McGeeked

I'd say that's not a tiny glitch either... that's a huge speed difference.

Well you were 100 % correct, that was the problem. That pretty much sucks for me, since the unRAID version that I am running on seems to be the only version that will even work with SAS2LP controllers.

I am starting to think that this is more of a matter of SMB not utilizing the available network bandwidth that I have. Wireshark shows that the SMB 2.0 protocol is running which I know offers some improvements over 1.0. I just feel like bottleneck is due to the Windows file sharing. This would explain when using Iperf, it actually used my available bandwidth. How have others handled this limitation? I would think that SMB 2.0 that Vista and Windows 7 offer can utilize more then what I am actually receiving at this point. Since I had a Cisco VPN Client installed, that automatically sets my MTU to 1300. I have since changed it back to 1500 for these transfers and have since received an average of 16 MB/s instead of the 14 MB/s that I was receiving before. But I should still see much better performance than this. I know in Windows XP you can turn on Large System Cache to get much faster file transfers, but I am not sure with Windows 7.

I appreciate it, hopefully it will show something, as typically when I am transferring nothing really shows up in the syslog. In the meantime, I am going to mess around with iPERF some more just in case I missed something on my initial test. syslog-2012-08-16.txt

No, I am not sure how that was loaded or what it is being used for exactly. That seemed to have occurred at 5:17, at that time I probably started transferring more files. It certainly was not manual. Think its causing a problem?

Absolutely, I appreciate all of the help. See attached.

Hmmm, I am not quite sure what Simulated Disk mode is, could you educate me? Pretty new to storage.

Correct, that was my mistake, I currently have 4 in the array, not 5. One needed to be sent back RMA.

sda is my flash drive. I am still digging around, any suggestions would be appreciated.

Absolutely yes, I am transferring from my drive on my actual HTPC, to the share. Not in between.

/dev/sda: Timing cached reads: 12630 MB in 2.00 seconds = 6324.36 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 70 MB in 3.07 seconds = 22.83 MB/sec /dev/sdb: Timing cached reads: 13058 MB in 2.00 seconds = 6539.14 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 384 MB in 3.00 seconds = 127.91 MB/sec /dev/sdc: Timing cached reads: 12996 MB in 2.00 seconds = 6507.87 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 356 MB in 3.01 seconds = 118.08 MB/sec /dev/sdd: Timing cached reads: 12800 MB in 2.00 seconds = 6410.12 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 356 MB in 3.01 seconds = 118.36 MB/sec /dev/sde: Timing cached reads: 12798 MB in 2.00 seconds = 6408.80 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 350 MB in 3.01 seconds = 116.13 MB/sec That looks fine to me, however does that command only result in HD reads?

Alright, so iPERF is reporting back a decent 78 MB/s average, so its not the network path. Could it be the WD30EZRX's?

Great point, I will give that a shot first. I originally had one of my IP phones in between my array and the network, I forgot that the phone was rated for only 10/100. So that was my original bottleneck, but once I removed the phone, the array negotiated 1000 and I was seeing an increase from 10 MB/s (when I was negotiated at 100) to the 14 that I have now. So although I am sure that I have gigabit connectivity now, I suppose there might be driver issues on the NIC's, or God help me no cabling issues. I will update the post after iPERF. Its nice that unRAID has it as a package. Thanks.

I appreciate the reply, I am transferring large ISO / VOB / and MKV files through Windows Explorer. I simply added my user shares on my array as a network resource through my Windows 7 HTPC. Some of the MKV's are around 20 GB. As I was testing this, I did one file at a time. At one point I did begin another transfer as one was already occurring, when I did this, it simply split the 14 average MB/s that I am receiving between the two file transfers.

I finally managed to get everything working on my array. I don't have a cache drive installed yet, however I am experiencing some slower write speeds then I was expecting to see based on the post "To Cache drive or not to Cache drive?" In that thread, there was an average rate of 20-30 MB/s write, the peak being reported at 40 MB/s* for individuals who did not have a cache drive. I am currently only getting 14 average MB/s write on my array shares through Windows 7 / SMB. I am fairly confident that it must be a bottleneck on the array itself, as the media that I am transferring off of my HTPC can transfer much quicker between my external HD and the native HD that I currently have hooked up to the HTPC. I must be missing something and was hoping the community could help me out. Or is this normal? Hardware specs listed below: 5 3TB Western Digital Green (WD30EZRX) 3x Supermicro AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 Intel i3-2120 (3.3GHz) Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O 8GB Kingston (DDR3 1333) Corsair AX850 OS - unRAID Server Release 5.0-rc6-r8168-test Thanks.