May 14, 201610 yr Hey all, Just completed an upgrade to my server by giving it a couple of H300 RAID/HBA Cards and though i would share my speed improvements for anybody looking if its worth grabbing a HBA or RAID card to throw in their unRAID system. (Protip, it is!) System this was done on only had six SATAII ports which was increasingly becoming a problem as i was fast running out of storage. Ill add full specs at the end for anybody interested! Note, this isnt a super scientific comparison, it is literally just cut and paste between the drives. Im sure its possible for it to run a little faster or slower in places if i stopped Docker, closed open files, etc but for a basic test, here is my results! Cache Speeds - 3x Samsung 850EVO 120GB Btrfs RAID0 Pre upgrade - Write: 421MB/s, Read 341MB/s Post upgrade - Write:481MB/s, Read 327MB/s Array Speeds - 3 Data + 1 Parity WD Red 3TB 5400RPM xfx Pre upgrade - Write: 47MB/s, Read 38MB/s Post upgrade - Write:54MB/s, Read 105MB/s Overall some pretty decent numbers for a cheap £30 card from eBay. Im sure with tweaking it a little, not having Windows do any caching of its own, having unRAID being completely inactive when doing these tests and by running the tests a few times would even out some of the numbers im very happy! Couple of weird moments like reads on SSD's being slightly faster onboard but im fairly sure this is down to my Plex Docker getting used whilst running the transfers. Hope this helps out anybody looking for some numbers on upgrades! Array transfers at about 400MB/s for the first few gigs of the transfer, im sure some unRAID guru knows why but im guessing its RAM cache or something before it evens out to the lower speeds. Full specs of system tested. 2X Intel Xeon E5630 8 Cores, 16 Threads 20GB DDR3 ECC Intel X540-T2 10GBe Network Card (Directly attached to Windows machine running the tests with the same card, jumbo packets, etc all set up. CAT7 Cable. 10Gbe means no network bottlenecks here!) 4x WD Red 3TB 5400RPM (Parity 1, No parity 2 and 3 data disks running unRAID's xfx file system) 3x Samsung 850EVO 120GB SSD (Cache 1 through 3, running unRAID's btrfs RAID0 file system for speed over protection) 2x Dell H300 RAID Card (Snagged for £30 each on eBay, both crossflashed to 9260-8i and running in HBA mode, including passing trough SMART data. 1 Card currently has array plugged into it, other has the cache. Probably little impact on tests, purely for my convenience when working on the machine. All drives connected via LSA MiniSAS to 4 port SATAIII cable)
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