10gbps over SMB on a 45Drives Storinator


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The evil in me wants to say: a lot of time wasted playing with Linus for something that has a very small use case currently, delaying us playing with 6.2.

The reasonable me says: Linus is apparently really helping spread the word and greatness of UnRAID, expanding your user base, and worth the wait.

The older outdated me has been saying for a while: Who the hell is Linus? He seems to have quite the following! Also if he is anything like the pewdiepie craze I hear of from YouTube, I seriosuly don't get it (I tried to watch his most popular video, and didn't get it)..

I feel old, and I'm "only" 33!.. LOL

 

Now, when do we get to play with 6.2?

You've been spamming and teasing its release too much lately.  ;)

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Now, when do we get to play with 6.2?

 

Not until I won the over/under release date pool. ;)

 

Heres how you can play along at home.

It always corresponds with a Holiday.

It is always over.

 

The fun is when there's multiple Holidays close together.  For instance these are all in play for a public 6.2 Release.

 

Christmas

New Years

Martin Luther King

Ground Hog Day

Chinese New Year

Ash Wednesday

Presidents Day

Daylight Saving Time

Ides of March

St Patrick's Day

Palm Sunday

Good Friday

Easter

Tax Day

Memorial Day

Cinco de Mayo

July Fourth

Labor Day

Columbus Day

   

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FreeBSD/FreeNAS does not have the same disk/network configuration capability?  Seems unRAID & FreeNAS were on par out of the box (pre-SSD) and was only after tuning the base OS in unRAID did it allow the 1/10 Gbps result.  I never used FreeNAS so not sure how much base OS is visible to the user.

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FreeBSD/FreeNAS does not have the same disk/network configuration capability?  Seems unRAID & FreeNAS were on par out of the box (pre-SSD) and was only after tuning the base OS in unRAID did it allow the 1/10 Gbps result.  I never used FreeNAS so not sure how much base OS is visible to the user.

 

FreeNAS uses ZFS so they do not offer a unRAID style array or btrfs cache pool.  FreeNAS also didn't offer any easy method to tune 10gbps networking.  The point of the video that we cared about was showing unRAID's viability as a high-performance storage platform as well as a high-capacity one.

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Curious to know ... will 6.2 be able to support more than 24 drives?

 

The system in the video has 27 HDDs plus another 8 SSDs, however for those who paid attention the cache pool for the test is made out of 24 HDD drives !

 

Curious about that also, on the video he has 24 cache + 1 array disks, so it’s under the 25 device limit like 6.1., I expect in 6.2 we should be able to use at least 26 devices or users using 24 array disks + cache won’t be able to add the 2nd parity disk.

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After some more thought it has to accept at least 27 devices, as Linus is using 27 slots total, 3 array + 24 cache.

 

I think the total he used is 26 devices, 24 devices in the pool, 1 array device (no parity was configured) and 1 flash device, which is the current limit.

 

That was my thinking at first, but although he is not using parity it still counts as assigned slots, on v6.1 minimum array slots you can choose are 2, even if you don't want to assign parity, and with 2 array slots maximum cache slots are 23, so the limit was increase to at least 27 disks devices (or 26 if 2nd parity does not count if not assigned).

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Curious to know ... will 6.2 be able to support more than 24 drives?

 

The system in the video has 27 HDDs plus another 8 SSDs, however for those who paid attention the cache pool for the test is made out of 24 HDD drives !

Mmmmaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyybeeeeeeee.....

 

;-)

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Hi guys,

I'm kinda new to the whole UNRAID thing, but I thought UNRAID puts the files in water-fall in the sense that it technically writes files to two drives (one pairing drive), so if the SAS drive was capable of  200MB/s write, wouldn't it stop there? Sorry I'm all new to the server world, and I'm trying to learn all these.

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Well, there is another possibility or two.

 

If the writes were smaller than the amount of RAM then all writes would be buffered.

 

If the writes were to a pure BTRFS cache pool setup on SSDs, I think that will stripe data across and be fast enough to hit high write speeds.

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Well, there is another possibility or two.

 

If the writes were smaller than the amount of RAM then all writes would be buffered.

 

If the writes were to a pure BTRFS cache pool setup on SSDs, I think that will stripe data across and be fast enough to hit high write speeds.

 

Oh So, the files aren't tapping into the Seagate drives? that makes sense

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If you look at the test setup, he's using a btrfs cache pool with a LOT of 6TB Seagates.    This allows FAR faster transfers than you'll get from any single drive -- indeed he's hitting just over 1GB/sec in his transfers.

 

But you couldn't get this from the UnRAID array, since the fastest you can read from the array is the native speed of whichever drive contains the data [which COULD be an SSD, but is more likely a spinner, so you'd be capped at around 200MB/s].    ... and of course writes would be slower (although you could cache those -- so if you had a btrfs cache pool you'd get faster writes than reads  :)  [Assuming, of course, you have a 10Gb network so you're not limited by the network speed.]

 

 

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If you look at the test setup, he's using a btrfs cache pool with a LOT of 6TB Seagates.    This allows FAR faster transfers than you'll get from any single drive -- indeed he's hitting just over 1GB/sec in his transfers.

 

But you couldn't get this from the UnRAID array, since the fastest you can read from the array is the native speed of whichever drive contains the data [which COULD be an SSD, but is more likely a spinner, so you'd be capped at around 200MB/s].    ... and of course writes would be slower (although you could cache those -- so if you had a btrfs cache pool you'd get faster writes than reads  :)  [Assuming, of course, you have a 10Gb network so you're not limited by the network speed.]

 

got it! upon rewatching the video again, he only has one (not even pair drive) set for UnRAID array, didn't even know that was possible, I thought you needed an array. I don't have a cache drive, and I've been wondering why transferspeed between windows VM and usershare. Perhaps adding bunch of SSDs will help? Also, do anyone know what RAID / SAS Host he's using? I have IBM M1015, which comes with 2 SAS connections, I was thinking about geting 2 more as I need 4 more ports, but it looks like he has a card that comes with 4 ports

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... got it! upon rewatching the video again, he only has one (not even pair drive) set for UnRAID array ...

 

He also doesn't have a parity drive assigned.  The test setup was designed strictly to see how fast he could get the network to run ... it's not a realistic UnRAID setup that you'd actually want to use.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

New to unRAID here, in the process of buying components for my move to my new unRAID server.

 

What I was wondering is, what tweaks did Linus actually perform?

And will these be included in future versions of unRAID?

 

I'm guessing even without them I won't hit any sort of limit on my config, but I do love to optimize the crap out of my systems!

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New to unRAID here, in the process of buying components for my move to my new unRAID server.

 

What I was wondering is, what tweaks did Linus actually perform?

And will these be included in future versions of unRAID?

 

I'm guessing even without them I won't hit any sort of limit on my config, but I do love to optimize the crap out of my systems!

Unraid 6.2 will include the tweaks we provided for Linus to achieve those speeds.

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