped dramatically, capping out at around 70-75Mb/s.

We also attempted to create an AFP share on the 11.1 instance and ran some additional tests. Unfortunately, our efforts were unsuccessful in resolving the issue. The only notable difference we found between the 11.0-U4 and 11.1 instances was in the SMB dump.txt file during debugging.

Given that we've tried various settings, including compression on and off, it's clear that there's a server-side issue at play here. To further diagnose the problem, we'll be testing the setup on Windows 10 to confirm whether this is a specific issue with Mac OS or a more general problem.

It's also worth noting that our media server with five vdevs exhibits the same slow write speeds when connected to the FreeNAS 11.1 instance. This suggests that the issue is not unique to our specific setup but rather a broader problem affecting all instances of FreeNAS 11.1.

In conclusion, we're still trying to uncover the root cause of this slowdown in write speeds on our Mac OS 10.12 machine when connected to a FreeNAS 11.1 instance. If anyone has any insights or suggestions on how to resolve this issue, please let us know.

Mac os 10.12 review