Hello from a brand new member!

 

A few days ago I put together a new unRAID box and I have been working my way up the learning curve. I found answers to lots of my questions on this forum and have been really impressed with the quality of the contributions here. Now I'm hoping that someone can offer suggestions on steps I might take to optimize my NFS transfer speed.

 

One of my goals is to serve my WDTV media player (modded for USB network access via firmware ). I built the unRAID server to upgrade from my Buffalo LinkStation Live (samba) to run NFS and achieve Blue-ray transfer speeds.

 

I'm running unRAID Basic 4.5-beta6. I understand that NFS support is relatively new to unRAID and is still considered to be experimental and not optimized. I really hope that some "experimenting" will allow for more speed than I am seeing so far!

 

Currently I get 44 Mbps transfers (time cat test method) with user shares and 49 Mbps with disk shares. While this is a huge improvement over the 21 Mbps I got with the old samba NAS, even 49 Mbps isn't sufficient to play my test .mkv (Quantum of Solace) without the audio dropping out.

 

Other modified WDTV owners using network adapters with the same chip as mine are reporting NFS transfer speeds over 60 Mbps, but apparently not (AFAIK) with unRAID.

 

I am really hoping that something can be done to improve my unRAID network transfer speeds to properly handle 1080P Blu-ray content.

 

Any thoughts or suggestions please?

 

SYSTEM SPECS

 

NAS Hardware running unRAID Basic 4.5-beta6

Motherboard: Asus A8R32MVP Deluxe

NB: ATI Crossfire Express 3200

SB: ULI M1575

Onboard SATA Controller: Silicon Image 3132

Onboard NIC: Marvel 88E8053 PCIe Gigabit LAN Controller

Processor: AMD Opteron 185 @ 2.6GHz

RAM: 2GB 400MHz DDR

Storage: 3 X 1TB WDC_WD1001FALS-00J7B1 (read testing at 106-109 MB/s)

 

Media Player

Western Digital WDTV-HD

Firmware: WD beta 1.02.08 beta plus Zorander ext3-boot 0.9.2 mod

TrendNet TU2-ETG H/W: V1.3R USB Gigabit Ethernet Adapter (AX88178 chip)

 

xmount 192.168.15.250:/mnt/disk2/media/Video Video nfs soft,intr

mount output: 192.168.15.250:/mnt/disk2/media/Video on /tmp/media/usb/Video type nfs (rw,v3,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,soft,intr,lock,proto=udp,addr=192.168.15.250)

 

LAN

Client & server connected at 1000Mb/s to 3COM Gigabit network switch

 

 

Well, after considerable time spent reading up on NFS and searching fourms, I've made some significant progress increasing the transfer speeds. Unfortunately the increase won't "stick". Maybe if I explain what I've tried someone here will be able to help me troubleshoot this further.

 

I compared the mount status on my WDTV with that reported by another user who was getting higher transfer speeds and I noticed that the NAS mount on his player was showing the soft and intr parameters, while mine was not. (Mine was showing hard and intr was missing.) So I rebooted my WDTV with those parameters set in the xmount statement.

 

xmount 192.168.15.250:/mnt/disk2/media/Video Video nfs soft,intr

 

Then I tested file transfers with time cat and it appeared I had a solution, because now I was getting 58 - 66 Mbps.

 

So I played my test movie on the WDTV. Initially it played much better, getting well past the point where the audio had been consistently dropping out before. So some progress. But, alas, a few more minutes into the movie the audio dropped out again. #$^&!

 

Now the strange parts.

 

When I retested the file transfer rates with time cat, I found they had dropped back to 41 Mbps.

 

Reboot player, remount and back up to >60.

 

Play movie, audio drops out, back down to ~41.

 

Also I found that now, even if I removed the soft and intr parameters from my xmount and rebooted, mount still reports that they are set. So it seems that somehow these settings must be "sticking" on the unRAID server.

 

My knowledge of networking, Linux, and NFS is minimal, so all this is really perplexing to me. I really hope that someone with more experience will have a clue from this what is going on and what I might try to solve this problem.

 

 

 

Finally resolved this issue. The problem was not with unRAID or my server build. Rather it was a conflict with some add on software I was running on the WDTV. It was real bear to work out, but I'm pleased to finally have the unRAID box doing what is supposed to!

 

For anyone else with a modded WDTV let me post the NFS mounting code for an unRAID user share (the disk share code is in my top post). You can figure this out by reading the manual and wiki, but it took me awhile.

 

xmount 192.nnn.nn.nnn:/mnt/user/media media nfs
# where "media" is the name of the share

 

Edit: Forgot to mention that with the problem fixed I am now getting 67Mbps and 61Mbps transfer speeds with disk shares and user shares respectively. Not shabby.

Thanks for updating with your progress.  I've actually got the same configuration (unRAID with a WDTV w/ USB mod), and while I'm not currently using NFS, this information could be helpful for me in the future.

 

Thanks for updating with your progress.  I've actually got the same configuration (unRAID with a WDTV w/ USB mod), and while I'm not currently using NFS, this information could be helpful for me in the future.

 

Great. Just so you know what you should probably avoid, the app causing all my trouble was disco's webserver.