Blade Posted July 28, 2011 Share Posted July 28, 2011 I have 2 towers that are full that are not 4k aligned drives. My new tower has 1 parity and 2 data drives and they are 4k aligned. The 4k aligned tower seems slower than the other 2 towers. Is this normal and is there something I can provide to show the gurus here to maybe help get it faster. Thx Quote Link to comment
Joe L. Posted July 28, 2011 Share Posted July 28, 2011 I have 2 towers that are full that are not 4k aligned drives. My new tower has 1 parity and 2 data drives and they are 4k aligned. The 4k aligned tower seems slower than the other 2 towers. Is this normal and is there something I can provide to show the gurus here to maybe help get it faster. Thx it ALL depends on the specific disks. What specific disks? How are they currently partitioned? Quote Link to comment
Blade Posted July 28, 2011 Author Share Posted July 28, 2011 They are all WD20 EARS drives and they are set as 4k aligned in Unraid. I use EADS and EARS drives in my other towers and they just seems faster. Here is the eth0 from the tower that is slow: root@Tower3:~# ethtool eth0 Settings for eth0: Supported ports: [ TP ] Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Full Supports auto-negotiation: Yes Advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Full Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes Speed: 1000Mb/s Duplex: Full Port: Twisted Pair PHYAD: 0 Transceiver: internal Auto-negotiation: on Supports Wake-on: umbg Wake-on: g Current message level: 0x00000007 (7) Link detected: yes Here is the eth0 from faster tower: root@Tower2:~# ethtool eth0 Settings for eth0: Supported ports: [ TP MII ] Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full Supports auto-negotiation: Yes Advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes Speed: 1000Mb/s Duplex: Full Port: MII PHYAD: 0 Transceiver: internal Auto-negotiation: on Supports Wake-on: pumbg Wake-on: g Current message level: 0x00000033 (51) Link detected: yes Quote Link to comment
Joe L. Posted July 28, 2011 Share Posted July 28, 2011 They are all WD20 EARS drives and they are set as 4k aligned in Unraid. I use EADS and EARS drives in my other towers and they just seems faster. I have some computers that are faster than others too. The LAN speed has little to do with it, unless running as 100Mb/s speed. To make the disks more "green" they've slowed them down. It saves energy. Quote Link to comment
Blade Posted July 28, 2011 Author Share Posted July 28, 2011 It just seems weird that tower3 seems to sort have to wake up but the other 2 towers are fast right away None of the drives on tower3 are set to spin down. Even the login thru PUTTY seems slow. Quote Link to comment
Joe L. Posted July 28, 2011 Share Posted July 28, 2011 It just seems weird that tower3 seems to sort have to wake up but the other 2 towers are fast right away None of the drives on tower3 are set to spin down. Even the login thru PUTTY seems slow. perhaps you have a network issue. Quote Link to comment
Blade Posted July 28, 2011 Author Share Posted July 28, 2011 That is only affecting the one machine out 10? Quote Link to comment
Blade Posted July 28, 2011 Author Share Posted July 28, 2011 I could not use the onboard LAN card with this tower because the chipset was not compatible that well with Unraid. So I bought a Intel PRO/1000 GT Desktop Adapter, PCI (PWLA8391GTBLK) - OEM It is acting like my one LAN card did when it was set to turn off after not in use for a while in windows. Once I turned that off it worked great. Is it possible that the LAN card in UNRAID is going to sleep after not in use and how would I turn this off. Quote Link to comment
Blade Posted July 28, 2011 Author Share Posted July 28, 2011 I ran the ifconfig on the tower and i see errors on the RX. My other towers do not show any errors. What is causing this and could it be the reason for the slowdown? root@Tower3:~# ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1b:21:ab:59:ca inet addr:192.168.1.12 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:624020678 errors:646 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:331 TX packets:441155986 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:2333959534 (2.1 GiB) TX bytes:218792322 (208.6 MiB) lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:2454 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:2454 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:173064 (169.0 KiB) TX bytes:173064 (169.0 KiB) Quote Link to comment
Blade Posted July 28, 2011 Author Share Posted July 28, 2011 Here is more info: root@Tower3:~# dmesg |grep eth0 e1000: eth0: e1000_probe: Intel® PRO/1000 Network Connection e1000: eth0 NIC Link is Up 1000 Mbps Full Duplex, Flow Control: RX/TX e1000: eth0 NIC Link is Down e1000: eth0 NIC Link is Up 1000 Mbps Full Duplex, Flow Control: RX e1000: eth0 NIC Link is Down e1000: eth0 NIC Link is Up 1000 Mbps Full Duplex, Flow Control: RX/TX e1000: eth0 NIC Link is Up 1000 Mbps Full Duplex, Flow Control: RX/TX Quote Link to comment
Blade Posted July 28, 2011 Author Share Posted July 28, 2011 root@Tower3:~# ethtool -i eth0 driver: e1000 version: 7.3.21-k5-NAPI firmware-version: N/A bus-info: 0000:03:06.0 Quote Link to comment
Rajahal Posted July 28, 2011 Share Posted July 28, 2011 Do any of your disks have jumpers installed? On Tower3, did you disable the motherboard's NIC so that unRAID is forced to use the Intel NIC? Do you think 10 devices could be overtaxing your router? Quote Link to comment
