I have 6 computers around the house all connected via 2 Netgear Prosafe Gigabit switches and all is hunky dory. I've tried a cable swap to no avail. It's been an ongoing thing since my early days with this controller card. Whether that's a co-incidence or not, I don't know.

 

Reading from the RAID is fine. I can copy over the network, at around 60 Mb/s to a gigabit able windows machine and at around 25 Mb/s to an old machine without a gigabit network card. . It's just writing to it that's the problem. That's what prompted my desire to try a cache disk which ended in failure elsewhere for now.

 

Fishing a little now, but perhaps the generic drivers for my controller card/MB network card aren't as well developed as they are for other proven combo's?

 

An interesting observation is that when copying from W8.1 to unRAID, a natty window comes up to show the transfer rate in graphical form. I get an intial burst, for a couple of seconds, of 80-100 Mb/s and then it rapidly throttles back to an average of around 5 Mb/s. Another interesting observation is that the resulting graph of the transfer is roughly sinusoidal. Peaking at around 10 Mb/s and bottoming out at around 1.5 Mb/s. I'll post a screen capture of it next time.

 

Any thoughts or suggestions gratefully received!

 

Regards,

 

Paul

Diagnostics

tower-diagnostics-20151120-1438.zip

How full are the drives?

Pretty full, but not so full that it should affect performance I think from reading the guides.

Someone else has recently reported terrible speeds with the 9650SE.  I suspect you both are waiting for someone to find the magic tweak that unlocks it.

That may well have been me! About a year ago....

 

I've lived with it having not done much with it but now I'm in another burst of activity....

There's no way you're getting 25MB/s on 100mb network connections. MAX is 12.5 MB/s

Perhaps I made a mistake in the capabilities of the machine.... it's my son's mid noughties Dell basic box.

 

Thanks for that, I'll go and check. I don't quite see how that moves the conversation forward.

 

Do you have anything constructive to add?

 

Regards,

 

Paul

Perhaps I made a mistake in the capabilities of the machine.... it's my son's mid noughties Dell basic box.

 

Thanks for that, I'll go and check. I don't quite see how that moves the conversation forward.

 

Do you have anything constructive to add?

 

Regards,

 

Paul

 

I suppose I should have expanded on my comments before.

 

If in fact your son's PC is only 100mb and its reporting transferring at 25MB/s it brings into question all the speeds you are seeing as being accurate.

 

That rapid burst you see when writing to unRAID is likely a cache to cache write and when that quickly fills up it begins writing to the hard drive, and showing your slower speeds.

OK I looked at your log and there are 2 things you can do that will quickly alleviate your issues.

 

1. install a cache drive. The syslog indicated none was present. This will take all your writes throughout the day (and continue to serve the files up through the user share system) and move them to the protected array at night when you're not in front of the machine waiting for it to complete.

 

2. all your drives are on the Areca controller. Try moving some to the motherboard ports.

 

 

 

PS. make sure that if you install a cache drive its to a motherboard port!

I had made a mistake.

 

I am reminded (by my son) that because the MB network card was only 100Mb, we fitted an after market GB card. It hasn't always appeared to be operating to its full potential though.

 

Having done the maths on the file size/time, I think the reported speeds are accurate.

 

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll give them a try. You may see from my previous thread that I tried a cache disk and it made my RAID read only........ never got to the bottom of why.... but removing the cache disk has "cured" the problem and at least I can write to it now. Albeit very slowly.

 

Regards,

 

Paul

With all my problems seemingly related to writing to my server, I wonder if it's anything to do with the on-board network controller?

 

I've just taken a punt on an Intel PCIe gigabyte card off ebay for a few quid, if only to rule it out.

 

Has anybody changed their NIC and had a lift in performance?

Well, it's nothing to do with the network controller.

 

I've tried a PCI-e Intel Gigabit card with absolutely no difference.

 

One less variable anyway!

Following Mr-Hexen' advice, I managed to cobble together 4 old hard disks and get them connected directly to the motherboard.

 

They work wonderfully well! An initial burst of around 110 Mb/s and then settling at around 70 Mb/s. See attached graphic.

 

This is both good and bad for me as it seems to point fairly and squarely at the 3Ware 9650SE controller card.

 

Good, because it seems to be an answer.

 

Bad, because it's the single most expensive bit of the system.

 

I've now got two 24 port RAID cards. The 3Ware is next to useless and my Highpoint 4460 isn't even recognised by unRAID.

 

Is there any way of getting the Highpoint 4460 recognised by unRAID or even tweaking my 9650SE to pull it's finger out?

 

Regards,

 

Paul

No experience with either controller, but if they have BIOS updates you might try that.

Thanks trurl but both are the most recent available.

ask lime-tech to include drivers for the highpoint in the next release.