Checking on perfomance

[iamimdoc]

I am not a computer sophisticate (and hence this question probably leaves out a lot of useful information)

 

I did mange to get a Version 5 Server up and running on a 2.6 GHz 4 GB ram PC used mainly for streaming music.  This works without apparent issue. Very reliable for 2 years.

 

I have several PC's on the network and some devices that are not gigabit (Western Digital TV for example).  The router is gigabit.

 

Copying files to the drives on the server typically never exceeds about 25 MB/sec, often slower.  I presume the variation in speed is based on the external drives from whence data comes.

 

My questions are:

 

Is there some type of software that tests performance and tells you where the bottlenecks are?

 

Is the CPU likely to be the bottleneck (and thus would a new mother board and CPU be of value) or are there other issues that need to be rectified first to improve performance?

 

Thanks

 

[itimpi]

Do you have a cache drive on the system? 

 

Without it, the architecture of unRAID means that the maximum write performance will never be much more than something in the region of 30-40 MBps (each write actually involves a read and a write on both the data drive being used and the parity drive - a total of 4 I/O operations).  That is the penalty one pays for not needing all drives spun up for a write operation.

 

With a cache drive writes are normally network limited - in other words about 100MBps.

[iamimdoc]

No cache drive (but lots of Johnny Cash....)

But

No parity drive but all data backed up to two other off site locations

 

Would a cache drive help in this circumstance?