I recently added 2 WD 1T Green drives to my array and I also had to add a sata card already was using a generic pci silicon one so I added another one. Basically I had my 1T drive on the mobo and 3 drives on each pci card,  everything worked but the speeds during a parity check only 500-4000kbs. I changed my mobo to a Gigabyte GA-8I915G-Pro(which I got for free) so now I have 4 on board sata ports.  I am using all 4 and  just 1 of the sata pci cards, speed is still the same. I decided to buy a supermicro 8 sata port pcie I read about on this forum. My question is should I put all 7 of my drives on this card or just the 6 storage drives and put the parity on the mobo? I am a newb on some of this stuff so any help will be appreciated.

 

Off this topic but I also bought a gigabit pci card and router for transferring files I assume this is the preferred way to go correct? Now all computers, switches and my router will be gigabit along with cat6 cableing.

I recently added 2 WD 1T Green drives to my array and I also had to add a sata card already was using a generic pci silicon one so I added another one. Basically I had my 1T drive on the mobo and 3 drives on each pci card,  everything worked but the speeds during a parity check only 500-4000kbs. I changed my mobo to a Gigabyte GA-8I915G-Pro(which I got for free) so now I have 4 on board sata ports.  I am using all 4 and  just 1 of the sata pci cards, speed is still the same. I decided to buy a supermicro 8 sata port pcie I read about on this forum. My question is should I put all 7 of my drives on this card or just the 6 storage drives and put the parity on the mobo? I am a newb on some of this stuff so any help will be appreciated.

 

Off this topic but I also bought a gigabit pci card and router for transferring files I assume this is the preferred way to go correct? Now all computers, switches and my router will be gigabit along with cat6 cableing.

 

The supermicro card is not a PCIe card, it is a PCI-X card.  Unless you have a special motherboard, PCI-X cards run in PCI card mode.  There is no advantage to that card over other PCI-based cards, except it is alot of drives on one card.

 

I am a little unclear on your speed numbers.  500-4000 kb/s.  Did you really mean kilo-BITS (kb/sec)?  or did you mean kilo-BYTES (KB/sec).  (The case of the k doesn't really matter, but the case of the "b" does!)

 

Normal parity check speeds are between about 8,000 KB/sec on the slow side, up to 80,000 KB/sec (and even higher for some small systems with fast ports and drives).  With 6 drives on the PCI bus I could believe speeds in the 8K range or even a little slower, but not 500 KB/sec.  And getting all but one off the PCI bus should have given you speeds in the 20,000+ KB/sec.

 

Post a syslog and let the experts here see if anything looks strange.

Thanks for the heads up I told you I was a newb I thought this supermicro card was pcie guess I will send it back. I have so much to learn. I am at work so I do not have the speed info right now but I will post the correct numbers. I have 7 harddrives in my array 1 250, 4 500, and 2 Terabytes the WD green ones.(one of these is parity) it takes about 3 days to do a parity check.,

 

I do not know what a syslog is or how to get it.

 

Also any good 8 port pcie cards out there that work in unraid? I looked at the hardware list and it has a 4 port one listed.

 

 

For help with accessing your syslog, please see the Troubleshooting link in my sig.

 

Many many users have been waiting for a decent AND inexpensive 8 port SATA controller, but it hasn't arrived yet.  Generally, users grab multiple 2 and 4 port controllers, or go with the 8 port PCI one that you have.  Please see the Hardware Compatibility page, SATA controllers section.

Follow the Troubleshooting link in my sig.  There are several ways to get at the syslog documented there.

 

There are no inexpensive 8 port PCIe SATA controllers.  There is one that is promising discussed in this thread.  I'd suggest getting your hardware running at reasonable speed with what you have before investing further.  I would return the supermicro MV8 controller given what you have explained.

 

If you are able to run 4 ports on the motherboard and 3 on the PCI bus, you should be getting decent parity check speed.  You'd want your smaller drives (esp that 250G one) on the PCI bus, and should get a noticable kick in performance once you pass the 250G point.  The other 2 drives on the PCI bus should be 500G ones.  The final 500G of the parity check will be completely off the PCI bus, and should likely run at >40,000 KB/sec.  There is no reason to use 2 PCI 4-port SATA controller cards if you only need 3 ports.  Just use one card - remove the other one completely from the system.

 

Set your configuration up that way, and kick off a parity check.  Then capture a syslog after 1/2 hour so of the parity check running. (You can then cancel the parity check if you like).  You could also post smartctl reports for each of your drives, also described in the troubleshooting page.  We can see if any of the drives are failing (which could cause severe performance issues) or more likely just rule out that possibility.