I'm a little new at this so please forgive my ignorance. my current unraid system consist of 17 drives (1 parity, 1 cache and 15 data) 3 ide and 14 sata. there are 2 sata ports on the motherboard and then 12 sata drives connected to 3 promise tx4 pci cards. i believe that this is too much on the pci bus, but as of right now i have no other options. i was wondering what everyone thought would be a good choice to upgrade to to get faster speeds. i have a gigabit network, but there seems to be a terrible lag in the system. i am running plex on both my macpro and my mac mini. even using the finder it seems to take a long time for the server to respond. i use my server for movie rips (standard and blu-ray). i am looking to upgrade the motherboard and then trying to decide if i should keep using the pci cards or move to something like pcie or pcix or whatever.

 

any help would be appreciated.

 

kingpin

Although a PCI bus heavy system such as yours will yield slow (maybe painfully slow) parity check times, you should not be having laggy performance when accessing and playing back 1 or even 2-3 movies at the same time from different drives.  You might want to post a syslog an let RobJ or Joe L. take a look to see if something is happening under the hood that you are not aware of.

 

If your laggy response is when searching for files, it is possible that your unRAID drives have spun down, and you have to wait for them to spin up.  If  you have giant user shares that span many (all?) of your drives, there would be big lag the first time you try that in a session.  But after that initial spinup, future accesses should be peppy until the drives aren't accessed for a while and they go back to sleep.  There is a tool that many users run that effectively caches your directory contents in RAM, and avoids spinning up drives to search for files.  You might want to load that and see if it helps.

 

In terms of upgrading, I'd look at a motherboard that has 6 or more SATA ports on the MB, and has 2 or more PCIe slots that are x4 or wider.  Gigabit lan is a must.  Onboard video would also be an added bonus (otherwise go for a cheap PCI video card).  The Supermicro C2SEE motherboard would be a good choice IMO.

 

To add drives, the Adaptec 1430SA is a good choice for 4 drives (about $100), but there is a new 8 drive Supermicro controller (about $130) that is not yet compatible with unRAID, but support should be coming soon (if Tom ever gets back to work ).  I'd (personally) try to resolve the problem you are having with your current server, and wait for that support, before investing in a major upgrade.  With a motherboard and 2 of those controllers, you'd be able to have 22 high speed drives staying completely off the PCI bus.

Always slow:  Check cables and router... they may not been good enough to do GigE.  Also check NIC configs to make sure you are at GigE.

 

Slow reading directories, then faster on revisit:  Samba, and caching of dirs.  Keep number of files and directories as small as possible (i.e. split into more higher-level directories... instead of 1000 movie dirs, split them into 5 directories (like by genre) of only 200 each.  Use disk shares instead of user shares.

 

Check reading of a 1GB file by copying it from unRAID to a local RAMdisk. 350Mbps (40MBps) will be about the best you can hope for.  Half that, or about 1GB per min, is typical.

Thanks for the help guys. I will post a sys log when i get back home monday. Movies and tv shows seem to play fine, it just seems to take a long time for them to load. Maybe i just have them spread across too many drives. Is there a way to redistribute the files to other drives without having to manually move them? could i somehow move all the tv shows to 1 or 2 of my 1TB drives instead?