I don't guess that this is so much of a problem, as it is an observation.  I'm wondering if other people have noticed this phenomenon or if it is a peculiarity of my setup.  It seems as though when the space on my unraid drives gets to the point where the user share might have to make a decision about what drive to put a file on, the server slows down.  As these decisions points get more frequent, when I'm trying to use up space in the existing drives before adding more drives, the speed problem becomes worse and worse, until finally near the end it even affects the speed of my Windows XP computer, that has several mapped drives to different user shares on the array.  Then when I finally add another drive, the problem goes away.  Alll xp and unraid speed is back to it's normal speedy self.  And this is consitant as well.  I've witnessed this several times, whenever I've added more drives. 

This is a "feature" of the ReiserFS (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiserfs)

This also happens on disk shares too.

I believe this is a reiserfs issue when the filesystem starts to get very full.

 

When I try to write a DVD, I'll see the drive churning and churning with no data being transferred.

Sometimes the XP/Samba operation will time out.

I find myself having to use rsync to move the files later.

 

I still see the same churning and delays, just that the operation does not get disconnected.