bkastner

I've already started looking into this, seems very doable just need to convert back to raw format and then convert into vhd, then a few more tweaks and some paravirtualisation drivers and it should work Great to hear. I will wait for you to do the heavy lifting then since you seem to know what you are doing. I look forward to the end result, and thanks for putting this together. It has the potential to rip out 75-80% of my UnRAID plugins in a single shot.

Even though this was built for KVM, should this work under Xen? I don't know the level of compatibility between the VMs. I am thinking of trying this on my XenServer 6.2 server, and not UnRAID 6.0 yet, but want to know if it should work before I try.

I am not an expert, but would say that yes, if you are dedicating hardware to a VM you likely can't share it with another VM regardless of which virtualization tech you use (this may not be true 100% of the time, but for a video card for instance it would be). the point of virtualizing XBMC is that there is no front end at the TV - the front end XBMC client is virtualized on your server and you are only running HDMI (and likely IR) to the TV from the backend server. There are likely some TVs you will still need a front end device for (i.e. HDMI is only good for 50 feet unless you extend over CAT5/6, but many of these solutions require 2 CAT cables for HDMI). You also still need to be able to get a remote working with these virtualized solutions as well (hence the IR comment above). Virtualizing UnRAID will likely work for some of your use cases, but not all (at least that is how it looks for me at the moment). For me I have played with a number of end point devices (Pi, Pivos, NUC, Boxee, full PC) and have only really been happy with the Intel NUC & Full PC). I am hoping to consolidate several clients at the server level and minimize the machines floating around my house.

I agree that the proper approach likely should have been to migrate 5.0 to 64-bit and stabilize before layering virtualization on top of it - this would have helped ensure a solid 64-bit foundation to start adding features onto whereas now there are a lot more moving parts which could cause issues, which may cause delay on 6.0-final. However given the general up swell of virtualization interest over the last couple of months and the potential of people taking UnRAID off on their own directly, I can appreciate Tom needing to take this step to maintain control of his business. I am guessing UnRAID is likely not following development best practices, but he is trying to do what is best for his company, which at this point does include catering to the higher-end users who have the potential to fragment his business or jump ship entirely. The wealth of knowledge available in these forums is impressive and it would be a huge loss to the community (and UnRAID) if they were to jump ship as they are helping drive UnRAID to the next level. Sometimes it's a matter of doing what is best from a big picture perspective vs. what is right from a purely technical perspective.

Agreed. I just ordered one, but since it's shipping from the UK to Canada it looks like it won't arrive until the end of the month. I will post back once I've played with it and let people know if it's a worthwhile solution.

You do realize the pulse-eight only does HDMI-CEC between the HDMI source and the TV, correct? It does not do HDMI over CAT6. You would need the pulse-eight at the source side, connected to the PC via HDMI and USB, then HDMI out of the pulse-eight into a HDMI over CAT6 converter (like the one I linked), to the other HDMI over CAT6 at the TV side, then HDMI out from the converter to the TV. And that's assuming the converter would pass HDMI-CEC (although I see no reason why it wouldn't). If you were to use a pulse-eight ONLY, you would need an HDMI cable in the walls between sounce and TV, which is exactly what you were trying to avoid. TL;DR: The pulse-eight only allows you to control the PC source from your TV remote. It DOES NOT do HDMI over CAT6. I did realize I still need a CAT/HDMI cable converter on both sides, but are you saying that even with this the pulse-eight solution will not do what I want it to? I wasn't 100% from reading the description, but thought it was a good fit.

They shouldn't. I think HDMI is only good for 50 feet or so before degrading, and anything over that you need to use CAT5/6 to extend. I don't know how they boost the signal, but CAT is the only way to get a quality signal over that distance.

