Smitty2k1

Using Explorer I am now up to full copy speed... Using TeraCopy's built in file integrity check I loose a little max speed, but this is still double my best write speed scenario under v 6.1.9 (and untweaked Windows) This is unreal! I've been chasing performance issues on my D525 for years now (I guess since v6 came out?). I have been ready for weeks to pull the $400 trigger on a new Pentium D1508 board and DDR4 RAM, but if this works for me it will save so much cash. I already spent about $100 on a new cache drive a month or two ago with no success (but I have since repurposed the old cache so that's OK) I can tell you what I'll be doing when I get home from work...

I built my little mITX 6 drive server in a Node 304 several years ago. it is serving me nicely except the poor Atom D525 CPU cannot seem to keep up with read/write speeds anymore. I'm going to upgrade sometime in the near future but I think I'm going to go with an integrated CPU again to cut down on noise and heat. My server is idle 95% of the time.

I hope you have better luck than I do tracking down slow read or write performance. I've been chasing it for years on my server

In the same boat with my D525. unRaid 6 is so slow writing to the array, and CPU utilization never exceeds 40% or so. I love my little Atom and don't want to spend $400 on the newer gen hardware

Hey OP I'm using the same case as you. I'm also using an Atom motherboard, but it is a previous generation D525 processor. Very very slow. I can't get above ~24MB/s write speeds. Even though unRaid doesn't show my CPU as being maxed out during writes, I'm assuming that is why I have such slow speeds. ANYWAYS - as far as the cache drive is concerned, you can always get a PCIe cache drive. I've used both mSATA and M.2 SSDs with a PCIe adapter. No problems what so ever. It is a little bit more elegant than the "taped to the side of a drive cage" method and reduces cable clutter. In my scenario, I had maxed out the SATA ports on my motherboard (and in 3.5" HDD cages in the case) so I had to go the PCIe route. When I update to a Xeon D motherboard in the near future, I will be able to use my M.2 SSD directly into the motherboard without taking up the PCIe slot.

Thanks! It is not too late, I'm hoping to have some files transferred and a parity check done by the end of the weekend before I do the reset.

Thanks, just for completeness I've attached a screenshot where I moved to a 'foreground' midnight commander transfer. Looks a lot different!

I'm transferring a large set of files from one disk to another using midnight commander (Telnet via Putty from a networked PC) and looking at my disk stats I'm getting big, consistent, more or less evenly spaced, drop offs during the transfer. I'm transferring large movie files that are more or less the same size which could explain the even spacing. Midnight commander is running the move in the "background" if it matters. Is this normal behavior? Please see attached screenshot.

Great, your input is very appreciated everyone. I will make sure I have my drive names/locations documented. It sounds like "losing" user shares won't be a problem. They are not setup in any special way. Crossing my fingers I solve my performance problems this weekend and can save the money I was putting towards new server hardware for a new gaming monitor instead. I built this server back in 2010 so it has been through a few software updates to say the least.

Thanks! How does it know what my user shares and login/password are? Are these stored on the parity drive?

I'm running unRaid 6.1.9. Parity x1, data x5, cache x1. Everything is working, parity is checked and valid. How do I go about resetting everything without loosing data on my data drives? I have some plugins, but nothing fancy like dockers, VMs, or the like. They would be easy to reinstall and reconfigure. I'm trying to chase down some performance issues and this is the last thing to try before buying new hardware.

Bump. Per my previous post, how do I remove the parity to check write speeds without it? Also, I attached a full diagnostic report in my previous post. Thanks again for all the help!

So I'm definitely kicking a dead pig at this point, but the unRaid GUI only shows around 30% CPU utilization when writing/copying files to the array using Midnight Commander. If the CPU was the bottleneck, wouldn't this be 100%? I'm pretty amateur at this stuff, so there may be something else going on besides "utilization" that may be causing the bottleneck. Just trying to learn testdasi, thanks for chiming in! How do I remove the parity to test this? Also, please see attached for the full diagnostic report. The last hour or so I've been copying large video files from on disk to another using Midnight Commander. tower-diagnostics-20160813-1101.zip

I did a bad job of conveying information in a logical manner! Read speeds are excellent! 90MB/s on green drives and 120MB/s on red drives. 400MB/s on SSD cache. Write speeds are terrible. ~20MB/s no matter how I write; midnight commander, SMB, cache or no cache. I'm fairly confident I've eliminated network issues because I can read over the network so fast and copying files via midnight commander is not affected by network speed. You had mentioned the D525 was giving you poor performance on v6 as well, but it sounds like your performance is both read and write.

