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In today's video, Mitch Hall returns with a deep dive into ZFS Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC) and its real-world performance impact — even when you're running 16 NVMe drives at full PCIe x4 bandwidth inside our newest enterprise product: the Stornado F-16 NVMe storage server.

With 64-core AMD EPYC power, direct-to-CPU NVMe lanes, and no bottlenecks in sight, we benchmark, tune, and explore whether the ZFS ARC still gives a meaningful performance boost... or if modern flash speeds have made it obsolete.

Featured in this video: the new 45Drives F-16 — a full-speed NVMe server designed for uncompromised performance:

-16 x 15mm U.3 NVMe drives
-Full PCIe x4 direct lanes (no bifurcation bottlenecks)
-Up to 64-core AMD EPYC CPU

Chapters:
0:00 - Intro: ZFS ARC vs NVMe
0:21 - 45Drives Stronado F16 NVMe Server Overview
1:01 - What We're Testing Today
1:35 - What Is ZFS ARC?
3:29 - Benchmark Plan Explained
5:11 - Create MDADM RAID 0
6:24 - First Write Test (RAID 0)
8:46 - Fixing Directory & Real Write Test
9:38 - Read Performance Test (RAID 0)
10:53 - MDADM with Parity Limitations
11:39 - Setup ZFS Pool (No Redundancy)
13:02 - Write Test: ZFS No Redundancy
14:51 - Read Test: ZFS No Redundancy
15:45 - Create ZFS Mirrored Pool
17:12 - Write Performance on Mirrors
18:08 - ARC-Only Read Test (Mirrors)
19:43 - ARC Disabled: Metadata Only
20:30 - Read Performance Without ARC
22:02 - When to Disable ARC
22:24 - ZFS Disk Scheduler Tuning
24:08 - CPU Sleep State Tuning
27:00 - ZFS Parameter Tuning (TXG, Zfetch)
29:43 - Final Read/Write Tests After Tuning
30:46 - Final Thoughts & Performance Summary
31:29 - Outro: What’s Next at 45Drives

Have questions about ARC behavior? Want to see tuning for random I/O or latency-sensitive workloads next? Leave a comment — and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss upcoming videos on ZFS clusters, ultra-high-speed arrays, and more storage architecture deep dives.

Quote your next storage server: https://www.45drives.com/products/

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