Slower than thought, UnRaid drive Performance

[Physicalphill]

Hi All, I hope things are going well...

I'm just looking to try and understand about the UnRaid drive performance since using the drives I've currently installed, the copying/reading/general performance does seem somewhat slower with UnRaid, so I'd like to understand why this might be and if there's a way to make it 'go fast'....

 

I've 6 x 16TB Seagate EXOS X16 drives in the server, its paired with a Xeon E3-1245 v3 with 16GB of DDR3 (its a little older but worked flawlessly with my Xpenology setup I had on it for years and its still going so, figured I'd carry on using it).   It's connected via a 1Gb and 10Gb network so hopefully the copy/read performance over the network is fast...  Having used a similar setup before, it was maxing over the 1Gb network at about 110MB/sec to 114MB/sec and then over the 10Gb network about the 450MB/sec to 500MB/sec with the Xpenology setup.  

 

I'm finding that the 1Gb network for the most part for UnRaid is almost half that, so I'd like to understand why that is firstly and then work out how I can make it better.  

I've setup the drives so I have 2 Partity and the rest are for data, so that's about 42TB usable.   

 

Could someone please explain to me, why the performance is lower than I've been used to and what I could possibly do to help speed it up.   I've got a UnRaid OS Unleashed licence, so I believe I can add in more drives without any issues.    I'm fairly new to UnRaid and so I'm still getting the hang of it but I hope I've not set it up wrongly or something when doing the drives...  

 

Any and all help is very gratefully appreciated.  If there's anything more that you need from me, please do ask away, I will help however I can    Massive thanks in advance

[itimpi]

Have you read This section of the online documentation accessible via the ‘Manual’ link at the bottom of the GUI or the DOCS link at the top of each forum page which discusses how writes to the main array operate.  The main Unraid array is not optimised for performance.
 

To get maximum performance out of drives you need them in a pool using ZFS or BTRFS, but then you lose flexibility on future expansion and other features of the main array such as keeping drives spun down when not being used.

[Physicalphill]

Thank you for the reply, I'll have another look at the link you've mentioned.

 

The default file type at the moment is XFS according to the array infomation.

 

Can this be changed with data on the drives or does it have to be taken off and then put back on?  I have noticed that 2 of the drives from the 4 are used a lot more than the others.  

 

One other thing whilst I remember, is there a way of making the array or part of it or a share folder being a media streaming etc.?  I'd thought I'd made a folder accessable to the Xbox and other devices on the network but it seems not  

[itimpi]

16 minutes ago, Physicalphill said:

Can this be changed with data on the drives or does it have to be taken off and then put back on?  I have noticed that 2 of the drives from the 4 are used a lot more than the others.  

You have to copy the data off; reformat to desired type; copy data back.

The way data gets allocated to specific dtiver depends on the allocation method used.

 

18 minutes ago, Physicalphill said:

One other thing whilst I remember, is there a way of making the array or part of it or a share folder being a media streaming etc.?  I'd thought I'd made a folder accessable to the Xbox and other devices on the network but it seems not

you can make a share directly visible on the network - but not a sub-folder.   No reason the Xbox should not access a share if it supports SMB.   You could also set up a docker container to expose selected content using DNLA if that is what you need.