NAS Optimizations for RockPro64

[MNtinkerer]

I am curious if anyone who has deployed the RockPro64 as a NAS have any optimizations that has improved system performance. Especially if they are using a PCIe to SATA adapter. I would like to find/develop a script to reduce the burden of the initial portion of a data sync or even just listing files. Whether as a SAMBA server, local file listing, or during the initial portion of a data backup, the CPU seems to run at max until the file attributes list is populated. Although other optimizations that are useful to you would be of interest too, this doesn't have to be specific to one OS, or one particular filesystem, back up scheme, or system admin maintenance task. Basically what is useful to you that might benefit someone else.

I have 2 RockPro64 deployed as NAS, one hosting Debian 10 and the other FreeBSD 13.0. I have configured it many different ways but both are using 3rd party PCIe to SATA adapters each hosting 3 HDDs. One is a kludge of 1TB disks both 3.5" and 2.5" with RAIDz1 the other is 3 identical 2.5" HDDs in RAIDz1. Other than having SAMBA configured on them, they are currently backups of my main server, which is also my desktop workstation. I have recently been getting into ZFS send/recieve for backups, but have more experience with rsync. ZFS is an improvement but still tedious. Simple commands like ls to list files in a directory will consume CPU cycles to the point of nearly halting the system, and I'm thinking having a scheme of some sort will improve this, that is durable across reboots.

The only reference I found to NAS optimizations on this forum was from a user who appears to no longer be active and they only referenced caching, but did not describe in detail what they did.