I'm wanting to optimize my drive placement to see if I can get my parity generation speed up, and I'm not sure what the best method is.

 

I'm currently running 10 drives + a cache drive (9 data drives, one parity, plus the cache).  As for controllers, I currently have 4 onboard Sata ports being used, 4 ports from an adaptec 1430sa in the 16x PCIE slot, and 4 Sata ports on a PCI Rosewill card.  One of my drives is also a Pata drive.  So basically I'm using 10 total sata ports, and one Pata.  As for the drives themselves, I'm running 4 750gb WD's (2 of them are Blue 7200's, 2 are Green's, one blue is parity, others are all data), 3 WD 640g's, 2 WD 320's, and one Seagate 500g (pata).  The Cache drive is a Seagate 160g Sata.

 

Last week I changed out a 320g (not in the list above) with one of the Green 750gb drives, and unraid rebuilt the data from the 320 onto the 750, but it took 20hrs to get the job done.  I haven't physically verified it yet, but I have a feeling that somewhere along the way with the upgrades, I've somehow managed to get the parity drive on the PCI card (or at the very least, possibly the other 750's on there), which is cause the slow parity generation.  I'm also getting ready to put 2 additional drives in the system, so that I can remove the smaller drives (the 2 320's, and the pata 500), one of which is a 1tb WD Black drive, which of course will be the new parity drive, the other is a 750g for data.

 

What I'm wanting to do is move the larger drives to the motherboard/adaptec ports, and the smaller drives (which will be going away over the period of the next week or so) to the PCI controller.  My plan was to move the 750's to the onboard ports, and the 640's to the adaptec, and placing the 320's on the PCI card, along with the cache drive, and leave the Pata drive connected as it is.  Am I correct in assuming that after I change the actual ports I'm plugging the drives into, I just need to go into my devices screen and make sure the drives are back in the proper slots they were in before the reshuffle?  My array is currently about 90% full, and I'd hate to loose the data and have to re-rip all those dvd's...

 

If that will work, my plan after I get the array back up and running (and I also plan on re-running parity to verify the speeds are improved), I intend to either put the new parity drive on the empty adaptec ports, or move one of the 750's to the adaptec, and put the new parity on the mobo (whichever would be faster for the parity drive), and let Unraid copy the old parity to the new, and then reuse the existing parity as a data drive.  At that point, I was going to manually move the data from one 320, and the 500 (according to my disk usage, I'm using less than 750gb on those 2 drives combined, and the other 320 is actually empty at this point, as I have already consolidated that drive onto one of the 750's), then remove them from the system one at a time.  At some point, I do intend on replacing the motherboard in this system (or at the very least, replace that 4 port PCI with a couple 2 port PCIE-1x boards) with something with more ports/expandability, but I just haven't found a resonably priced AMD system board with 8 ports or more, that is known to work with Unraid.

 

Basically, what I want my end result to be, is the 1tb WD as parity, then the 5 750's (I've got another green 750 on the way), then the 3 640's, and lastly the cache drive.  I'd love to have the drives listed in that order on the disk status page, but that's a minor concern (I can live with them mixed as they are now).

 

Am I correct in assuming that after I change the actual ports I'm plugging the drives into, I just need to go into my devices screen and make sure the drives are back in the proper slots they were in before the reshuffle?  My array is currently about 90% full, and I'd hate to loose the data and have to re-rip all those dvd's...

 

More or less, yes, that is correct.  However, to ensure the safety of your data, I would recommend reading BOTH of these guides and following the method they describe.  They both describe the same procedure, but they offer complimentary tips and helpful info.

-What is the safe way to rearrange disk numbers, assignments, slots, etc?

-Move Largest and Fastest Data Drives Off PCI Bus

 

 

If that will work, my plan after I get the array back up and running (and I also plan on re-running parity to verify the speeds are improved), I intend to either put the new parity drive on the empty adaptec ports, or move one of the 750's to the adaptec, and put the new parity on the mobo (whichever would be faster for the parity drive)...

The direct connection to the mobo will be fastest for the parity drive.

 

...and let Unraid copy the old parity to the new...

As far as I know, unRAID never copies parity data, instead it rebuilds it every time.  That means that your array is temporarily unprotected while the new parity info is calculated.

 

...and then reuse the existing parity as a data drive.  At that point, I was going to manually move the data from one 320, and the 500 (according to my disk usage, I'm using less than 750gb on those 2 drives combined, and the other 320 is actually empty at this point, as I have already consolidated that drive onto one of the 750's), then remove them from the system one at a time. 

There are multiple ways to accomplish this.  You can follow the simple instructions here:

-How do I remove a hard disk that I do not plan on replacing?

or you can just wait for your new 750 GB drives to arrive, then replace the 320 GBs at that point (pretend like they had failed, and unRAID will 'restore' the data onto them, in this case the data being nothing).

 

At some point, I do intend on replacing the motherboard in this system (or at the very least, replace that 4 port PCI with a couple 2 port PCIE-1x boards) with something with more ports/expandability, but I just haven't found a resonably priced AMD system board with 8 ports or more, that is known to work with Unraid.

That shouldn't be a problem, unRAID is very tolerant of different hardware.  I recently replaced the CPU in my server, and unRAID didn't even seem to notice.

 

Basically, what I want my end result to be, is the 1tb WD as parity, then the 5 750's (I've got another green 750 on the way), then the 3 640's, and lastly the cache drive.  I'd love to have the drives listed in that order on the disk status page, but that's a minor concern (I can live with them mixed as they are now).