But that's also a 4x8 matrix switch. Very pricey but would be awesome to have. There are cheaper options to do a single HDMI over a single CAT6. Still somewhat expensive, but not $2k expensive. Here's a $190 example. http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=109&cp_id=10110&cs_id=1011012&p_id=8122&seq=1&format=2 The benefit of the other solution offered is it includes USB: http://www.pulse-eight.com/store/products/104-usb-hdmi-cec-adapter.aspx You can use the single device to manage the remote as well as HDMI, instead of just HDMI. Since I only have a single CAT6 run to the bedrooms this looks like a better solution.

Please take a look here: http://www.pulse-eight.com/store/products/104-usb-hdmi-cec-adapter.aspx I think this solution would work in your case. You wouldn't need USB cable for your remote, controlling the xbmc but use your tv remote instead. This looks pretty cool, and for $50 it's definitely worth a try. Thanks for the suggestion.

Do you have any ideas how it would be done over a single cable? I have my house wired, but it's not easy to run a second cable to some of the rooms. If it's insane then I would just go with a local end point, but I would be curious on what it actually requires. This is a little expensive but looks fun! http://www.octavainc.com/HDMI_Matrix_HDbaseT_HD4xSTPMX_over%20CAT6.html Wow... all for the low, low price of $1875. Nice, but for that price I think I could rip out my drywall and re-cable the necessary rooms and still have a ton of money left over.

Do you have any ideas how it would be done over a single cable? Google: hdmi single cat6 tons of hits and reviews of the various solutions. Sorry, I am trying to figure out how to extend both HDMI & USB for IR receiver over a single CAT cable (if possible). I have 2 TVs I like to extend this to, but each room has a single cable installed. Is that still what you are talking about googling?

Do you have any ideas how it would be done over a single cable? I have my house wired, but it's not easy to run a second cable to some of the rooms. If it's insane then I would just go with a local end point, but I would be curious on what it actually requires.

Thanks guys. I guess I was overthinking this a bit (I do that from time to time). For some reason I didn't think \\tower\flash showed the entire drive, but I think I was confusing it with when you telnet in you are not at the root of the drive, and was thinking \flash did the same thing. I guess this isn't nearly as difficult as I was thinking - I was more focused on the work to rebuild if something went awry as I really don't remember all the config I did for SAB, SB, CP, etc. Thanks

I was wondering if there is a good solution to do a complete USB flash drive backup periodically? Considering all the plugins and config work done it would be a PITA if the flash drive got corrupted and everything was lost. Equally a pain would be having to yank out the USB drive to backup periodically as I am unlikely to remember, and the server isn't convenient to get to all the time. Is there a good solution anyone knows of to do this weekly or monthly? Ideally I would like to export it to another machine (Windows based).

How are you doing the HDMI pass-through. Do you have a video card with 2 HDMI ports, or two video cards, or something else? I'm passing through 2 Radeon HD6450's to separate XBMCbuntu VMs. They run flawlessly. I've been thinking about this and have a couple of questions for those of you using centralized end points. 1) Have any of you seen/tried video cards with dual HDMI out? Since I am thinking that HDMI is the only option for audio/video I don't want to tie up multiple PCI-E slots with video cards if I don't have to, but I don't know if ESX/Xen etc would recognize 2 HDMI ports on a single port as discrete and send separate video signals 2) How many cables do you need to run to each end point? And are they discrete as well? I am thinking if you need to do HDMI over Ethernet, and USB over Ethernet you need 2 cables, plus if you want just straight Ethernet (i.e. you have an XBOX attached to the same TV) then you potentially need a 3rd cable. Is there any way to put a hub on both sides for each requirement, or do you need to run 3 direct cables (HDMI to HDMI, USB to USB, etc). As mentioned in an earlier post I have my house cabled, but most rooms only have a single CAT6 cable and I am trying to figure out if this is doable or not.

