Can I plug a USB external drive into my NAS system using unraid for faster x-fer speeds?

[coppatop]

Title says it all, but I will expand a bit --

 

I JUST finished building my NAS a few days ago.  Been playing with it and slowly transferring 15++ years of HD photos and videos (I am a photographer) over.  It is slower than I would like, getting about 30mb/s.   I have a few external drives, is there a way to plug them directly into my NAS USB ports for faster transfer, rather than moving it over my network through windows?

If so, what's the best way to do that?  Do I need to mount the drive in Unraid first?

Thanks!

[Hoopster]

12 minutes ago, coppatop said:

It is slower than I would like, getting about 30mb/s

Are you using a parity drive?  Many new unRAID users do not assign a parity or drive or cache pool during data transfer from source to new unRAID server.  Parity slows down write/transfer speeds.  A parity drive and cache pool can be added to the array once data transfer is done.

 

Using the Unassigned Devices plugin, you can attach external USB drives directly to the server.  You can also use it to mount remote shares if needed.

[coppatop]

I do have parity and cache setup.  The cache is setup ONLY for downloaded content (PLEX).  I probably should have started with my current data backup first.

 

 

[trurl]

Realtime parity update is probably the reason for your write speeds. Some people prefer to do the initial data load without parity and then build parity after since it is faster if you have a lot to load.

 

You could turn on Turbo Write

https://wiki.unraid.net/Manual/Storage_Management#Array_Write_Modes