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Transferring media files: What am I doing wrong? (Only 6Mbps!)

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Greetings...

 

I'm a unRAID noob....so please bear with me :)

 

I have tried numerous ways to transfer media files from other drives on my network and the maximum speed I can achieve on any transfer is 6Mbps....meaning that I should be dead of old age before my 10-11TB worth of data/media ever finishing transferring.

 

Is this normal?

 

I have my unRAID Tower plugged directly into my Router ---- I have an iMac and a Mac Mini both directly connected to my router ---- I have tried to transfer from both machines, again...each of them only get 6Mbps

 

I have tried it with the cache drive UNASSIGNED....I have tried it with the Parity drive UNASSIGNED and I have tried it with BOTH the cache and Parity drive UNASSIGNED. No changes, still 6Mbps.

 

 

I have also tried to transfer from within the server itself. I added 2 new drives that already had data on them and followed the directions here:

 

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Copy_files_from_a_NTFS_drive

 

And I have also tried with the directions posted here:

 

http://www.lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Configuration_Tutorial

 

I cannot seem to get either of the above guides/tutorials to work....I'm going to let the latest Parity-Sync finish here today (currently at 25%) and re-attack this tonight...

 

 

Any further guidance that I need to be looking at?  Much appreciated!~!

 

 

Is your router Gigabit ethernet? Or just 10/100?

At the console of your unRAID machine, run the command:

 

ethtool eth0

 

And tell us the entries for "Speed" and "Duplex"

Router: Fritz!Box Fon WLAN 7170 (10/100Mb/s)

 

Link to router: http://www.avm.de/en/Produkte/FRITZBox/FRITZ_Box_Fon_WLAN/index.php

 

I live in Germany (US Military) and this is the router that the internet company sold me...I used to have very slow internet, but just a couple months ago they upgraded and my speed has increased quite a bit. I still don't think it's very good though...but I could be wrong.  Perhaps I will check and see if a faster router is available from them tomorrow - now that my speed has increased.

 

It may just be that I simply don't have a fast enough connection...

 

-----------

ethtool eth0 setings:

 

Speed: 100Mb/s

Duplex: Full

 

The Speed: 100Mb/s is where the problem lies.  That is not a Gigabit connection so the max you will see is about 10MB/s.

 

Your internet connection speed has nothing to do with it as you are transferring all these files locally on your LAN.

An alternative would be a Gigabit Switch that you plug both machines into and thereby will bypass the router.

Could be cheaper that way.

 

I'm also trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong trying to "Copy Files from an Internal or External Drive"  (http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Copy_files_from_a_NTFS_drive)

 

I added (2) Western Digital 2.0TB drives to my server.  I left them unassigned.  One of them is at "sdb" and the other is "sdc"

 

These drives are FAT32 (I believe, as they came from a Western Digital My Book Studio Edition 2 and were previously attached to my Mac Mini via Firewire connection

 

Anyways, I type the following:

 

mkdir /mnt/old_data                                     

 

mount -r -t vfat /dev/hdj1 /mnt/old_data             <-----------instead of hdj1 I put: sdb  (correct?)

 

After typing that, I get the following message:

 

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so

 

 

Any clues for me :) ?

 

mkdir /mnt/old_data                                   

 

mount -r -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt/old_data            <-----------instead of hdj1 I put: sdb  (correct?)

 

notice the 1 at the end of sdb

An alternative would be a Gigabit Switch that you plug both machines into and thereby will bypass the router.

Could be cheaper that way.

 

 

graywolf: I was thinking about that also...I just wasn't sure if that would work.  I almost bought one today... So, I would just connect the iMac and the server to it....and that should give me somewhat faster speeds?

 

Yes connect the Mac, the server, and your WAN router to the switch. Trendnet 8-port switches are often on sale for $25. This will allow 10X performance you getting now between the server and the Mac as well as giving Internet access to both machines.

I tried that and here is what its telling me:

 

mount: special device /dev/sdb1 does not exist

 

I also tried it for sdc1 and it gives me the same message....

 

sdb and sdc drives are in the array but I have left them unassigned

It would b very unlikely your disks have FAT file systems.

 

To see the partitions of all your disks, type:

ls -l /dev/disk/by-id

I tried that and here is what its telling me:

 

mount: special device /dev/sdb1 does not exist

 

I also tried it for sdc1 and it gives me the same message....