MSI and Asus is better of late but those are of the manufacturers that you have to do some major checking and rechecking on the VT-D / AMD-V and IOMMU. ASRock and Gigabyte in the past have done a much better job with their hardware and BIOs working for PCI Passthrough. If you go look in the Arch / openSUSE / XenServer threads on the first page, I provide links to various places that tell you what works or not. I usually rely on ASUS for all my motherboards, but for this build I went with a Xeon E3-1230 v3 and a SuperMicro X10SLH-F as it gave me all the features I wanted, including IPMI. The only downside is you seem to need ECC ram, which was a bit expensive. I figure this is the only server I am going to build this way though, and expect it to last me quite a while, so made the extra investment. It would be nice if VT-d was more commonly supported. Also, you likely want to check to make sure your CPU supports everything you want. I had bought a i5-4670 at Christmas on sale, but then realized it didn't support hyper-threading, so I returned it and went for the Xeon instead. Again, I don't know if hyper-threading is 100% required, but if I am doing a server build to last for a couple of years (I hope) I want to make sure I have all the bells and whistles I may want down the road.

How are you doing the HDMI pass-through. Do you have a video card with 2 HDMI ports, or two video cards, or something else?

I have had great success with HDMI over Ethernet. My Server boots up, starts 2 XBMC VMs automatically. I can play 1080p with HD Audio no problems. Also tested it with Windows 7/8 running all kinds of benchmarks / games without an issue. Did you do this utilizing visualization? Assuming you did, were you passing through an AMD / nVidia (Quattro Serier) video card? Did you enable the Video Hardware Acceleration on the card or were you using VMWare (If ESXi) or Cirrus Video Drivers (If Xen / XenServer) (which is will do / use by default)? Simple way to tell what driver you are using in XBMC... goto System, System Info, Video Hardware. Also, after starting a Video... Hit "o" on your keyboard / info on your remote and you should see vappi for Intel, VDPAU for nVidia and XVBA or VDPAU for AMD. If you don't see that, you aren't using the Hardware Video Acceleration on your Video Card and will notice that your CPU utilization is very high (it's also on that same screen). Most people don't know when passing through a Video Card in ESXi / Xen / XenServer by default it won't use the Hardware Video Acceleration on the Video Card. Therefore the CPU has to do all the processing and depending on the CPU, that usually is around 70 - 80% of the CPU Utilization. If you enable / configure / install your XBMC (and XBMC VMs) to use Hardware Video Acceleration on the Video Card... CPU Utilization drops down to 10% and on newer CPUs it should be 5% or lower. When I tried it it was a few years ago. I had bought a new house and had it wired with CAT6, but for the run to the main floor and master bedroom they ran HDMI over Ethernet as all the equipment is in a rack in the basement and the run to the master bedroom was over 120 feet. I had everything (cable box, Blu-ray player, media center computer) plugged into a receiver in the basement and used the HDMI solution to the main room TV (I never bothered with the master bedroom). I had various issues, including flickering, color distortion, etc, and since it was only a 40 foot run I just bought a long HDMI cable and replaced the solution. Everything has been flawless since. It was an expensive HDMI over Ethernet solution (~$1,800) and could run to 4 TVs, but I just shelved it and have it sitting under my office desk at the moment (I am open to selling it to anyone interested for a reasonable price). This would have been 3 years ago, so things may have changed, or I may have had an issue specific to me. I really didn't do much testing, and virtualization was not involved at the time. It was a single bare metal PC running Windows 7 with Windows Media Center at the time.

