January 19, 200917 yr I am testing out UnRAID and plan to permanently built one in a few days once the SATA controller arrives along with a HD. Until then, I'm just experimenting with the interface and performance. The system is: - Asus A7N8X-E with an AMD XP-2500 processor [it's an OLD system] - 1.5gig RAM - a single 40 gig IDE HD used for testing. Final setup will be 2x 750gig and 2x 1TB SATA drives. No parity drives for now, just a single 40gig IDE drive. Write to the server is SLOW. A 1.4gig test file takes about 40 minutes to copy. Read performance is as expected. Copying the same file to my Windows server is fine (~3 minutes). The network is 100mb. I am unsure of what to check. This write performance is not acceptable. I have test SATA drives, but I won't be able to use them for testing until Friday. Any suggestions? Thanks, hades
January 19, 200917 yr Agreed, that speed is unacceptable. As always, we need to see a syslog, please see my sig for the Troubleshooting link.
January 19, 200917 yr Author Here is the syslog. This is what I would guess is the detection of the HD: Jan 18 22:31:01 FileServer kernel: hda: ST340016A, ATA DISK drive Jan 18 22:31:01 FileServer kernel: hda: host max PIO5 wanted PIO255(auto-tune) selected PIO4 Does this mean that the HD is running in PIO4 mode? 2 files were transferred during the creation of this log. Both with terrible throughputs. Thank you! hades
January 19, 200917 yr Author Reading another thread, http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=3131.0, I tried out version 4.3.3. The write performance is as it should be! Interesting... But that thread found the solution by modifying the NCQ and ACHI settings. But these settings don't exist for IDE drives? hades
January 19, 200917 yr Does this mean that the HD is running in PIO4 mode? No, that line usually appears first, it just means that the kernel selects an appropriate PIO mode, if it has to fall back to PIO. Then it negotiates a UDMA mode, and actually uses it, in this case UDMA/100, which is normal and fast enough. Three minutes sounds about right. And write performance should be close to read performance. Unfortunately, I see nothing wrong in your syslog, especially if you captured this *after* the slow write. Try some of the commands on the Console commands for hard drives page. The hdparm -I will show what mode the drive is actually using, the one with the asterisk. The hdparm -tT test will verify the speed of the drive, probably between 60MB/s and 70MB/s. And a SMART report will show the health of the drive. But that thread found the solution by modifying the NCQ and ACHI settings. But these settings don't exist for IDE drives? Correct. At this time, I have no idea why v4.3.3 would make any difference at all.
January 19, 200917 yr Author Go figure... I collect all the stats in 4.3.3, then restore my 4.4.2 configuration, don't change anything, but everything works fine. I'll do some more tests tomorrow. Thanks for the commands! hades
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