April 16, 200818 yr Well I began realizing I was having trouble after viewing Sparkie's Network thread... I have found more issues so I decided to create my own thread. Original Post: I'm suffering from the same exact problem... stuttering during MP3 playback while ripping/transferring large files (DVDs) to the Server. Happens in both Winamp(default) and WMP. Main PC: Corsair 550VX PSU Abit IP35-E E6300 @ 3.0Ghz 4x2GB OCZ Reaper HPC (4-4-4-15 variation) 2x 320GB Seagate SATAII drives (7200.10's) XFX 8800GT UnRaid Media Server: Antec Earthwatts 430 PSU MSI K8N Neo3-F AMD Sempron 2800+ 2x512MB 3200DDR 1x1TB Seagate SATAII (7200.11) 1x500GB Western Digital SATAII 1x500GB Maxtor SATAII (7200.10) D-Link DGS-2205 10/100/1000 5-Port Switch (only Media Server and PC hooked up) with Linksys WRTP54G Router uplinking for internet access I now have noticed that transferring between the drives within my server is quite awful compared to what I would pull in XP. MC is reporting me transferring files between disk1(WD drive) and disk2(Maxtor) at 3-9 MB/s and I know that just isn't right on SATA drives let alone directly and not across the network... Where could my problems be stemming from? As I said I'm using MC to transfer my files from 1 drive to the other... so it should be directly going between drives correct? Is there something I'm missing in the BIOS that is causing the decrease in SATA performance? Ignore the timestamp on the log... I reset my BIOS recently and forgot to properly set the date back lol.
April 16, 200818 yr From this syslog, your performance is still terrific. The earlier syslog showed an average parity sync speed of about 47MB/sec, and this one shows an average parity check speed of about 64MB/sec!!! Now that is using a terabyte parity drive and 2 500GB data drives, so I'm curious what happens when it begins processing the final 500GB's. If it is a high-speed read of 1 drive for 500GB's, and a high-speed write of zeros to 1 drive for the parity sync, then that would skew the average speed, make it look a little better than it is. Your SATA drives are linking at 3.0Gbps, with no errors or speed limiting showing. Your system appears to be configured fine. The 3 differences between the syslog, are the use of a different USB drive (should not matter), the recovery from a crash (replaying 274 transactions, not a performance problem), and a strange network issue at the end of the syslog. It indicates the message "eth0: too many iterations (6) in nv_nic_irq", which is repeated 882 more times over a 2 minute period. I have no idea of its significance, if any, but I have never seen that message before. Others will have more thoughts on what you are seeing, but I can say in my own case, I see read-from-unRAID speeds in the mid 20's (perhaps 25MB/sec), and write-to-unRAID speeds around 10MB/sec. Writing to an unRAID parity protected data drive is at least 4 times the amount of work of reading from a data drive. A read is just a single read of 1 drive, where as a write is a read from both the data drive and parity drive and a write to the data drive and parity drive. I have no idea of how a read of a local drive (with its local resource requirements) compares to a read from a remote drive. But it may not matter, since the huge bottleneck is the write. That is why Tom added the Cache drive in the latest versions, to remove the parity penalty from streamed writes.
April 16, 200818 yr Author Well it seems that the stuttering is definitely related to this machine specifically. If I transfer from my laptop to the server (large files) and play music on my desktop at the same time... no stuttering. If I transfer a file from my desktop to my server while listening to music from the server... stuttering. I shall be building my dedicated HTPC soon so hopefully I'll have different (better?) results with that one in terms of playback. I guess i'll have to wait on more input for the other problem. I see what you mean about writing to the parity at the same time... that makes sense. I'll have to start looking into a cache drive which also means upgrading to plus or pro (probably pro... why limit myself ).
April 16, 200818 yr Author Stuttering has stopped... I setup usershares and inadvertently stopped the stuttering problem. Not exactly sure whether or not that was what fixed the problem but all I know is that I'm not stuttering right now. I can't think of anything different I was doing before besides that.
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