February 1, 20242 yr New user to Unraid with LOTS of data to move from my workstation to an Unraid server soon. I'm almost done reconfiguring them so both server and workstation are connected via 10Gb network. My understanding is that when I copy a directory with lots of content over SMB to the Unraid server using robocopy or even just Windows Explorer, that process is going to move files sequentially. On the receiving end, Unraid will write those files sequentially as it receives them to the appropriate drive as determined by the high-water setting. Unlike a RAID 5 array that would split the incoming stream out among drives, Unraid will only ever write this incoming stream of content to one drive at a time, thus making the drive write speed, not my NIC speed the bottleneck, correct? If I run parallel copy processes on my workstation moving broken up different portions of my data to the Unraid server at the same time, would Unraid potentially handle each incoming stream of content independently in a way that would allow writing to multiple disks simultaneously rather than one at a time and thus allowing me to take better advantage of my 10Gb connection? Edited February 1, 20242 yr by poshmick907ak
February 2, 20242 yr Community Expert 26 minutes ago, poshmick907ak said: Unraid will only ever write this incoming stream of content to one drive at a time, thus making the drive write speed, not my NIC speed the bottleneck, correct? If you write to the array, and if you have parity, actually slower than single drive. https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/manual/storage-management/#array-write-modes You can have multidisk btrfs or zfs pools outside the parity array and those would be faster than single drive speed. Files from pools can be moved to the parity array automatically during scheduled idle time.
February 2, 20242 yr Community Expert Solution 32 minutes ago, poshmick907ak said: independently in a way that would allow writing to multiple disks simultaneously If writing to an array with parity, they can't be independent even if the destination is different disks, because parity is realtime and has to be updated for each.
February 2, 20242 yr Author Thanks @trurl, that confirms my assumption. Looks like I'm stuck at the slower transfer rate for the time being unless I reconfigure the structure of my array (not really wanting to do right now). I'll just have to be patient then
February 2, 20242 yr Community Expert You could remove parity and rebuild it after you are finished with initial data load.
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