Slow Transfers

[phermium]

Hello! I've been thinking about moving my home server from Arch Linux to Unraid because I seem to spend a couple hours a week doing maintenance, keeping my ansible config working, etc., and have heard that Unraid might help simplify things. There isn't really anything wrong with the setup... I'm trying to simplify things if possible to take some of the admin work off my plate.

 

I have a Dell R720xd

• 2x Xeon E5-2650 v2
• 64GB ram
• 1x 500GB SSD (OS)
• 3x 14TB drives for media (2x data, 1x snapraid parity)
• I also have a couple BTRFS mirrors with 3TB drives

 

So, I decided to (after making sure I had a backup) create an Unraid USB drive and give it a go. I used Next 6.10.0-rc2 (maybe I should try stable?). I wiped out my Snapraid parity drive (WD 14TB) and setup the Unraid array with that. I specifically didn't set a parity drive as I read it would probably be faster to transfer my data to it. I decided I would transfer all my movies, load up Plex in docker and test the performance before fully committing to the transition.

 

The transfer was fine doing local to local (About 130MB/s), and Plex also worked fine. Where I started to really feel like it was a step backwards was transferring data from my Windows desktop (SMB). I tried transferring a few ISOs and a VM hard-disk file (about 25GB) and it maxed out at ~85MB/s. While that's still not horrible, I can get ~125MB/s with my previous setup using the same test file. On my main system I'm using dperson/samba, so maybe I could try that on Unraid, but at that point then I'd miss out on user management, which is one of the things I wanted from Unraid.

 

I have a couple 14TB drives attached to my desktop (Drivepool) to backup data from my server. I use FreeFileSync when I want to do a sync (usually at least once a month). On my current server it takes about 33 seconds to compare the files (simple timestamp and file size) and over SMB. When I do the same on Unraid it takes about 3.5 minutes. For the test, I only included the files that were available in Unraid (movies).

 

I've read that transfer performance gets worse when parity is added (makes sense) so you can use a cache drive (SSD/NVME) to help offset that, but I was really hoping to see raw numbers closer to what I have on my Arch Linux install. If performance really is that much worse for FreeFileSync comparison (~500%), and transfers (~30%), then I don't know its really worth the transition to Unraid for me.

 

Additional things I've tried:

• set case sensitive to true (SMB) = no change

 

Some things I think I could try:

• Try going from latest "Next" to "Stable"
• Try NFS (Instead of Samba)

 

I know SMB may not be the fastest method, but I was hoping to see about the same performance out of it (before parity) since Unraid is a NAS-focused OS, and before I was just using a docker container for SMB. I've heard (and read) some great things about the community here, and would love to hear if anyone has any thoughts or ideas. If I can't get better performance, I'll just have to decide if its worth taking the hit on performance to gain ease of management from Unraid, which is still worth considering.

Edited December 7, 2021 by phermium
Cleanup