Hi everyone,

 

With windows 7 reaching EOL I decided to give Unraid a try to move my media server over to.  Bought two 4tb Seagate IronWolf and have created an array with 1 parity drive and 1 data disk with the intention of adding the other drives after the files are transferred.

 

Problem I seem to be having is that the Read and Write speeds never go above 3MB which means the parity sync is quoted to take 16 days. I've tried rebooting a couple of times and turning on Turbowrite but I cannot get higher than that.

 

When initiating a file transfer from Windows 10 it initially peaks at 80MB but then stops and waits I assume to wait for Unraid to catch up.

 

The only time I have seen an expected disk read/write speed is when I installed the "DiskSpeed" docker. 110 - 120MB/sec reported both in the Unraid main tab and within the DiskSpeed UI. I understand there is going to be some overhead for the trade off of having a parity drive but I did not think it was going to be as severe.

 

Am I missing something or is this functioning as intended?

 

Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks,

 

 

tower-diagnostics-20191223-1521.zip

Wait for the parity sync to finish.

Hi Johnnie,

 

Thanks for the reply.

 

Is it likely going to take the 16 days quoted by the UI to complete? If so is there anything I can do to speed it up?

 

Thanks,

Make sure nothing is using the array and speed should improve a lot, if it doesn't please post new digas.

I've stopped the only docker I installed and I'm sure there is nothing else using the array as it is a brand new installation.

 

New diags attached.

 

Thanks,

tower-diagnostics-20191223-1605.zip

Do you have another controller you could use? That SIL controller is very old and slow, though it should be faster than that, but could have issues with simultaneous use.

I'm afraid I don't, ran into this issue when I moved into a server case and used a mini-sas backplane. Have a GPU in for transcoding which covers two of the PCI-E lanes and because the board is old it only has 2. Ended up using 6 onboard sata ports and a card in the PCI slot for the other two.

 

I never had performance issues when I was running it on windows 7 though. Although it could be masked by the fact I would only be ever writing / reading from two drives.

 

If it is the controller it is only going to get worse the more drives I add isn't it?

That's a PCI controller that is limited to around 120MB/s for all connected drives, so with all four ports in used it will be limited to around 30MB/s per port, but like mentioned this is still much better than 3MB/s, could be an IRQ related problem, slowing it dow, can't you use the onboard SATA ports, even if just for testing, not clear if they can be used.

Yeah it's the controller, drives plugged into the bottom mini sas which is directly in the board are transferring at 190MB. Parity sync is 5 hours.

 

I'll look to get a riser card and a controller card. Any suggestions or should I just go through the supported list?

 

Thanks for your help with this!

We usually recommend LSI controllers, any with a SAS2008/2308/3008/3408 chipset in IT mode, e.g., 9201-8i, 9211-8i, 9207-8i, 9300-8i, 9400-8i, etc and clones, like the Dell H200/H310 and IBM M1015, these latter ones need to be crossflashed.

Perfect, I will have a look into them.

 

Thanks again,