So the baked in virtualization in unRAID means that the unRAID portion (pooling the drives, and the shares) are running as part of the OS... not virtualized? Like what it is today...? I have been mulling this over... So if my above statement is correct, within the server, I would create several VM's.... would I create a VM strictly for Sab, SB and CP? Then I would create one for Maraschino (currently my Maraschino plugin's Python fights with the SB and CP python) and perhaps throw in mySQL on that VM? If the above is correct, each of these VM would have their own internal IP addresses when its time to do the settings in Maraschino, Sab, etc? Now what OS are each of these VMs? I assume not a full flown OpenSUSE or Ubuntu... Is this what Arch linux is, a basic basic OS? CentOS? Is this the part where grumpy says, just go "yum install sickbeard" (I know syntax is not correct, but only for discussion)? To me (as I mentioned before) the Holy Grail is virtualizing the htpcs... What type of user experience would one expect on this.... say I have a powerful i7 or i5 unRAID and VMs... how would speed/user experience compare to my current Openelec/Centralized MySQL running on Atom Ion $280 hardware. How are the USB IR remotes handled? You can assign individual USB ports on mobo to specific VMs? This is the passthrough everyone refers to right? I am going to search for some type of newbie videos about VMs. Curious to see how it all gets managed... Thank you guys. In a year I hope I run into this thread again, and shake my head about how ignorant and naive I was... As I think others have mentioned, your Holy Grail is likely overly convoluted and I am not sure on the true value. In order to get HDMI out to each TV you need either to run a long HDMI cable, or you can do HDMI over Ethernet, however if you already have Ethernet out to the TV you will likely get a better experience with a local endpoint device. I've had HDMI over Ethernet setup previously, but had issues with flickering and it just wasn't seamless. Currently I have Ethernet throughout my house, so I am playing around with different end points: Raspberry Pi - You can get a base unit for $35, though you really need a fast SDHC and USB3 key to make it work, plus you will likely want a housing and power cable, plus you need a IR receiver and remote - so it's really about $100 to setup. I've been able to play my 1080p movies fairly well with this, though I get pauses occasionally. I do find the menus really slow and have had issues with the Pi rebooting periodically. Pivos Xios DS - This is a XBMC approved device, and is roughly $90-110 depending on where you get it. It definitely runs smoother than the Pi and has a better overall experience. I don't really like the remote as it's cheap plastic crap, but it does the job. My bigger issue is that XBMC is at 12.3 however the Pivos supported version of XBMC is still 12.0 - which is over a year old (the Pivos XBMC latest update is from May 2013). For an officially supported device I am disappointed that the software is so outdated. Intel NUC - This is a proper Intel computer (mine is Celeron 847), that you need to buy a mSATA drive and ram for. Mine cost me about $400 total, but it can run Windows or OpenElec, which I have on it. Because it's a full PC it is nice and fast and works the best of the end point units I've tried. I also have a full blown PC on my primary TV (it's actually in the basement, with a 50 foot HDMI connection from the receiver to the TV in the living room). I had been running Windows 7/XBMC, but just replaced that with OpenElec as I had gotten to a point where I needed to reboot Windows periodically. The local end points are far easier to setup I would think, and far easier to troubleshoot than a fully centralized solution (if it's even possible). Personally I see a lot of value in consolidating the server side details, and centralizing common components (such as the XBMC database), but I am not sure whether the end points are worthwhile. As I write this, there is one solution that comes to mind... Plex. This is another media center solution that can run in place or, or beside XBMC. Many newer TVs can install Plex, which would mean you wouldn't need a local endpoint. As I understand it, pretty much all the processing is done on the Plex server as well (which can run on UnRAID), and you can share you media library, with your TV, tablet, smart phone, as well as friends. If you have newer TVs that support this, this may be a good option for you, but other than that I'd stick with real end points.

You are correct - sorry, I should have clarified that. Realistically, any Intel CPU/Motherboard that supports VT-x will support virtualization. I had already mentally taken it the next step and assumed that if I am rebuilding my UnRAID server with new CPU/motherboard that I wanted to make sure my investment would support everything I want now, and may want in the future - hence the VT-d requirement and pass-through.

