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I have a bunch of WD RE4 disks I got from a place that I worked. The drives are 3Gbps SATA II interface. I was going to use them in a server I am building for myself to act as a NAS / SAN for my network. My plan was to run ZFS as the file system using some support method such as FreeNAS, Nexenta, or ZFS on Linux but I am not sure yet.

A question that came to mind today was whether or not the SATA II interface on the drives would actually impact the performance of ZFS negatively. I don't know a ton about ZFS but I do know ZFS uses RAM or other means to cache data. But does that change the fact that the drive are running somewhat slower.

Also unless I have this wrong (which I probably do), WD shows that the sustained drive speed from the disk to host is only 138MB/s which puts only about 50% utilization of the SATA II interface.

Here is the specs I am looking at; Link

Could someone please provide some insight on this?

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SATA only affects the link between the drive and the motherboard - everything ZFS does it does in the kernel in system memory just using data pulled from the drive. If the drives are bottlenecked by SATAII (and it sounds like they aren't) then the filesystem will be slowed down by about as much as any filesystem would, just because it takes that much longer to access the data over the SATAII interface.

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