What will be the 2022 Setup for Best Write/Read Speeds?

[Hexenhammer]

Hello,

So i been putting off unraid for long time due to hearing its extremely slow, but lately i heard that newer versions have new options to make HDD read/Write speeds equal to their actual speeds, is this is true?

What will be the setup that i need to follow to do that?

Also, can i keep my old NVMe with windows 11, to get dual boot, or at least so i can unplug unraid USB and then boot into windows

 

I also have 1TB samsung pro SSD, bunch of 512 pro SSDs and  Optane 905 280Gb, I want to use the 1Tb and two 512Gb Samsungs pro + 280p Optane as cache drives

Whats the recommended setup for cache drives?

 

Is there any way to sent torrent magnet links and torrent files from main PC web browser to unraid for download? like some sort of browser plugin that captures the torrent and sends them to uinraid?

 

Connection is AQC107 10Gb and one PC, I planed to plug them directly into each other, but found on amazon Germany has a sale for Qnap QSW-2104-2T, so i got one to make everything simple, it has two 10GB ports and x5 2.5Gb ports, ill use the 2.5Gb port as uplink to my router, i hope it wont slow down the internet speed

 

I hope all the parts that I have are unRaid compatible

My build is 12700, iGPU, 32Gb RAM and i have x3 5 port PCIe x4 SATA card, forgot the controller, but its the good one among the cheap cards, its PCIe Gen 3.0 and has PCie x2 lane connection so enough for HDD's

 

Thanks

[TimTheSettler]

I had an old PC.  I wanted to try unRAID but have the option to go back if things didn't work out.  I originally thought to leave the Windows drive in the PC and this would work ok with unRAID but decided to disconnect it.  The trick is knowing which drives are for Windows and which ones are for unRAID.  Both Windows and unRAID will ignore the drives until you tell them to use them but it's easy to forget which is used for what.

 

Anyway, I recommend that you just give unRAID a try.  There's a 30-day trial so install it and use it and see if you like it.

 

I don't see anything wrong with your hardware but sometimes hardware is picky.  I had some old M2 drives lying around so I bought a card that I could put them in.  I plugged the card into a mobo but it wasn't recognized.  I then plugged that same card into an older mobo and it worked there.  Almost everything is built to work in Windows and most, but not all, things work in Linux.  The best is to either just give it a try or read up on the device.

 

You can try different combinations of cache drives including mixing and matching although it's easier to use similar sizes/devices.  The cache drives can be used as fast access for docker apps and VMs or as a fast file cache.  It's up to you.

[MedicalDetective05]

Curious what you decided to go with. I just built my server, and decided on Unraid and am very happy with it thus far. Also, I like the community from what I've seen online thus far. People are very helpful when you have a question, or issue which is always awesome, and I feel that's a big plus. 

[MrGrey]

On 12/6/2022 at 8:02 PM, Hexenhammer said:

So i been putting off unraid for long time due to hearing its extremely slow

Best Internet for most is Gigabit (which is 100Mb per second). A mechanical HD can do 150Mb/sec easy.

 

Maybe I'm missing something?... All of my SATA connections can do 6GB/sec.

 

My motherboard has 24tb of bandwidth per second.

 

Why is everything so slow?

 

MrGrey.

 

 

[Hexenhammer]

On 12/26/2022 at 2:38 PM, MedicalDetective05 said:

Curious what you decided to go with. I just built my server, and decided on Unraid and am very happy with it thus far. Also, I like the community from what I've seen online thus far. People are very helpful when you have a question, or issue which is always awesome, and I feel that's a big plus. 

 

For now i have an unRaid, but every day im thinking if that was mistake and maybe trueNAS is ultimate build, especially when i found out that on idle it can spin down the drives

Since i have tons of HDD's, way too many, I kep OG files on their original drives, if i feel to format to TrueNas i can do it, Ill have to re-copy everything again [60Tb total]

I have everything setup already so switching to truenas will be time consuming, all left for me to do is run Defrag on all drives until it stop and says nothing to defrag and enable parity

 

This is my build:

12400 CPU [HT disbaled] set to 50W in Bios [Board has 8 Intel SATA that share 2GB/s bandwidth]

32Gb of RAM

iGPU

9200 card for 8 drives

jmb 585 for 5 drives

 

samsung 850 PRO [MLC] 512Gb "Vault" cache SSD: encrypted

x4 Samsung 850 PRO 1TB [MLC] in RAID 0 brtfs as big normal cache drive

Intel Enterprise 4TB 4500 U.2 as downloads SSD [I cant use HDD for downloads, too slow]

 

x2 16TB Exos x16 for future Parity [not set yet]

Storage array is exos x16 x8 14tb, x1 16tb and one 12Tb NAS wolf pro or something, all set to 4Kn native and some benchmark for 290Mb/s, the slowest does 240Mb/s [advertised speed is 160Mb/s, so im confused here]

And i have like 3 or 4 exos x16 16TB kept as replacements, basiclly when 14tb dies it will be swaped for 16tb

I have single 18Tb that im thinking to use as parity, instead of 16tb, so it will be one 18 + 16 and in future the 16tb parity can be upgraded to 18

 

I have 10-15 Shucked WD HDDs sized 12 to 14 and one 16, these are atrocious and i would never use them on unraid [true nas OK thou], unlike Seagete that has their Enterprise HDDs inside external boxes, WD has castrated Enterprise models with firmware that slows down the read/write speed, they spin at 7200 but do read write like 5900rpm

So they very HOT, very slow, never hit 200 mb/s, Seagate owns them hands down.