Blade Posted July 28, 2011 Author Share Posted July 28, 2011 None of the 3 drives have a jumper I did disable the onboard nic. All of the other machines run fine. It is just this one for some reason. Quote Link to comment
Rajahal Posted July 28, 2011 Share Posted July 28, 2011 OK, good info. Please post full hardware specs of Tower3 and a current syslog. Also include the version of unRAID that you are using. Quote Link to comment
Blade Posted July 28, 2011 Author Share Posted July 28, 2011 Here are the machine specs: Machine: 1 - Azza Helios 910 Black ATX Mid Tower Case 9X5.25 1X3.5 4X3.5INT 230MM Blue LED Fans & Window No PSU 1 - MB BIOSTAR | TA880GB+ R 1 - Corsair Builder Series CMPSU-600CXV2 600W ATX Power Supply Active PFC 120MM Fan *3 Year Wrty* 3 - Western Digital WD20EARS Caviar Green 2TB SATA2 3GBPS 64MB Cache 3.5IN Hard Drive Oem 1 - AMD Sempron 140 Processor 2.7GHZ Socket AM3 1MB L2 Cache 45W Retail Box 1 - MEM 2Gx2|GSKILL F3-10666CL8D-4GBECO Add on NIC card: Intel PRO/1000 GT Desktop Adapter, PCI (PWLA8391GTBLK) - OEM Had to use add on nic card because on board one was not very compatible with Unraid. Syslog attached Thx for looking at this. syslog.txt Quote Link to comment
Rajahal Posted July 28, 2011 Share Posted July 28, 2011 Well, you server's connection with your router/switch does seem to go up and down quite a bit. Have you tried a different ethernet cable? Different port on the router/switch? Those would be the first things to eliminate. Quote Link to comment
Blade Posted July 28, 2011 Author Share Posted July 28, 2011 OK I will try a new cable first Quote Link to comment
Blade Posted July 28, 2011 Author Share Posted July 28, 2011 OK cable has been changed. I will see what happens Quote Link to comment
Blade Posted August 1, 2011 Author Share Posted August 1, 2011 OK new cable did not make any difference and neither did changing the router port. I cannot believe how much slower tower3 is compared to tower 1 and 2. Any more ideas? Quote Link to comment
Blade Posted August 3, 2011 Author Share Posted August 3, 2011 OK I have no idea what is causing the slowness on tower3. I am thinking of replacing the nic card in the machine and try that. Can someone please recommend a good NIC card for unraid? I currently have this one installed Intel PRO/1000 GT Desktop Adapter, PCI (PWLA8391GTBLK) - OEM Maybe it is defective. I just dont know Thx Quote Link to comment
cyrnel Posted August 3, 2011 Share Posted August 3, 2011 Those are good cards, assuming it isn't defective. I'd also suspect the specific card or connection. Possibly the physical route to the switch/router. Long cables? Wrapped around a refrigerator? Electrical panel nearby? If it makes any sense could you try swapping physical locations with one of your happy systems? Quote Link to comment
montery Posted August 3, 2011 Share Posted August 3, 2011 I have a older drive (circa 2007?) 320Gig SATA drive, that I was using as a data drive but have now switch it out, pre-cleared it, and am running it as a cache drive now. I'm running Unraid 4.7 pro. When I started the pre-clear, I specified the -a option to have it align at sector 63. It successfully completed the pre-clear with no errors. Now it's formatted and everything 'looks' good. The thing that is bothering me is that when I first ran the preclear, it thought by default to align at sector 64. Based on everything I've been reading, I think I should be okay to use this cache drive now. But am I? Quote Link to comment
Blade Posted August 3, 2011 Author Share Posted August 3, 2011 Those are good cards, assuming it isn't defective. I'd also suspect the specific card or connection. Possibly the physical route to the switch/router. Long cables? Wrapped around a refrigerator? Electrical panel nearby? If it makes any sense could you try swapping physical locations with one of your happy systems? I agree that they are supposed to be good cards. It is acting like the NIC has gone into sleep mode but I do not know if that is even possible in Unraid and if so how to disable that. I am pretty sure it is not the cable because I replaced it with one that was working 100% on another tower and it still does the same thing. All of the wires run back to the same location so I do not think it is the location of the wires. All things point to the NIC card at this point. I need to look for a new one and try it I guess. Quote Link to comment
Joe L. Posted August 3, 2011 Share Posted August 3, 2011 I have a older drive (circa 2007?) 320Gig SATA drive, that I was using as a data drive but have now switch it out, pre-cleared it, and am running it as a cache drive now. I'm running Unraid 4.7 pro. When I started the pre-clear, I specified the -a option to have it align at sector 63. It successfully completed the pre-clear with no errors. Now it's formatted and everything 'looks' good. The thing that is bothering me is that when I first ran the preclear, it thought by default to align at sector 64. Based on everything I've been reading, I think I should be okay to use this cache drive now. But am I? you will be fine. Quote Link to comment
montery Posted August 3, 2011 Share Posted August 3, 2011 Thanks Joe... follow-up question on Parity drive, if I may. Parity is a WD20EARS drive, jumperless, and was installed factory fresh into the array. Did not preclear it prior to activating it as the parity drive. Now that I'm adding 2 more jumperless WD20EARS drives, which are being precleared with the -A option as I write this, I have to rebuild my parity. Should I take this opportunity and change the parity drive to be 4K aligned, or just leave well enough alone? Quote Link to comment
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