 

sdb and sdc drives are in the array but I have left them unassigned

It would b very unlikely your disks have FAT file systems.

 

To see the partitions of all your disks, type:

ls -l /dev/disk/by-id

 

Yes. I'm guessing either HFS or NTFS. HFS if they were formatted by the Mac and NTFS if pre-formatted.

If they are HFS...am I SOL :) ?

 

Meaning I'll just have to transfer them over the network...?

 

 

No there is an HFSplus driver included in unRAID, you just have to load it (modprobe) before you can mount the drive.

If they are HFS...am I SOL :) ?

 

Meaning I'll just have to transfer them over the network...?

 

 

It wouldn't be the end of the world. Gb networking can keep up with most disks, certainly spinning disks with unRAID parity protection. Expect 40+MB/s depending on bunches of stuff.

Sorry for interjecting a 2nd related question here.  However I am about to face similar questions when I build my UnRAID machine and have to migrate about 4 or 4.5 TB of data.

 

Does it make more sense to install the NTFS disks in the unraid machien and copy internally with this process?  Or should I just put them in a win7 machine temporarily copy files over, and then move the discs back to the UnRAID server to mount them in the array?

 

How much faster is the copy when it's internal?  If not any faster, then isn't it "safer" just to put them in my win 7 box temporarily?

Well, as I said...I'm now transferring my media files over to the server...however, I'm wondering if I didn't make another mistake in doing so.  After reading the following "To cache drive or not to cache drive" thread: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5754.0

 

The last statement under "General Advice" in that thread states the following:  If you attempt a data transfer that is larger than the size of your cache drive, the transfer will fail.

 

Well, silly me...I immediately started a 4TB transfer (w/ 2TB cache drive)!!!  At this point, I'm about 25% completed (~1TB transferred)...does this mean I should expect to get an error around the ~2TB mark?  Fingers crossed for a successful transfer...somehow!

 

I am by no means the expert here, but from what I understand, you should not start using the cache drive until after you copy everything over to the array.

Well, as I said...I'm now transferring my media files over to the server...however, I'm wondering if I didn't make another mistake in doing so.  After reading the following "To cache drive or not to cache drive" thread: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5754.0

 

The last statement under "General Advice" in that thread states the following:  If you attempt a data transfer that is larger than the size of your cache drive, the transfer will fail.

 

Well, silly me...I immediately started a 4TB transfer (w/ 2TB cache drive)!!!  At this point, I'm about 25% completed (~1TB transferred)...does this mean I should expect to get an error around the ~2TB mark?  Fingers crossed for a successful transfer...somehow!

 

I am by no means the expert here, but from what I understand, you should not start using the cache drive until after you copy everything over to the array.

It really does not matter too much AS LONG AS YOU SET THE MIN FREE correctly on the cache drive to be about twice the size of your largest single file.  (and remember it is kilobytes, not bytes.)

My understanding (I definitely could be wrong!) was that having the cache drive assigned would speed up transfers, not slow them down?  Perhaps this was beyond the initial seeding of the server though?

 

Just do as Joe L says and set your min free space on the cache drive. And do your transfers in batches <= (Cache Drive Capacity - Min Free Space). You can then run the mover script after each completed transfer to get it off the drive. After everything is off the cache drive, you may start the next transfer

  • 5 months later...

I'm sure this drive is a FAT32 drive. It's got a bunch of files on it that I want to transfer to my server. I put the internal drive into the server, upon boot up, I did not assign it in the unRaid startup drop down menu.

 

The drive got assigned /dev/sdi, but there are not any numbers after any of the dev's, like /dev/sdi1, sdi2 etc. I was able to read this drive through a SATA <> USB adapter on my Windows desktop.

 

The error I get when attempting to mount is:

 

root@Dumbo:~# fdisk -l | grep FAT

WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sdd'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.

Disk /dev/sdi doesn't contain a valid partition table
/dev/sda1   *           1         976     7839656    b  W95 FAT32
root@Dumbo:~#

 

Where /dev/sda is the flash drive with unraid OS, and /dev/sdd is the cache drive.

 

I've attached other curious log entries.

 

I'll wait to hear back from someone before I pull the drive and copy Fat32 > Windows machine > network > unRaid share

 

thanks!

new_wd_sdi.txt

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