Watter

I have a modest Unraid setup. It's 8 drives plus parity with 27T of storage total. It's all consumer grade hardware; either all or mostly 5400 RPM drives. I'm using the onboard ethernet to connect the NAS to my network. The array mostly serves as a media server for a single Apple TV 4k in the living room that is connected to the network, and thus the NAS, over ethernet, not wifi. My problem - The media streaming performance, even at 4k, is usually rock solid. I used to be able to literally go months without even thinking about it and that's with watching something from the media server almost every night (Plex server on NAS -> Plex client on the Apple TV). However, it seems that I can reliably tank my streaming performance by accessing my NAS SMB shares through normal operations for backup or (and I think this is the real problem) streaming content over the SMB shares for viewing on my PC. Perhaps it's a red herring, but it seems that when I do this, i.e. access heavy content over the SMB shares, then when we sit down later that night and attempt to watch anything with a even somewhat heavy stream rate, it will falter and repeatedly halt. I can easily fix the issue by stopping the array and restarting it. Not rebooting, just literally "stop array" -> "start array". After that, the streaming is fine; every single time. This is driving me bonkers. My wife is very patient with my media server setup because it usually works, but this one issue is starting to put my WAF in the toilet. Any ideas? Given that restarting the array fixes the issue (again, it's 100% reliable that this works), what does that tell me? I really appreciate the help.

I would humbly suggest that the first post in this thread be updated with the above information. The current information mentions the /config and /mnt volumes (only the former seems to exist) with nothing on the others. I did not feel comfortable even starting the container until I ran across this post that describes each of the volumes. Thank you, Leifgg!