Ryan23

Just a followup. I swapped my Parity over to the ICH8 controller along with a 500GB drive. Now all 6 SATA ports on the ICH8 Controller are being utilized. I still have one 500GB drive and two 750MB IDEs on the JMB controller. The SIL3132 controller only has my "new" 250GB SATA1 cache drive on it. Parity check speed is identical. ~39,000 KB/sec. So no benefit to swapping the controller ports around. Now on to the plus side . I managed to transfer an 8GB movie over to the cache drive in 5 minutes!! This was VS. 5GB in 24 minutes when writing directly to a disk in the array. A 7 fold speed increase. I'll cross my fingers and hope everything goes well tonight during the scheduled move off the cache drive. I guess the slow write performance wasn't Vista's fault Ryan

Thanks for the replies! I wasn't aware that the SSD's had a limited amount of "writes". If I'd be looking at a MTBF of 2 years under heavy writes, that's not a viable option....damn. I'm not running any cache drives at the moment. I do have an old 250GB SATA I could utilize as a cache. Here's my current (complete) setup: Coolermaster monster case Twin 500W PS's ABIT AB9 Pro mobo Pentium 4, 3.0 GHZ 2 GB DDR800 memory One Seagate 1TB Parity drive Six Seagate 500GB SATA2 (all SATA1 jumpers removed) Two Seagate 750GB IDE drives and a vintage 4MB S3 PCI video card (circa 96') Four 500GB SATA2 on the ICH8 controller One 500GB SATA2, One 1TB SATA2 (parity), Two 750GB IDE on the JMB363 controller One 500GB SATA2 on the SIL3132 controller. AHCI is enabled in bios. I'm using the built in NIC. I've done the various registry hacks to prevent Vista from throttling. I do have a 1.5TB Seagate coming to replace my parity drive. My current 1TB parity will replace one of my 750GB IDE drives. I'm thinking (hoping!) that my mix of SATA & IDE drives may be slowing things up a tad. Just got done transferring 5GB from Vista c:\ to //Media_server/disk2. Time: 24 minutes . Maybe I'll swap over to the 250GB SATA as a cache drive and do some more data xfers. Looking over my controller layout again, maybe I'll try swapping those drives around while I'm at it. I've got two open SATA ports on the ICH8 controller. Thanks for the input guys! Ryan

I'm on SP1 now. Actually, the test numbers were reinforcing MY point of read speed being satisfactory. They are read I/O tests, not write. From what I gather, there are four operations being performed when data is wrote to the array. Bypassing that, via the cache drive, would help WRITE thouroughput. It was my understanding that Tom added the Cache drive for that purpose, maybe I'm wrong... A few people have used their spare drives and noted an improvement in write performance with the cache drive: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2698.0 I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts on an SSD for that purpose. Ryan

"Dumping Vista" is not a realistic option. Considering my HTPC is setup the way I want with no real hiccups, I wouldn't want to go out on a limb by undoing all that on a hope & prayer it will get better. Surely I'm not the only Vista user with an Unraid server. I'm going over Gig-E, no hub, direct to PC: Settings for eth0: Supported ports: [ TP MII ] Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full Supports auto-negotiation: Yes Advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes Speed: 1000Mb/s Duplex: Full Port: MII PHYAD: 0 Transceiver: internal Auto-negotiation: on Supports Wake-on: pumbg Wake-on: g Current message level: 0x00000033 (51) Link detected: yes Using "hdparm -tT /dev/xxx" on my various drives, I see ~75MB/S across all 9 disks (~100 for my parity). Using the "I" option, I'm showing *UDMA6 for all SATA drives. Motherboard was just transitioned over from a P5PE-VM to an Abit AB9 Pro. I'm in the process of ditching my IDE drives for all SATA. Only two IDE's remain (750GB). Last parity check came in ~39,000 & took ~200 minutes for 4.5 Gig. Ryan

