I'm new to unRAID and having just installed v6.5.3 to a newly built custom system. I would like to get an idea of how well my system is performing or if improvements can be made. My system feels slow, e.g. it takes a few seconds for plex to draw the home page, or a tv show with more than 6 seasons (Supernatural), which is why I am looking into this.  

So far I have SSH'ed into the server and performed the following tests (same commands just different targets):  
   

dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/disk{1..5}/test bs=64G count=20 oflag=dsync  

which returned ~48 MB/sec  

 

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/user/isos/test bs=64G count=20 oflag=dsync  

which returned ~43MB/sec  

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/cache/test bs=64G count=20 oflag=dsync  

which returned ~490MB/sec (Samsung SSD)  

 

I haven't tried the above when connected via NFS or SMB as I wanted to get an idea of what the local speed was / should be before introducing the overhead of a network share.  

If there are different tests that can be ran directly on the server I am open to trying them out for completeness.  

So...for anyone else that has performed similar actions what speeds are you getting? 

Those speeds seem reasonable for writes to the parity array. You can turn on turbo write at the expense of having all disks spin.

 

 

Thank you @trurl, that is good information that I will try out. All of my HDDs are WD Reds and my system once back in use will be nearly constantly busy so the drives should be spun up for the most part.

 

Can you advise if there is a way for me to set unRAID to never spin down the drives?

 

 

set the spin down delay to 'never' in settings/disk settings

 

If you turn on TW you'll get the full speed benefit.  If you want to be a bit more selective, have a look at the TW plugin that will turn TW on/off depending on how many drives are spun down e.g. I have 6 disks and I have TW on if 2 or less are spun down