That kind of bugs me too, but I just found the solution (again through the wiki):

Reassigning Drives

 

One more thought: I see some logic to placing the cache drive on the PCI card as you are planning to do, since as long as only one drive on the PCI card is being used at a time, you won't notice much slowdown.  However, if you think you may ever want to transfer files to the server (write operations) while simultaneously playing a movie from the server (read operations), then you may want to move the cache drive to a faster port, such as directly on the mobo, or on the PCI-E card.  On my server, I do equal amounts of reading from and writing to the server, so it benefits me to have both the parity drive and the cache drive connected directly to the mobo.  If you do mostly reading and not much writing, then your server is probably fine as it is, with the cache drive on the slow PCI card.

What I'm wanting to do is move the larger drives to the motherboard/adaptec ports, and the smaller drives (which will be going away over the period of the next week or so) to the PCI controller.  My plan was to move the 750's to the onboard ports, and the 640's to the adaptec, and placing the 320's on the PCI card, along with the cache drive, and leave the Pata drive connected as it is.  Am I correct in assuming that after I change the actual ports I'm plugging the drives into, I just need to go into my devices screen and make sure the drives are back in the proper slots they were in before the reshuffle?  My array is currently about 90% full, and I'd hate to loose the data and have to re-rip all those dvd's...

Yes you are correct. Also you won't loose your data as long as you do not press FORMAT and/or re-initialize a drive or RE-STORE the superblock.

Just grab a screen shot of everything before the move.

 

...

I also plan on re-running parity to verify the speeds are improved), I intend to either put the new parity drive on the empty adaptec ports, or move one of the 750's to the adaptec, and put the new parity on the mobo (whichever would be faster for the parity drive)

....

Basically, what I want my end result to be, is the 1tb WD as parity, then the 5 750's (I've got another green 750 on the way), then the 3 640's, and lastly the cache drive.  I'd love to have the drives listed in that order on the disk status page, but that's a minor concern (I can live with them mixed as they are now).

 

There seems to be an allot of shuffling around in this message when you could just reset the drives the way you want, then recreate the parity drive. It seems like you've done this already.. and you plan to do this again.

 

I would use the motherboard or the Adaptec depending on the motherboard architecture.

Without knowing the motherboard, it's hard to say where to put it. I.E. Where are the 4 SATA ports on the motherboard connected?

 

I'm currently using an Abit AN-M2HD (was a left-over from a HTPC I was going to build).  It's an nForce 630a board.  I'm running a single-core Athlon 3200+ (Orleans core), which for Unraid purposes seems to be fine.  I also have 2gb of ram onboard.

 

I'd like to find a AMD board with about 8 ports on the board, and at the very least, one 16x PCIE slot, or even better, 2 16x's that are electrically able to run 4x/8x cards.  Something around 100 or less would be great, but it looks like I'm dreaming there, lol.

 

I was pretty sure last time I upgraded parity, it copied the parity data from the old drive to the new, then moved the old drive into the array as storage, it sure didn't take as long as a full parity check I know that much.  As for leaving the 320's in there, I actually have another machine that I was wanting to stick those in, and at this point I'm wanting to bring my total drive count down on that particular machine (the case I'm using now, an Antec 300, has 6 bays at the bottom, and 3 5.25"s at the top, which currently has a SuperMicro 5-in-3 in it, and at least for the short term, I'd like to keep the total number below that, until I replace my desktop PC and use it's Antec 900 with 2 more 5-in-3's or can afford a Norco).  I know at the very least I'm going to be moving out the 500g Pata, and if I could drop another drive or 2, I'd be able to go with everything on the mobo/adaptec ports.

 

I tried download the motherboard manual and it came in at 0 bytes.

The board is fairly modern, and supports PCIe X16 & X1, so I'm sure the SATA ports have a good enough speed.

Remember that you can get a 1X card to support 2 drives very cheap. I have my party drive on it's own 1X card.

 

I have everything moved where I want as far as ports, with 2 320's on the PCI card (with the cache drive), the new 1tb Parity drive on the mobo along with 3 of the 750's, 1 750, the 3 640's on the Adaptec, and the 500g PATA connected to a PCI card as well (I probably SHOULD have put this on the onboard ide port, but it's coming out soon as I get the old parity drive replaced).  I'm currently getting very slow parity generation (6552k/sec average at the moment), but I fully expect that to jump up as soon as I pass the 2 320's, and then reach full speed after the 500g is finished.  I also ordered another Adaptec Sata controller (a 1220sa PCIe 1x 2 port card) for a little over 39$ shipped, so I'll be able to put all the available drives on the PCIe bus, aside from the cache drive.

 

I'm hopeful that this will improve my parity generation, as 38hrs (the last time I generated) was a bit much...

 

When I can manage to get a larger case for this machine, I'll probably get a 10 port Asus mobo (P5Q?), and drop a lower-power intel CPU on it.  That'd take me to 16 drives, and the ability of adding a couple more controllers .  Now if Limetech can get the SAS controllers working, putting 2 of those in a system with 10 onboard ports should let me fill one of the Norco 4220's with room to spare...

 

I checked the smart status in unmenu, and my new parity drive (which I ran the preclear script on yesterday), has the following under additional issues/failures:

 

» head_flying_hours=18

» attribute_241=1969350406

» attribute_242=3.99941e+09

 

I didn't get any errors as far as I remember with the preclear script, and I'm wondering if I should be concerned with the head_flying_hours message?

 

I stopped parity generation, moved the PATA to the onboard port (instead of on the PCI bus), and now I'm getting:

 

Total size:  976,762,552  KB

Current position: 8,739,564 (0.8%)

Estimated speed: 51,117 KB/sec

Estimated finish: 315.6 minutes

 

I'm guessing that once I get past those 2 320's on the PCI bus, and my speed should go up considerably...

 

Went from 6m/sec to 51m/sec, quite an improvement already...