Virtualization really comes down to 2 main benefits in my mind - better hardware utilization (many of us have way more cpu and memory capacity than what UnRAID needs), as well as server consolidation/isolation. Like many people using UnRAID, I started with a base setup just to manage my media storage. I followed the guide to install UnRAID to give me some additional options and was off to the races. As my comfort level grew I added things like UnMENU, SimpleFeatures, SABnzbd, SickBeard, Couch Potato, Headphones and most recently MySQL as I am in the process of setting up a unified database for my various XBMC clients. I've also installed Plex to play around with the options it brings. As I add more and more to UnRAID I do worry about the worst case scenario where UnRAID dies and I have to remember how to re-setup all these applications that are plugged in, plus there is the downtime associated with all this automation that has been configured. The point of virtualization in general is usually server/computer consolidation. If you look at it from a business perspective, many companies have applications that are business critical, but have a small cpu and/or ram requirement, however it's nearly impossible to buy a server that just meets these low requirements (try and buy a computer with a single cpu core and 2GB of memory - it's easier in the consumer space, but usually not cost effective and it's worse in the corporate space). Now imagine that you have 30 computers that really only need low end cpu and ram requirements, but you have 30 physical servers sitting in your data center or server room. Not only does this take up a large amount of space, and generate a lot of heat, and cables, and management to oversee, but there each server is also underutilized (sometimes only using 5-10% of the servers capabilities), and each server is a single point of failure. Virtualization from a corporate perspective is based on the strategy that instead of having 30 underutilized servers sucking power and generating heat, you instead buy one monster server (comparatively speaking), or better yet two (for redundancy), and then you virtualize each of those underutilized computers and run them from the new beefy servers. Because each server is virtualized within it's own self-contained bubble, you can mix Linux, Unix and Windows. Each virtual machine (VM) believes it's installed on bare metal and has access to all the system resources, where in reality there is a virtualization layer (either ESX, Xen, Hyper-V or whatever) that is serving up virtualized instances of your resources (cpu, ram, storage, network card, video, etc) to each VM and managing all 30 VM instances from a central pool. There are significant benefits to this, including: - Reduced management (you are only managing 2 physical servers, not 30 - though some VM management is required as well) - Reduced footprint - you only have 2 servers sucking power and generating heat - potentially with some shared storage. - Better hardware utilization - instead of having 30 machines using 5% of the available CPU and RAM, you can now balance those 30 machines across multiple virtualization hosts, and leverage 80% of the available CPU and RAM - which is a much better return on your investment - Lower risk/better availability - usually in the corporate would when building virtualization you plan for N+1 hosts, which means you determine how many hosts you need to support all your VMs (you add up the CPU and RAM requirements and figure how best to lay them out virtually), and then you add an additional host so that in the event that a single server dies the VMs will automatically failover to the new host - this way the hardware failure is invisible to the virtual servers and hopefully to the end users who are using those applications. From a consumer perspective (specifically with UnRAID), virtualization allows you to remove some of plugins from the UnRAID server and run these applications in isolated VMs. This gives you the following benefits: - Improved stability of UnRAID - Right now you could have 10 different plugins running on UnRAID. Each is potentially created by a different person, each has unique requirements, and each has the potential to blow up UnRAID. If one of those 10 plugins was updated incorrectly, it could cause unexpected side effects, and it could have nasty consequences. The more you add on top of UnRAID, the higher the associated risk of something going wrong. By taking plugins away and running them in a VM (such as SAB, SickBeard, CouchPotato, Plex, MySQL), you reduce the complexity of your UnRAID environment, and decrease the possibility of an unexpected event occurring due to an incorrect updated plugin, or a conflict of plugins. - Application Isolation - Along with improving the stability of UnRAID, you also reduce the results of UnRAID blowing up. Currently, if you have everything running on UnRAID as I mentioned at the top of this post then if your USB stick died, it