Is there an inexpensive way to increase drive performance

[rukiddin]

I've got a couple of UNRAID servers, and have been very happy with them.  My current configurations are generally built around 8TB shucked drives, mostly Seagate, my parity drive for instance is a Seagate Barracuda (ST8000DM004).  I do have a mix of smaller drives thrown in there as well, mostly older 4TB shucked Seagate drives.  One of my servers has 9 drives, and the other has 5 drives in the array.

 

Anyhow, once drive prices come back to reality (hopefully in the not too distant future), I'll be upgrading to either 14TB or larger drives.  Looking at my Parity Check, it's currently taking 18 hours at a speed of 123mb/s.

 

My parity drive appears to be maintaining a 6.0Gbps link.

 

I want to increase the throughput as much as possible so that I minimize the increase in my parity check time.

 

What are the most cost effective ways of doing this?  (Faster SATA controller, better motherboard, SATA cables, etc.) What are other people seeing in terms of their parity check run times?  What should I expect a parity check, with a 14TB drive to take in terms of time? speed in mb/s?

 

Thanks

 

Mike

 

[Squid]

There's nothing particularly wrong with that speed (the maximum sustained speed that drive can do it 190MB/s)

 

But, you have to bear in mind that every drive slows down the closer they get to the end.  Since you have a mixture of smaller drives (you mentioned 4TB, but implied other (presumably smaller) drives), then those slowdowns slow down the speed until the check is past those drives and no longer needs them.

 

As an aside, more and more people run the parity check in bursts overnight via the parity tuning plugin, so it doesn't particularly matter how long it takes because it's only running at times when nothing else is happening for a couple of hours a night.