Hello Everyone.

 

I am a recent convert from WHS to unRaid, and I have a few questions.

 

First off, the purpose of this system is movie and music storage. Music storage doesnt take a lot of space, but of course movies do.

 

I am running an archaic intel DB865GBF board, with 5 hard drives.

the board only had 2 sata1 connectors, and no pcie, as the board was made like 8 years ago.

So 3 drives are connected to a genaric pci-4port sata card, i think with a silicon whatever chip.

5 Drives,

WD 2tb green

2 Seagate 1.5tb

2 Samsung (i think) 1tb drives

 

All 5 disks are assigned as data disks, and there is no parity disk installed at the moment, as I need the space for media. Eventually I will get a 6th drive for parity.

 

At any rate, when copying the data to my server, I am getting about 30MB/sec transfer, and from what I hear that is normal..

However, when I was running the same hardware with WHS, I was getting 60-65MB/sec.

 

So here come the questions.

 

If I want a movie collection to span whatever disks it wants, do I have to use a user share for it to do that?

If its set at High Water, does it only write to 1 disk, therefore making file transfers go faster, or is most-free prefered for transfer speeds

 

Knowing that I am not using parity at this moment, is there any reason for the difference in write speeds?

 

Thanks for the help guys.

 

If there is something you want me to upload, let me know what it is, and how to get it, and I would be happy to comply. THANKS!

I know it's not related to your actual question... but holy cow, you realize that's a dangerous way to store your data, right?  I personally will not trust the 1.5/2TB drives in general due to the number of heads; they're prone to fail.  But to trust 5 "prone to fail" drives like that, and without parity... you're pretty much asking for it, don't you think?

 

Again; it's off topic from your question, but thought I'd express my concern about your rig.

 

Robbie

Soon enough, I will get a 6th drive for parity.. but to make use of everything on the system, that drive would be 2tb.. they are still a bit expensive, and at the moment, out of my budget.

Soon, though.

Are you writing to a user share or directly to the disk?

 

Peter

user share

Try writing directly to a disk share and see if you get a faster speed.

 

Peter

Ok.

Doing it that way, I am not able to fill from 1 disk to another automatically, am I?

If I have 4tb of movies to upload, I would have to do it in pieces, correct?

It's just to test. Pick a drive with enough space and try moving a large file to it to see what the speed is.

 

The cache drive writes slow when using user shares but faster when writing directly to the drive. I'm thinking the data drives will have the same problem but most people use a parity drive and the parity drive causes an even bigger slow down.

 

Peter