would be a ton of work to re-set everything up and reconfigure it. If you had a separate VM that was running SAB, SB and CP, and another VM running Plex, and possibly another running MySQL and XBMC updater, then if UnRAID died it would only impact UnRAID. All your other VMs would still be fine, which means you don't need to worry about re-creating or re-configuring those apps. If UnRAID is your base OS as suggested in the virtualization categories then these VMs would be out of commission until the server was rebuilt, but you would only need to re-point the virtualization software to the pre-existing VMs and then restart them. - Server/Computer Consolidation - Even though this is not as prevalent an issue as in the corporate world, many users here have multiple computers for different tasks. Some have spoken about software based routers, whereas others (such as myself) have Active Directory and Exchange running at home, or other software. Rather than buying additional servers to manage this, being able to virtualize on top of UnRAID allows you to expand your home server environment as your needs grow, without having to invest in additional hardware (unless you have a minimal UnRAID hardware config, in which case you may need to make an investment). - Test environments - one of the really nice options virtualization allows is that you can easily create and destroy VMs. This give you a ton of options to try different configurations (again, without needing new hardware) and figuring out exactly what you want to do before moving it into production. For example, say you want to add new functionality to UnRAID (like MySQL and maybe XMBC centralized library), but have no idea what you are doing, and don't really want to mess around with your UnRAID server. With virtualization you could easily create another UnRAID server in a VM (you could even just copy your current production configuration), and then tweak and modify the test VM until you are happy with the results, and then, once you are comfortable you can make the necessary changes to your production UnRAID server. This is a far better approach than trying to undo changes on your production server if you find something went wrong. This is also a great way to test out things like the different GUI options without modifying your production server until you are sure which one you want. As each of us mature in both our technical understanding, and our desire to further improve our personal environments, virtualization makes a lot of sense as a platform to work from. With all the above said the key thing to take advantage of virtualization is to make sure you have the proper hardware to both support it, as well as enough resources to take advantage of it. To truly have a setup that will be able to take advantage of these options you need to invest in higher end configurations than what is often suggested for UnRAID. Again, one of the features UnRAID claims is a minimal hardware config. This means that many, such as myself, bought low end AMD/Intel processors, fairly basic motherboards and minimal RAM configurations. If you are planning on virtualization for the future you need to learn new terminology and re-plan the hardware requirements for your UnRAID server. If you are an AMD fan, then you are looking for motherboards and CPUs that support HyperTransport. If you are an Intel fan, then you are looking for motherboards and CPUs that support Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O, abbreviated VT-d I prefer Intel, and just did this research for myself for my updated UnRAID server. Intel has a website (http://ark.intel.com) that you can use to look up any CPU to confirm it's feature set. AMD may have something similar, but I haven't looked into it. You also need to make sure that the motherboard you select supports virtualization (HyperTransport/VT-d). This is likely a matter of picking which CPU you want (so you can get the correct CPU socket type), and then pick your favorite motherboard manufacturer and find a board that supports the virtualization technology you need. Then you want to make sure you stock it with enough RAM to support multiple VMs (or at least make sure you have the option to expand as your needs increase - i.e. if you have 4 slots, don't fill them with 1GB DIMMs, instead start with 2x4GB DIMMS or 2x8GB DIMMS so that you can expand down the road). I believe everything above is accurate, however I may be mistaken on some of the AMD requirements. If so, I am sure someone will correct me. Lastly, while I've made reference to UnRAID blowing up and other nasty things happening to highlight my points, the likelihood of this is pretty small (I think). The way we run things now (i.e. UnRAID with plugins) works for thousands of people without issue, and likely will continue to do so for years to come - I don't want to leave anyone with the impression they are running around with a ticking time bomb just waiting for it to explode. Hopefully this was helpful.

