shovenose

There should be no difference in performance with a SATA III HBA when compared to onboard SATA III ports as long as everything is working the way it's supposed to. Most of these enterprise grade cards use a PCI-E X8 bus which has more than enough bandwidth for 8-16 mechanical hard drives. And unfortunately, I can't comment on that other concern, I have never had any stability issues with Unraid 6.9.2 and I've only ever run it on Intel systems.

Restart the server and the computer? This always fixes my issues access network shares which randomly decide my password is not correct.

You got a few options, for transcoding though Intel with QSV i the way to go. You don't need anything fancy, a used 10th gen system will give you a modern version of QSV, for example in my desktop I've got an i3-10100 and according to cpubenchmark.net it scores about double your CPU even though it's a low end chip. I've used that system to transcode stuff temporarily. You can, of course, go brand new, again Intel is your best option, just get whatever is cheap as long as it's got an i3 or better you'll be fine. Just don't buy any F-series Intel CPUs as those don't come with an iGPU at all. Also, there's the DDR4 vs DDR5 debate, even the latest intel platforms support DDR4 as long as you pick a motherboard that's DDR4 not DDR5... and DDR4 is the way to go. DDR5 is NOT worth the massive price difference. Only thing is your number of SATA ports wanted will limit your motherboard choices, whether you go used or new. You may simply want to pick up an LSI HBA card in IT mode off eBay and connect your drives to that. A decent 8-port card can be had for about $150, but after the cost savings of a cheaper motherboard the end price difference in your overall build won't be much. Just be sure you have a fan directly on or blowing on the HBA as most of them get HOT and expect to be living in servers with tons of airflow, while even a gaming type PC case with lots of cooling will not be enough for long-term stability. Another option is to keep your existing system and add a GPU for transcoding, although I don't believe that Docker supports anything except Intel QSV for transcoding, so your best bet would be moving your Plex server to a Windows 10 VM, if you decide to go this route. In the end, throw your old mobo, CPU, RAM combo on eBay you'll still get some money back for it.

I have had all sorts of bizarre issues with a fairly new TP-Link managed switch and various Realtek gigabit NICs and one random mobo with a Marvell NIC (what a turd). Either the link would be unreliable or simply perform "wrong" or go down to 100Mbps randomly. No such issues with any other switch (including TP-Link unmanaged switches) nor the Realtek 2.5g NIC in my main desktop. I ended up resolving the problem by replacing the switch, although the issue did seem to be driver dependent as with some OS's the problem would never happen, while on some OS's it would be fine. Anyway, do me a favor, try a different ethernet cable and a different switch (or if directly connected to your router, throw an unmanaged switch in between). If that doesn't work, Intel NIC time they are cheap on eBay

Here you go sir. Although I think I may have resolved it, I'm not sure why it worked, but I found someone else online who resolved the same issue by picking an older "machine type" so I deleted my VM, created one with machine type q35-4.0 instead of q35-5.1, attached my old disk, and when I came back this morning to check Plex was working and my VM was not paused. panther-diagnostics-20220331-1018.zip

I consolidated my stuff into my Unraid server to save space, so here I am using VMs in Unraid for the first time. Anyway, got my Win10 VM going, passed through my Quadro P400, Plex works, but my Unraid VM will randomly pause. I read that this could be storage related but I'm running the VM on my Cache drive which has nothing else on it. My cache drive is a 128GB SSD and my Windows VM is set to 100GB disk. Any help? Thanks.

Right? I'm still waiting for an updated version. In the mean time I can barely stream from Plex while adding new content to the server or running a backup from my PC or something. I must say the folks on this forum have been really helpful when I'm having minor problems but this is a major issue and we don't even have a specific date for a fix besides Soon^TM.

holy cow i feel so dumb i forgot i set that. i'm so sorry and thank you!

thanks and yes i checked share settings it's set to include all, exclude none. unraid-diagnostics-20190927-1607.zip

ok any more ideas? i need to resolve this issue. thanks

I have it set to split anything

I have it set to place files on the drive with the most free space, so I'm not sure why it's not putting files on disk7. I did copy the 13.2GB of files that are on this disk using the command line from a disk that was having issues before removing the disk that had issues - perhaps that's got something to do with it? Not sure. Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Thanks! How far away is that?

Yeah, I mean sure Unraid is cheap compared to enterprise software, but there are plenty of other great products that are free or cheaper. I don't think price is a worthy reason to ignore such a major, easily reproducible bug. I spent $130 on this thing and for it to perform so abysmally is frustrating. I never had ANY performance or any other issues with DrivePool and it's waaaay cheaper. I am glad I switched to Unraid because it delivers the additional features I needed (easy parity, web UI, etc) but DrivePool just worked. Perfectly. 100% of the time. And it's $30. Saying it's OK for Unraid to have this issue without any word from the developers on an ETA for resolution is like saying it's OK if my 2010 Ford Escape gets limited to 5mph while driving 65mph randomly just because it cost less than a brand new Escape. No, it's not, and in fact Ford had a massive recall related to prematurely failing electronic throttle bodies because they would go into limp mode on the highway which is a major safety and functionality issue.

Yeah, I'm wondering when an update will be available to resolve this issue.