Amazing write speed in v6 beta vs 5.0.5!

[strike]

First time I'm writing to my unraid box since upgrading to v6 beta8, and I'm seeing this amazing speed improvements. With 5.0.5 I was getting around 30-40 MBps average and now with beta8 I'm seeing average speeds in the 60-80 MBps peaking at 101 MBps, and this is with parity! It's rarely going under 40 MBps now. Anybody else seeing this? I haven't seen anybody mention it in the general support section for v6, apart from a thread on speed improvements in parity checks.  What changed in the beta allowing this kind of speed?

 

I'm moving files from my windows box to unraid so I have not tried copying/moving files between disks/shares in unraid yet, I rarely do that anyway so. 

[theone]

Are you using a cache drive for faster writing?

 

What drive types/models are you using? array, parity, cache?

[strike]

I have a cache drive yes, but not using it at the moment or in this test. In 5.0.5 I was using a SSD cache drive, but had issues with low speed after the disk(s) were spun down and spinning up again for the write, causing a "disk overload" in utorrent due to it wasn't able to write fast enough to the disk, resulting in low download speed. (don't know why this was happening). So I stopped using it and started downloading to my windows box instead and moving the files to my unraid server on an daily basis. And still doing so as of this moment, but I'm intrigued to try my cache disk again just to test the speed.

 

But yeah, to the point, my setup is:

12x WD Red 4TB NAS (11 data disks and 1 parity)

Samsung SSD 840 EVO 120GB as a cache drive (which I'm not using at the moment,but I'm going to start using this for dockers)

Motherboard: ASUS Z97-DELUXE

CPU:  Intel Core i3-4360

RAM: 16GB Crucial DDR3 BallistiX Sport 1600 Mhz

RAID/SATA controller: ADAPTEC RAID 71605E

 

Is nobody else experiencing improved write speed in beta8? And most importantly what are the changes in the beta allowing this speed? I think it's important to know so it doesn't change in later releases, because I'm loving this.. Is it just the move from 32 to 64bit? Better drivers? I really don't have a clue, but I'd like to know. It can't be just the hardware, because I wasn't experiencing this in 5.0.5.

 

Ps: Sorry if my grammar is bad, english isn't my native language.     

[jumperalex]

If i had to guess, then like me you are seeing raw network and samba improvement (initial high speed) coupled with the os cache/buffers actually being used and then filling up (speed drop on large files after some time).  So yeah I think the recent betas have fixed some slowdowns, but bare metal array write speeds are only going to see marginal improvements once the memory and on-drive cache is full.

[strike]

Yeah, you're probably right. The files I was moving were only just over 1 gig so they got transferred pretty fast. I was trying with a lager file now (17GB) and the speed was 70-90MBps til it came to about 4,5GB in then it dropped to 30ish MBps from 4,5-7GB and then up again to 70-90MBps from 7-12GB, down to 30ish from 12-14GB,up to 70-90 again from 14-17GB. It was some low points though, down to 12 MBps at one point, but that was briefly. So the speed was really all over the place on a large file transfer. But hey on average it's way better than the speed I got on 5.0.5, so I'm not complaining.  

[jumperalex]

Indeed.