Given that XMBC is moving away from MySQL and looking at a UPnP style replacement, would XBMC on unRAID make more sense so that it's the "master" copy updating the library and all your tv-based clients could get the update from this version? I agree that currently this may not be overly valuable for many who run unRAID headless in the basement/back office, but if this is the direction XBMC is moving to with Gotham and beyond, then having a local XMBC copy for the database update may be valuable.

While this is true, personally I think if Tom managed this differently this could change and be far more lucrative for him. There are a number of online products that charge an initial use cost, and then an annual payment to be entitled to the latest upgrades. If Tom was willing to: 1) Provide consistent communication 2) Provide a solid list of updates being included in a given release, and stick to it 3) Provide a proper roadmap 4) Stick to his commitments, or at least provide better visibility into his progress (which leads back to #1) If the above were being met I am sure a number of us would be willing to help keep Tom financially viable. If Tom had a model where you buy Unraid (Plus or Pro) then you are entitled to 1 year of upgrades. Additional years of support could cost you $10/$20 depending on your version. This would allow those who are happy where they are to use the product they bought, and those who want the latest and greatest to pay a bit extra to gain those features. If this was being applied retroactively to current users, Tom could release 5.0, offer a year of upgrades to everyone existing and then slide into this model moving forward. I have a couple of products I use structured like this, and have no problem with it. However... it's because I have confidence in the vendor - not so much by what they've done, but by the fact that they don't disappear for weeks/months at a time, and because they don't try and slam last minute features into a product that is 95% baked. I definitely appreciate what Tom has done with Unraid to date, and would be willing to help Tom moving forward, but a whole lot would need to change from the current model. Hopefully the 1 year post-5.0 could be used to regain the trust of the community and show consistent progress to prove Tom can meet commitments and deserves this. I am not one to voluntarily throw away money, but I have no problem supporting the products I use, trust and appreciate. Given the vocal support Tom receives in this forum (and the passion of the detractors) I think there are potentially a lot who may agree with me. All those who keep pushing for release I believe are just trying to keep Tom to his word, and wanting the same 4 things listed above. It's not so much a technical requirements (though there is some of that too), but wanting to trust Tom. I am guessing none of us really know Tom (or very few do), but all of us want him to succeed. I think if Tom was to focus on the above model, the rewards would definitely pay huge dividends to him, help make Unraid far more financially viable, and possibly allow Tom to focus full-time on this and potentially other products (provided this is not a full time job now, which the sporadic communication suggests is not). I am sure not everyone will agree with me, and some will likely complain at the thought of paying even more for Unraid, but I bet there are a lot of others who would agree to this. I am guessing I may find out in the reply comments to this.

Good point... after I sent this I was lying in bed and realized I didn't factor in the parity write (as I was talking about non-cache drive), but I am still somewhat surprised it sucks 75% of the speed, but I guess my experience isn't that abnormal from what you mention. I guess I should be getting a cache drive in place to solve my own issue. Thanks for helping clear things up.

Just throwing in my $0.02 here. I seem to have speed issues with UnRaid compared to other Windows boxes on my network. I have a mix of Windows boxes (Win7, Win8 and Server 2012) and I can copy from any one to the other and get 80-100MB/s no problem. When I copy to UnRaid I get 20-25MB/s. The UnRaid server is on the same switch as my Server 2012 machines, and I've swapped cables back and forth with no effect. I am currently using RC 15a, but did notice this was earlier RCs as well. It's not a showstopper, but it is annoying when I actually realize how big a difference there is. I am using an Intel NIC in my UnRaid server and it is configured as 1000MB/Full Duplex: NIC info (from ethtool)Settings for eth0: Supported ports: [ TP ] Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Full Supports auto-negotiation: Yes Advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Full Advertised pause frame use: No Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes Speed: 1000Mb/s Duplex: Full Port: Twisted Pair PHYAD: 0 Transceiver: internal Auto-negotiation: on MDI-X: off Supports Wake-on: umbg Wake-on: g Current message level: 0x00000007 (7) Link detected: yes NIC driver info (from ethtool -i) driver: e1000 version: 7.3.21-k8-NAPI firmware-version: bus-info: 0000:06:05.0 I don't know if this information helps anyone else trying to look into this, but it would be great to get this fixed (assuming it can be).