With SSD's coming down in price, has anyone experimented with using one as a cache drive? I'm looking at Newegg and a 64GB G-Skill SSD lists for ~$130. I'm looking to speed up my horrendous write speeds. Currently I'm seeing fluctuations between 1200 -12,000 kbytes/sec from Vista. A 30GB folder is looking like it's going to take 3 hours. to xfer . I've gone through all the tricks on the wiki. I don't anticipate pushing more than 60GB a day anyway... Ryan

IOZone seems like a nice tool for testing the performance of your own particular system. I'm not sure if it makes for a good benchmark to test against anyone else's system though. The performance of the server looks to be directly related to the horsepower of the workstation running the test. While running it on my own system, I saw my HTPC's CPU utilization hit <95% for a good portion of the test. This was with all other applications shut down, just IOzone running. In reporting results here, it might be useful to post what your workstation's specifications are as well. My HTPC is a little outdated but it still manages to serve up my movies and run FFDshow just fine (albeit at ~80% CPU utilization during playback). So with that said, here's my specification & results: Media Server: ASUS P5PE-VM Pentium 4 (Prescott), 3 Ghz, 800Mhz FSB Corsair DDR400, 1GB Coolermaster Stacker -4-in-3 x three modules -Couple of case quiet fans - Dual 500W redundant PS's - 800VA APC UPS Sandisk Cruzer Micro, 512MB Seagate 500GB, 7200, 16MB, SATA2, 500GB (Parity) " " (Disk 1) Maxtor 300GB, 7200, 16MB, IDE (Disk 2) Maxtor 250GB, 7200, 8MB, IDE (Disk 3) Maxtor 200GB, 7200, 8MB, IDE (Disk 4) Maxtor 250GB, 7200, 8MB, IDE (Disk 5) HTPC: ASUS A7N8X Athlon XP 2200 (1.8 Ghz) Corsair PC3200, 512MB Seagate 160GB, SATA Edimax Gigabit PCI adapter Pioneer 111D DVD Burner Samsung SH-162D DVD reader Oddball midtower ATX case I stumbled across at Compusa awhile back. Placed on it's side, blends right into the rest of the home theater components. 500W Antec PS (quiet!) MS XP MC Edition, Various MCE plugins and tweaks. Write Performance: IDE (Disk 5) SATA-2(Disk 1) 32MB 25.5 37.9 (oddity) 64MB 26.6 24.4 128MB 23.7 23.7 256MB 22.0 22.8 512MB 21.5 21.7 1GB 21.7 20.3 Read Performance: IDE (Disk 5) SATA-2(Disk 1) 32MB 27.1 27.2 64MB 27.4 27.2 128MB 27.3 27.5 256MB 27.4 27.4 512MB 27.3 27.7 1GB 14.4 17.8 Notes/misc: - Unraid Server version 3.0 (Final) - I also built my server over the Black Friday sale. Total cost was $790 shipped. Build cost included the server itself, the two 500GB drives and the gigabit NIC for my HTPC. That total does not include the 12 drive version of Unraid or the UPS ($35 on Fleabay with a new battery!). - HTPC & Server are connected via a dedicated crossover cable (cat 5E, ~30ft), no switches, static IP's. - HDD temps (according to SMART) typically sit between 17C and 30C (peak on parity drive). I would attribute this to the cooler room where the server sits (~65 F) and the excellent case ventilation afforded by the Stacker case. When my drives used to reside in my HTPC they would run extremely hot. I experienced multiple drive failures over the course of 3 years or so. While the Stacker case is certainly a behemouth, it sits in a spare bedroom out of sight quietly churning away. - For "real world" file transfer tests, I use a little shareware app called Windows Commander. I've been using it for file management tasks since 1995 in various iterations. I typically see 14,000 - 18,000 kbytes/second when moving DVD vobs over to the server. - With a *proper* PC software solution foir HD-DVD and Blu-Ray just on the horizon, I'm a bit motivated to finally upgrade the ole' HTPC. The new HTPC I'm building here shortly will utilize an NVIDIA nForce 680i chipset based Mobo, 3 Ghz Core2 Duo, 2 GB ram, Foxconn GEFORCE 7950, 512MB, dual head DVI video card and Vista. Once this is stood up, I'll run IOzone again and post the results here. I'm guesing there may be a bit of variance. Ryan