I have used unRAID for quite a while now. Performance was never an issue as the array was not essential for my performance applications. Since I usually copy in the background, I did not care how long it took, but...

 

I do copy pictures and movies on the drives and I noticed that the performance... sucks.

 

I am getting 4-6 MB/ sec. Is this normal? I see other people here talking about 30-40MB/sec even 50-60MB/sec, what is the magic formula?

 

I am running V4.5.4 latest build, 10 drives total (1 for parity) attached to Promise SATA TX300 controllers, on an older mobo I have to say, and a small processor (celeron 2.0mhz) with 512MB of RAM. (3 drives are 320 Gig, 2 are 500 Gig and the rest are 1 TB) I am in the process of replacing the older smaller drives, but as you know it takes a while...

 

I did not think that the processor or memory would affect transfer rate on an array, does it? If so, by how much?

 

I used to have User Shares, but I removed them, only disk shares right now - essentially all files go on a single drive for every operation.

 

I am thinking about a cache drive, but again, I don't know if it will make a big difference.

 

Any suggestions on what I should "upgrade" first to gain performance? Do I have to replace the whole rig? or...

 

 

I

0 drives total (1 for parity) attached to Promise SATA TX300 controllers, on an older mobo

 

What older motherboard?

How much ram do you have now?

 

The processor is fine. It's really all you need.

memory is depending on how fast the I/O is and how small the files are.

 

If you are only using PCI cards, then upgrading to a motherboard that supports more advanced bus architecture will help.

 

write speed is related to the parity drive, the data drive (both drives come into play) and your bus speed (because both drives have to communicate over the bus).

 

 

>> I am thinking about a cache drive, but again, I don't know if it will make a big difference.

You can test this by mounting a single test drive outside the array. Then update samba config and do a test transfer.

 

4-6MB/s is too slow.

I would expect 10-14MB/s as the slowest. 30Mb as the norm for a modern setup.

 

 

PCI cards. You can really only have one or two modern drives on an entire PCI bus to use its full potential. On my two recent builds half my priority was to avoid PCI altogether and use PCIe instead (as ALL the PCI slots share the same bandwidth, while each PCIe lane is separate). Ran a parity check last night at an average of 72MB/s.

Ok - I get it.

 

I will need to upgrade the motherboard. Only one PCIe 4x slots on it. It's an Asus P5K-VM. Yes I am using two PCI Sata controllers (each 4 ports) plus 2 ports onboard.

 

That must be the choking point...

 

Thanks