Advice on a couple of issues

[anthropoidape]

Hi all, I could use some advice.

 

First topic: a hard drive issue.

 

I had two Seagate 1.5TB drives in my unraid system. I have removed one and replaced it with a 2TB, mainly because it was showing a very high end-to-end error count in its SMART report. Initially, reading suggested that this was a serious hard drive issue. Further searching has led to a few posts online saying that it is common for Seagate drives to have a high count on this property and that it isn't meaningful. Seatools says the drive "passes". It's still within warranty (but not for that much longer). The other drive - same model - does not show any problem in its end-to-end error count.

 

I am not sure whether I should put the drive back in or not. I would like to RMA it so I don't have to worry about it. So, questions - do you think I can RMA it even though Seatools passes it? Or, do you think it is fine to just keep using it?

 

Second topic: I have an opportunity to upgrade my unraid hardware due to an upgrade of my main working desktop machine. I believe the upgrade should deliver some improved performance as the hardware I am currently using is fairly basic. I am wondering if there is some benchmarking I could do before and after the upgrade. This is purely for curiosity and to report on the results. Are there any suggested performance tests that are reasonably reflective of real-world performance for a NAS like this?

 

Thanks for any tips on either of these topics.

 

Jason

[marcusone]

Not sure about your Seagate drive; perhaps try calling them to see what they say about the SMART report, as really only the drive manufacture really knows what each value means.

 

As for hardware upgrade; unRaid will basically run the same on "low end" hardware as it will on very top end server hardware... its limiting factor is the hard drives you use.  if you are using all 'green' drives, you likely see 20-30MB/s writes to the array.  if you use 7200rpm drives you likely get 30-40MB/s to your array.  That is the best I've ever seen quoted here for a standard setup.  The only way to get faster writes is to use a cache drive (then you are not protected until the mover script runs and moves your data from cache to the array, again likely at one of the two speed ranges above).

 

So your current setup is using SATA2 controllers (on motherboard and/or add on cards in a PCIe slot), your 'upgrade' is likely going to be just as 'fast'. 

The only other factor that might make a difference is if you use other software on your unraid, like Sabnzbd, or Plex, etc.

 

[anthropoidape]

Thanks for the reply.

 

I think you are overestimating my hardware; I have (other than those seagates) all 2TB WD green drives, and I've never seen anything like  20-30MB/s for writes. Admittedly it's nearly all about reads for me, not writes, so it doesn't matter, but for the record I usually see anywhere from 5-13 MB/s when transferring files internally, and slower when writing from the network. I think I once hit 16MB/s when transferring between disks internally.

 

I'm not complaining; I have found it to be a really good NAS system for my purposes. But the new hardware will have more RAM and run faster and I hope to run virtualbox as well as shifting sabnzbd etc over to it, so it is the only system in the house that gets left on 24/7 (and hence does all the automated/overnight sort of jobs). However, I am also hoping for faster write speeds. It's not crucial but it would be nice.

 

I am thinking I might just try some basic speed tests - maybe:

 

1. transfer of a big file internally

2. transfer of a folder full of small files internally

3. as above but over the network

 

As said it's just out of curiosity, I will live with it regardless.

[marcusone]

You likely have some very old hardware then... as a Celeron (5+ year old) machine I have as a test bed gets those same rates as my main server that is an i3 (less than a year old) machine.

 

so you should notice some nice increase in speed (assuming you are running Gigabit ethernet), or at least see internal transfers from cache to array go up.

 

If you are transferring from one user share disk to another, speed will be slower.

 

[anthropoidape]

It's an Athlon XP 3000+. I will post some results when I get a chance to do the upgrade; it's hard to find a time when the NAS isn't in use

 

I think it's a testament to the quality of Unraid that it has been serving us pretty well for a couple of years now with a motherboard and CPU that are nearly a decade old. As the NAS mainly serves up media files I guess it is a use case where write speed is not very critical.