Fastest Unraid Rig

[smino]

Who has the fastest Unraid rig?

I know about the ethernet limitations, but I do alot of video, and copy and move video on the array itself. I was curoius who had the best build? Anyone running it on infiniband or anything faster?

[downloadski]

You need to look for 10GE ethernet connecton than. Some users have tried link bundeling(802.3ad) to pass 125 Mbyte/sec.

As for inter array movement the newest generation of drives must be used as they have the greatest transfer speed.

There are some thread with measurements, look for them.

 

But if you work with video and need a large volume to work on, it seems better to bult a raid-6 hardware solution and not use unRAID. For affordable storage and streaming unRAID is a great product.

[theone]

Ethernet is not a limitation with unRAID, it does not reach Giga Ethernet speeds unless you are using SSD cache drive for writes and SSD data drives for reads.

 

[Johnm]

If you are looking for video editing and high speeds, I would suggest looking to hardware raid or ZFS.

 

If you want to move/copy projects to unraid for archiving at high speeds. you can use an SSD cache drive. but that limits you to the size of your SSD.

 

If you need more then the size of a single SSD cache plus high write performance... You can make a hybrid unraid. That is a traditional unraid with a raided cache drive. This could be Hardware raid or ZFS. the ZFS would be a little tricky since you need to either virtualize them or interconnect them with something faster then traditional gigabit.

 

I am running a hybrid unraid myself. I run a massive unraid with a ZFS raid for my cache drive. my cache drive can sustain about 450MB/s read/write. my old SSD cache was about the same. plus I can scale the size of my cache by the size of my raid.

Keep in mind, once my data has moved to unraid storage drives, I am at the limit of individual drives for reading (60-120MB/s)

 

In theory you could leave directories on the raided cache that do not migrate to the traditional unRAID for performance. say scratch drives.

[bubbaQ]

You won't be able to use infiniband unless you use IPoIB, and performance will suck.

 

You _can_ max out 1gbe even w/o parity.... but CPU utilization of SMB starts to be the limiting factor.

 

Teaming or bonding or trunking... whatever you want to call it... will not help exceed the 1gb connection speed with a Windows client to unRAID because Windows can't do bonding mode 0 (Linux can however).

 

10gbe may benefit small-file access even w/o a cache drive due to the chatty nature of SMB.

 

I have a couple of new Intel X540-T1 10gbe cards coming, and plan to test them with my all-SSD unRAID test box.

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=23539.msg207541#msg207541

 

 

[smino]

Great feedback everyone.

Your ZFS Cache Drive, How did you set that up? Did you document it?