Hi,

 

Got my new server setup and starting moving my data across, however its currently at 10-13mb...at this rate it will take days. Have I missed something?

 

My Media share is set to

Name: Media

Allocation: High-water

Min. free: 0

Split level: 4

Inlcluded:

Excluded:

Share empty: no

 

Any ideas?

 

Edit: Setup a cache drive and starting copying from my windows box to the cache share...still going 11MB (made sure to selection cache only)

what are the specs of the parity and data drives?  are they 7200 RPM? what size is their cache?  who else is using network while you are copying files?  i am no unraid expert, btw.  still learning. 

unRAID is not designed to optimize write performance when writing to User shares although that does seem a little slow.  Under unRAID writing a sector involves a minimum of 4 disk accesses (a read and a write to both the data and parity drives).  You should, perhaps, be looking at the use of a Cache disk to improve write performance?

 

Another way is to disable parity while loading up the data.  However this means that during the copy process your data is unprotected against failure of a disk drive.

Arrgh, sorry...not enough info...2nd attempt

 

Both my pc and nas box are wired to a 100mb router.

PC has 2x2Tb disks (72000 WD Green)

NAS has 3x2Tb (7200, WD Red)

 

I dont have the parity disk turned on yet, read if I copy the stuff over I will speed up the transfer...then turn on parity afterwards. Im currently on free (but will upgrade once I have my data over), so dont have a cache disk either.

 

Thanks again, my sata III cables arrvied...perhaps the old cables im using are slowing it down?

Is your copy speed in Megabits  per second (Mb/s) or Megabytes per second  (MB/s)?

Im copying from my Win7 machine to the Unraid box at 11.2MB/second

Im copying from my Win7 machine to the Unraid box at 11.2MB/second

 

11MB/s is normal for a 100Mbit network.

What kind of speed would I get if I upgraded to a router with 1gb ports? I can try calling my isp and see if they will supply one.

What kind of speed would I get if I upgraded to a router with 1gb ports? I can try calling my isp and see if they will supply one.

 

Your speed would probably be in the 30-40 MB/s range.  If your provider does not have routers with Gb ports (or wants too much money), you can simply purchase a Gb switch and you can bring all the computers on your network that have Gb capability to that speed.  Note that you do need cables that contain 8wires (not 4)-- with four wires, the connection speed is limited to 100Mb.  Cat 5E and Cat6 cables are wired correctly and rated for Gb use.

 

You would simply connect all of the computers to the new switch and run a cat 5E (or cat 6) cable to the modem/router/switch for your Internet connection and the DHCP services.

What kind of speed would I get if I upgraded to a router with 1gb ports? I can try calling my isp and see if they will supply one.

 

Your speed would probably be in the 30-40 MB/s range.  If your provider does not have routers with Gb ports (or wants too much money), you can simply purchase a Gb switch and you can bring all the computers on your network that have Gb capability to that speed.  Note that you do need cables that contain 8wires (not 4)-- with four wires, the connection speed is limited to 100Mb.  Cat 5E and Cat6 cables are wired correctly and rated for Gb use.

 

You would simply connect all of the computers to the new switch and run a cat 5E (or cat 6) cable to the modem/router/switch for your Internet connection and the DHCP services.

 

If you also add a cache drive, writes to the cache should be 60-80MB/s.

@gwiyomi

That might be a good (cheap) solution, i will try borrow a switch from work...im sure we have a few old 1000mb/8 port switchs. Thanks for the suggestion, Im looking into replacing the router anyway as its really old (doesnt support N, so its really slow).

 

 

edit:

@dgaschk

After checking, I dont think I can add a parity drive on the free version. I purchased a license, but not sure if I will need to wait till monday now. Will need to hold off until then I think, cause I was wanting to install sab etc and not sure how I would move them from the array to the cache.

@gwiyomi

That might be a good (cheap) solution, i will try borrow a switch from work...im sure we have a few old 1000mb/8 port switchs. Thanks for the suggestion, Im looking into replacing the router anyway as its really old (doesnt support N, so its really slow).

 

 

edit:

@dgaschk

After checking, I dont think I can add a parity drive on the free version. I purchased a license, but not sure if I will need to wait till monday now. Will need to hold off until then I think, cause I was wanting to install sab etc and not sure how I would move them from the array to the cache.

If you have a lot of data to migrate, a cache drive will help, but ONLY at the expense of having to deal with the cache drive filling. 

 

Basically, you can install the parity drive after migrating the data, BUT ONLY IF YOU CAN KEEP YOUR EXISTING DATA INTACT ON THE SOURCE SYSTEM UNTIL AFTER PARITY IS INSTALLED AND CALCULATED AND ARRAY HAS BURNED IN FOR A FEW DAYS.

 

I strongly prefer to leave parity installed from the beginning, and queue the files to be transferred, and then let it move while you sleep.

Use a program like teracopy to perform the transfer. (if possible)

Basically, you can install the parity drive after migrating the data, BUT ONLY IF YOU CAN KEEP YOUR EXISTING DATA INTACT ON THE SOURCE SYSTEM UNTIL AFTER PARITY IS INSTALLED AND CALCULATED AND ARRAY HAS BURNED IN FOR A FEW DAYS.

 

I didn't use a parity for the first few days, here's a tip:-

Don't add a parity & a new data drive at the same time when you already have a configuration already set up. Unraid screws up, adds the data drive & parity but doesn't allow you to use the parity until you reboot, remove the parity, reboot and add the parity.

Basically, you can install the parity drive after migrating the data, BUT ONLY IF YOU CAN KEEP YOUR EXISTING DATA INTACT ON THE SOURCE SYSTEM UNTIL AFTER PARITY IS INSTALLED AND CALCULATED AND ARRAY HAS BURNED IN FOR A FEW DAYS.

 

I strongly prefer to leave parity installed from the beginning, and queue the files to be transferred, and then let it move while you sleep.

Use a program like teracopy to perform the transfer. (if possible)

 

I have a 500GB sataIII cache drive, so I dont mind doing it in stages (if its much faster). Just downloading teracopy to see if its better/faster..thanks for the tip Joe.

 

I didn't use a parity for the first few days, here's a tip:-

Don't add a parity & a new data drive at the same time when you already have a configuration already set up. Unraid screws up, adds the data drive & parity but doesn't allow you to use the parity until you reboot, remove the parity, reboot and add the parity.

 

Nice one, I will keep my originals until the parity drive is up and running...cheers for the advice Auto

 

 

So anyway, got the cache drive setup and started copying stuff across...still going 11MB/sec. Any other suggestions on where I could be going wrong?

 

Edit: Win8 copy is nice, but teracopy gives me much for info...cheers for that (still doing the same speed, but i cant at least queue them up etc)

Did you borrow the gigabit switch as you suggested?  Otherwise, you're not going wrong... 11MB/s is correct for a 100Mbit network. 

 

If you ARE running gigabit, then perhaps your NAS is only 100Mbit?  Or if it's a few years old, it may not be capable of much better than that.  I had a ReadyNAS NV+ that couldn't get much more than 20MB/s reads and 13MB/s writes, even though it had a gigabit interface.  I believe the CPU etc let it down.

I wont be back at work till Tue, so thought I would try the cache drive and see it might speed things along in the meantime. I assumed that since I was copying to a single drive (500gb sataIII) it would of been much faster that copying to the array.

 

I just built the nas (Corei3/8Gb), so hope its not hardware and just user error.