 

But if used for RAID, then its fine since you get speed boost from raid

 

 

[Hexenhammer]

9 hours ago, MrGrey said:

Best Internet for most is Gigabit (which is 100Mb per second). A mechanical HD can do 150Mb/sec easy.

 

Maybe I'm missing something?... All of my SATA connections can do 6GB/sec.

 

My motherboard has 24tb of bandwidth per second.

 

Why is everything so slow?

 

MrGrey.

 

 

 

Whats your exact problem??

Whats your spec and drive models?

[TimTheSettler]

On 12/30/2022 at 2:57 AM, MrGrey said:

Best Internet for most is Gigabit (which is 100Mb per second). A mechanical HD can do 150Mb/sec easy.

 

Maybe I'm missing something?... All of my SATA connections can do 6GB/sec.

 

My motherboard has 24tb of bandwidth per second.

 

Why is everything so slow?

 

MrGrey.

 

 

 

I find component speeds to be fascinating.  Speeds increase and increase but then hit a ceiling of some kind and then someone figures out a new way around it and speeds start to increase again but with a new technology or standard to get around the limitation.

 

Let's clarify and standardize a bit here.  Network throughput is typically measured as bits per second (bps) but computer speeds are typically measured as bytes per second (B/s).  Technically both are correct (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data-rate_units).  A LAN speed of 1Gbps is common but we're talking about gigabits (Gbps) so let's convert this to megabytes (MBps or MB/s) so that all comparisons use the same unit of measure.  So LAN is 125MB/sec (1Gbps=1000Mbps=125MBps=125MB/s).  Notice that I talk about LAN because internet is not LAN.  I know people who get download speeds of 1Gbps but my internet is not that fast (I get 40Mbps) and usually upload speeds are far lower at 10Mps.  ISPs cap the speeds so that you get more download capability.  After all, most people just stream shows or watch videos or check Facebook which is mostly downloading.

 

Hard drives with platters run between 50MB/s up to 250MB/s.  Generally older drives run slower and the hotter a drive gets the slower it runs (https://avtech.com/articles/13787/how-high-heat-reduces-hard-drive-performance/).

 

To keep things simple SSDs are about 5x faster than HDDs and M.2 drives are 5x faster than SSDs.  This site sums it up nicely (https://photographylife.com/nvme-vs-ssd-vs-hdd-performance).

 

As for SATA connections we have 6Gb/s or 750MB/s.  That can easily handle a HDD running at 250MB/s or an SSD running at 600MB/s (average speed of SSD is 500-600MB/s).  M.2 is where it gets interesting because now we're maxing out the SATA speed which is why older M.2 drives were SATA but are usually now NVMe which use the PCIe bus (20GB/s or 20000MB/s).  Kingston explains it nicely here (https://www.kingston.com/en/blog/pc-performance/two-types-m2-vs-ssd).

 

So let's get back to what's slowing down the system.  If you're accessing something across the internet then that's usually your bad boy but if you're transferring files inside your house then the LAN might be the bottleneck.  But remember that the LAN speed and the hard drive speeds are pretty close (125MB/s versus 50 to 250MB/s).  One last point to consider is the LAN cable.  You should be using a Cat6 cable.  If you're using Cat5e then 1Gbps is possible but not always likely.  This article explains why cable trauma can cause a 1Gbps to drop to 100Mbps (https://www.intel.ca/content/www/ca/en/support/articles/000058908/ethernet-products/intel-killer-ethernet-products.html).

 

Lastly, if the network is not involved and your internal transfer speeds are slow (between dockers, VMs, or just data transfers from one drive to another) then it could be a few things.  One thing to note here is that the parity drives should be your best and fastest drives because each write to each drive has to also be written to the parity drive too.  Just having a parity drive will slow things down.  Note that using a cache drive can be a benefit here not just because files are written there first and cache drives are usually SSD/M2/NVMe but when the mover runs it can efficiently move data off the cache to the drives in the background without holding you up.

 

So now we're at the point where it could be the physical drives being slow, the underlying software and architecture inherently slows things down a bit or need to be tweaked, or it could be a hardware issue.  Sadly, bottlenecks can be hard to nail down.

Edited January 2, 2023 by TimTheSettler
Accuracy

[unrateable]

5 hours ago, TimTheSettler said:

As for SATA connections we have 6GB/s or 6000MB/s.  That can easily handle a HDD running at 250MB/s or an SSD running at 1250MB/s.

 

Good summary ! 

 

Just a nitpick, the above. 6GBit/s you mean. Net transfer rate max. approx. 600Mbytes/s

Edited December 31, 2022 by unrateable

[TimTheSettler]

On 12/31/2022 at 6:16 AM, unrateable said:

 

Good summary ! 

 

Just a nitpick, the above. 6GBit/s you mean. Net transfer rate max. approx. 600Mbytes/s

 

Thank you for nitpicking.  I edited my article a bit to reflect the proper numbers.