I am running 64Bit PCI-X 8 port cards on a server board and a 7200RPM sata cache drive. Right now i at max get 40MB/s doing a parity check or copying locally outside of unraid (MC). This is about the same limit if I copy through the PCI bus or directly through the motherboard sata ports.

 

From what I know, PCI-X 64Bit should have a limitation of 1064 MB/s,

the 7200RPM sata drive should be around 100MB/s

 

the gigabit network throughput gets 54MB-UP/83MB-DOWN to the motherboard cache drive directly.

 

Is this as expected, am I missing something or is something else creating a bottleneck?

If your are using MC (Midnight Commander) to copy between disks you are not bypassing unraid... the parity system is still in place making sure your data is secure. You will not get much faster speeds then this I am afraid..

 

When you use a cache drive (which only works when accessing from a different system, it is not active when copying from the system using MC) you are bypassing the parity system (untill the mover runs) but you get the network overhead in return and the fact that you need to have another system running to make your copies..

 

At the moment I am copying large quantities of movies from one disk to another (towards a new 4gig wdred from a 2tb wdearx) and MC is reporting a allmost 50 MB/s quite consistently.. Which is way faster then I am used to.. I am pretty content with 30 mb/s normally..

The cache drive (/mnt/cache), is outside of unraid domain (until the mover kicks in). Just to be sure I've also tested on a seperate drive partitioned and formatted in ext3...still 40MB/s...Anyone know where the bottle neck is? Is it just the drive speed? (SSD is my next step)

So when you copy between two disks that are both not part ofthe array you are still getting these speeds ? How is your sata configured ?  IDE legacy perhaps ? shoud be ahci for decent speeds..

With my X7SBE and 2 AOC-SAT2-MV8s and 20 2TB Green data drives (EARS & EADS) and 2TB Black parity drive I got 40+MB/s inner tracks to 90MB/s outer tracks when doing a parity check on unRAID 4.6.  I got 60-70MB/s to the 2TB green catch drive.  Parity and Cache drives as well as 4 data drives were on the MB Sata ports and 16 data drives on the SAT2-MV8s.  The two SAT2-MV8 cards were plugged into a 133mhz PCI-x slot and a 100mhz PCI-x slot with nothing else plugged into the remaining two PCI-x slots. 

 

When I virtualized my system and upgraded the processor to a Q9550S (was Celeron 140) I used the PCIe slots for tuners for a Windows VM and reduced my unRAID drive count to 16 drives connected to passed through SAT2-MV8 controllers to unRAID VM.  The unRAID VM ran fine virtualized this way but the Windows VM would crash every 2-4 weeks and I would have to reboot the ESXi host to get it back some/most of the time.  So I upgraded my MB to a X9SCM-F for it's better virtualization and haven't had the crashes again.  I also switched to a single M1015 and a SAS expander so that I could increase my drive count back to 20+ drives off a single controller in my unRAID VM.

Server motherboard, has both ide and SATA ports, IDE is diabled and attached is sata detection info. the drives i tested were from motherboard attached sata drives cfdisked/mke2fs'ed seperatly from the array. The motherboard has the latest bios (10-22-09).

 

Does the RAID rule of thumb, the more spindles the faster the I/o, apply with unRAID?

Does the RAID rule of thumb, the more spindles the faster the I/o, apply with unRAID?

 

No.  Not at all.  Each disk has it's own file-system and Parity is used to protect the disks in the event of a single disk failing.

 

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Parity

 

Write speed is determined by how fast your parity disk is in conjunction with the current disk you are writing to.  Read speed is dependent only on the disk you are reading from (assuming no failed disks exist in the system).

I think we need more info:

 

MB model, PCI-X model, and hdd models.

 

Which drive is that one listed in your SS, "third IDE"? Is that how it lists you sata drives?

 

Is your 7200rpm cache drive that 250gb hdd? Is it Sata I/II/III ??

 

Also, you said you get 83mb on the network via your GB ethernet card on the Unraid machine (I'm assuming here, that you mean you can read FROM your unraid via GB ethernet at about 83MB/sec). Thats pretty good, you can get a little faster, but then you are factoring in EVERYTHING else in your system, etc.