How slow should transfer be?

[Paak]

Hey guys, just curious...

How slow should transfer speed be between disks?  I'm running the budget build with unRAID 4.5.1 and the transfer of 3.3gbs between a WD20EADS and a WD20EARS is saying it will take 115 hours! I understand they are both 5400rpm but that seems a little TOO slow

[kizer]

How are you transferring the files? Are the drives full?

[Paak]

drives are not full, a little less than 1tb on the WD20EADS and 300gbs or so on the WD20EARS.  How should I be transfering them?  I smb into the server and drag and drop.  Is that not right?

[kizer]

You could get faster transfer rates if you logged into console and used the "mc" command which is for midnight commander.

 

What you are doing is transferring files this way.

 

Server -----switch----pc-----switch-----Server

 

Midnight commander would go from drive to drive directly in the machine.

 

That's of course assuming you are wanting to transfer files from one drive to another drive within the same Server. If you are transferring files from your PC to your server it would depend on your network setup and if your transferring. Don't forget you have to account for your Parity drive if you have Parity enabled.

 

If you are transferring files from your machine to your server you could try this program to see if it helps any. http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php

[Paak]

I've never heard of mc but that is what I am trying to do.  Move files from one drive to another in the same Server.  I just put the EARs drive (drive 2) in and wanted to move my TV Shows folder over to it and off of the EADs (drive 1).  How do I go about using the "mc" command?

[Joe L.]

drives are not full, a little less than 1tb on the WD20EADS and 300gbs or so on the WD20EARS.  How should I be transfering them?  I smb into the server and drag and drop.  Is that not right?

If you do it that way, the data must travel from the disks to your PC and back across the LAN.  It will work, but it will be slow, especially if your PC is on a wireless link, or only has a 100Mb/s LAN connection.

 

If you are copying from one disk on the server to another on the server you really don't want to involve the LAN at all.

 

Regardless, you are limited by the write speed of the array, and that is limited by the rotational speed of the disks involved.  At best, a 7200 RPM drive might get about 40MB/s.  A 5400 RPM drive might get about 30MB/s.

 

Without involving the LAN, and without any possible bus bottleneck in your server you basically could do, at best, one Gigabyte every 33.3 seconds, or 33,333 seconds per TB.  (roughly 9 1/2 hours per TB)

 

Since you are getting an estimate of about 10 times that duration, your effective speed across the LAN is apparently closer to 3MB/s.  (By chance are you using a wireless link?)

 

Joe L.

[Paak]

Yes, my mac is on wifi. I guess that's why the transfer rate is so bad?

[Paak]

Just read the wiki on transferring files within the server...

 

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Transferring_Files_Within_the_unRAID_Server

 

gonna see if this speeds anything up.  thanks for the help guys, i'll post my results in a bit.

[Paak]

holy crap!  works like a champ!  thanks a lot guys!!

[kizer]

I don't know why I didn't catch the wireless issue.

 

At least you got a good solution to your problem and learned something new today.

[Paak]

Oh yes, I learned something new and wife thought I was a genius!  Thank you very much gentlemen!