How important is dual channel?

[mikester]

I just setup my UnRaid server using an Asus P5PE-VM mobo and a 2.66 GHz Celeron D processor.  While doing an intial copy from my old server to the UnRaid box, it took 11.5 hours to copy 212GB of data.  That works out to about 5 MB/s, which seems a little slow.  I've never had problems before with maxing out the throughput on my 100Mb network, so I was expecting more along the lines of 8-9 MB/s.

 

The only thing I can think of that MIGHT be slowing it down is that I bought a single 512MB stick of DDR400 memory, so the machine is running in single-channel mode.  Do you know if that would make such a huge difference in performance?  Can you think of anything else I should check that might be causing the slowdown?

[limetech]

Definitely you should be able to max out the 100Mb/s ethernet.  How many disks do you have and what rate are you getting for parity-check?  If you don't mind rebuilding parity later, one thing you can try is to create an array without parity (just unassign it on the Devices page).  This will take the s/w parity gen out of the equation.

[mikester]

Right now there are 3 drives total.  I have 3 other drives which I was copying the data over from, and now they are ready to add to the array.  Should I add them first and then test some large copies (I guess without the parity drive)?

[limetech]

A simple test before adding any more drives is to just start a parity-check.  Let it run about 5 minutes and then refresh the page and post back what you're getting for "Estimated speed".

[mikester]

I went ahead and installed the other drives last night.

 

But I did the parity check anyway, and it reported 24,168 KB/sec for the estimated speed.