The Diskspeed.pdf I attached is read speeds, not write speeds

I had been toying around with the idea that the board was too slow, but so many other peopled used it (way back when) and had fine results. Makes sense with the v5/v6 switch! I built this back in the v5 days. Thanks for confirming... I wish I would have learned that about 2 years ago! Either way, I've attached my diskspeed results showing how fast the read speeds are diskspeed.pdf

So this utility is giving me good read speeds on all my drives (90MB/s for green drives, 120MB/s for red drives, 400MB/s for SSD cache)! However, my write speeds are terrible... 20MB/s or so. Copying large files using Midnight Commander. Any ideas off the top of your heads what may be causing this? PS: Great utility!

Hi all me again trying to sort out some slow write speeds! I've posted before about slow write speeds to the sever. Usually only get about a 20MB/sec write. My typical use case is that I download a large file to my server and want to make a copy of it in a different user share on my server. I've always just drag and dropped files between shares in windows explorer (SMB). After all these years I've learned that that is actually slowing things down because essentially I'm doing double the work, and Midnight Commander is the best way to move or copy files on my server. So I used Putty to login and moved files between DISK shares using Midnight Commander and sure enough I STILL get 20MB/sec write speeds. This is the same if I "move" or "copy" the large file(s). Transferring many small files yields approximately the same write speed. As a data point, I can copy a large file from my unRaid server to a desktop PC with and saturate the gigabit ethernet speeds (~118MB/sec). If I copy the same file back to the server, again I'm down to about 20MB/sec. From my limited knowledge and testing, it is not one particular drive that seems to be the culprit. I'm really looking to see if there are any other tools at my disposal to try to track down where this problem is coming from. I've attached a syslog to this post that I captured after a fresh reboot. And here is some more information: unRaid 6.1.9 Supermicro D525 (Atom) board with IPMI Array of 5 data disks (mix of WD greens and reds) PCIe SSD cache (confirmed that the cache is enabled for all shares, and that freshly copied files wind up on the cache) Gigabit ethernet syslog.txt

Did you look at the whole screen? I believe there is a checkbox near the start button that enables formatting of all unmountable disks. There sure was... thanks! This isn't the first time unRaid has made me feel particularly illiterate

I believe when I did that it did not prompt me to format the drive, it just said "unmountable" I'm not sure if it matters or if I was clear, but empty disk1 has been in my array for some time and was only recently emptied to other disks

Guys, I'm lost here. I have the following 4TB drives in my array running the latest official version of unRaid (6.1.9) Disk1 - RFS - empty Disk2 - RFS - full Disk3 - RFS - full Disk4 - RFS - full Disk5 - RFS - full I thought I could just stop the array and change the filesystem on the empty drive. That didn't work. How can I change the filesystem to XFS one drive at a time without rebuilding parity everytime?

So I started with unRaid a few versions ago when it was a basic fileserver with redundancy. The years since then have brought a tremendous amount of additional features. The most advanced feature I've really used is the new web interface. This has a little bit to do with my under-powered Atom processor, but more to do with my complete ignorance to all these new features. So can someone give me a brief overview of Dockers, VMs, Plugins, and Apps? Why would I use one over the other, or to maybe phrase better, what are the use cases for each one of these "add ons" to unRaid? Thanks!

Hi all two questions: 1) I've got two empty Plex shares that have folder structures on my cache drive. They are technicly empty, but I can't delete the folders. Also, how do I remove the user shares? I had experimented with a Plex docker but don't use it. 2) I've got a pcie cache drive (msata drive in a pcie adapter) that I am going to replace with a newer drive (M.2 drive in a pcie adapter). What is the proper procedure for doing this?

What about using the array during the parity check after the rebuild? I'm going to replace the drive tonight before I go out of town for the weekend and therefore won't be able to start the parity check until I get back.

Thanks for the replies folks. I'll just pop it in and wait for a few days Can I continue writing to the array through this process?