Disks too slow

[etsi]

N36L isn't enough powerful for unraid? Running iperf I get gigabit speeds but disks are slow. Using the disks without unraid I can read/write 100mb/sec.

zeus-diagnostics-20230521-1704.zip

[Kilrah]

How slow are we talking? That looks like ancient hardware.

[etsi]

About 25-30 mb/sec.

[Kilrah]

Is that when transferring multiple files or a single large one?

 

If the former you might want to try using disk shares instead of user shares, unraid's merging of filesystems does need some CPU on each file access and this CPU is slower than a low end part from 15 years ago... seems a 3rd gen i5 from 2012 is a whole 10 times more powerful

Edited May 21, 2023 by Kilrah

[etsi]

Single large file. Can I transfer the disks and the flash drive to another system and upgrade like that easily? I can find a system with  i5-2300 CPU.

Edited May 21, 2023 by etsi

[Kilrah]

Yes as long as both systems give direct access to the disks you can swap hardware as much as you want

[JorgeB]

Check that write cache is enabled in the server BIOS, it's disabled by default.

[aaronwt]

On 5/21/2023 at 10:05 AM, etsi said:

N36L isn't enough powerful for unraid? Running iperf I get gigabit speeds but disks are slow. Using the disks without unraid I can read/write 100mb/sec.

zeus-diagnostics-20230521-1704.zip 123.65 kB · 2 downloads

I just setup an N36L last night. I bought a "For Parts" N54L off eBAY and needed to replace the Motherboard. So I was able to pickup an N36L Motherboard (and Tray)for around $40 shipped, off ebay.

 

In my testing last night, with no parity drive, I had no problem hitting up to 1.6Gbps transfer rates, using a 2.5GbE network card (in the PCIe x1 slot), and bypassing the cache drive. And the 12 TB EXOS X18 drives I had in the system, easily hit up to 250MB/s (2gb/s) transfer rates. With consistent rates over 200MB/s(1.6Gb/s). Both from the Motherboard SAS connector and the SATA card I have installed.

 

My SSD cache drive, 870 EVO, was even hitting around 450MB/s (3.6gb/s) peaks. But that 2.5" drive, and a fifth 3.5" drive, is connected to a PCIe x4 SATA card. And it hit those peaks when pulling cached data from the 16GB of ECC memory.

Edited May 23, 2023 by aaronwt

[etsi]

So maybe the problem is the low performance of the drivers that are very old. Because I want to upgrade the disks I will try that first on N36L and if it's still slow I will upgrade the system.

[aaronwt]

On 5/24/2023 at 3:51 PM, etsi said:

So maybe the problem is the low performance of the drivers that are very old. Because I want to upgrade the disks I will try that first on N36L and if it's still slow I will upgrade the system.

With no Parity drive in use, the N36L should have no problem maxing out the throughput on the drives. 

 

How old are the drives? I know I have 24+ 4TB Seagate Terascale drives in unRAID setups. With an N40L and N54L, and they don't come anywhere close to reaching the throughput that my Exos X14 and X18 drives have. But they will still hit up to 170MB/s throughput. While the Exos drives will hit up to 250MB/s throughput, in the N36L.

Edited May 28, 2023 by aaronwt