I moved on and put most of my files on my primary windows workstation and shared it out, and that made a huge difference for my network clients. My throughput soared for the things that were lagging prior, and I started to notice other things were a lot better. For example, just opening up directories of photos now populate the thumbnails almost instantly, instead of me sitting there waiting for them to slowly pop up one by one. When you have a few hundred photos in each folder and you're trying to find something in a hurry, it's a lot easier now. I still use unraid for some movie archives, since my client is also linux so they can chat back and forth via NFS and the access time isn't really an issue. I also use it for backups, since I can kick off a manual or automatically scheduled sync and don't really care when it finishes. However, I've had recurring issues with a drive just dropping from the array (red x) when the array goes to shutdown...it doesn't matter what card I have it on, what channel of the card, I've swapped drives, I've swapped bays, it just seems to always pop up someplace on the array. This may have to do with the Marvell chipset, but I don't want to keep dumping money into hardware and hoping it fixes things. Ultimately I'll probably wait until drive prices come down and keep it online and expand my cloud backup solution. But I agree, ultimately without some idea of whether this is a solveable issue or nonsolvable, and if solveable, when.... that doesn't sit real well . I've got my money's worth with the product, so I'm not in quite the same position, but after wrestling with it for a while, I started to realize I didn't want to be spending my non-work hours figuring this out nonstop..
Pete