trendco, the speed isn't good because you have many "extra" layers, not because of the lack of a virtio driver for freebsd. What you are doing is fine to test and play with, but if you want to use it for anything serious, it's pointless and really
not a good idea at all...
Everyone in this thread running some kind of NAS as a virtual machine should read below, otherwise I will simply say I told you so, and you will feel like an idiot when all your data is lost...
First of all, you shouldn't virtualize your file-server if you expect any performance out of it. It would be faster if you ran the 2 SATA drives directly under Proxmox. Most modern motherboards support doing a RAID 1 setup (mirroring) with no extra hardware, which will store your data twice and it will be much faster. Not only that, but if your FreeNAS virtual machine is stored on your SSD, then your system still relies on that
single point of failure, if that drive breaks, then your precious 2 copies are not accessible any more, which defeats the purpose of having a RAID array... ALSO, ZFS requires a lot of RAM, plus you are virtualizing FreeNAS which needs additional RAM too, so if you simply want to have your data on 2 drives, you're better of with RAID-1.
I get the feeling everyone thinks their data is safer because it's mirrored, but the whole point of RAID-1 (mirroring) is to have 2 copies of all the data, 1 copy per hard drive, so that in the case of one hard drive failing, the system can continue to run without shutting down. It's used to avoid downtime. It is not meant to be used as a backup solution... Yes you have 2 copies of everything, but to the system the RAID array appears as a single disk. If you were moving files around on your RAID-1 array, and accidentally deleted a folder, then that folder will be deleted from
BOTH hard drives at the same time. If you don't have a backup copy of that folder somewhere else, your data is lost forever... So as you can see, RAID-1 only protects your data from hardware failure, not accidental user error nor data corruption, which is why
you should be making regular backupsAND testing them to make sure they actually work, even if you have a RAID setup. I can't stress that enough.
What you are doing is fine if you just want to experiment with FreeNAS and Proxmox you'll be able to get them talking and see how it works, but as soon as you think your data is in any way safer, you are unknowingly putting your data at a much higher risk of loosing forever... I hope my explanation is understandable, and sheds some light on your setup, I would hate to see you loose all your data.
-Slopes
