My hardware is all bog standard stuff which others use too. It's all from the recommended hardware list apart from the mobo which is the LE version of the Asus board. This has a known issue with the onboard network chip so I run a separate PCI card NIC (cheep and cheerful). Drives are all Samsung F2 and F3 Ecogreen (5400 rpm). Network is Gigabit but my Dune only supports 100Mb. I stream uncompressed BD rips (40GB plus folders), full 1080p with HD audio using SMB with no problems at all. The Dune shows me the bit rate which is around 40Mb/sec for these rips.

 

For info, the first server I built was something thrown together from an old HP PC. I really didn't do anything much appart from strip out what wasn't needed and add a couple of extra HDDS. This worked fine too.

 

What you describe is certainly not a common problem or complaint and there are hundreds of users with any number of different hardware configurations. So, I can't help thinking your problem must lie elsewhere.   

@Yannis.

 

I tend to agree with you.  I did read elsewhere in the forum about some issues with the Seagate 2TB drives I am using, but a few folks say they "work fine" without listing any speeds or specs. 

 

I'm currently clearing 6 drives and will run some other tests.  I also will be picking up a loaner gigabit switch from a colleague to see if it for some reason lies there as it's the only common element left between the multiple hardware configurations I've tested on.

 

Thanks for your insight.

 

 

I copied at 40 Meg Bytes/sec from a Seagate LP 2T. drive to my windows desktop. I have three switches between the two machines. You should be able to achieve at least those rates.

Thanks ohlwiler.  That makes me feel better about buying 6 of them

Well - completely stumped.  Swapped out the switch with a Cisco 24-Port 10/100/1000 Gigabit Smart Switch and speeds are actually the same as before.  For a brief period there I was getting 25-27 Mb/se down but it went back to 15-16 Mb/sec. 

 

While I can stream compressed BluRay MKv files at these speeds, I tried to stream an uncompressed ISO and it failed miserably as you can imagine. 

 

Just for fun I installed Ubuntu on the same box, same NIC, same hard drive I'm testing with and did both a test with SMB and FTP.  Guess what...  45 Meg a sec.  Same hardware, different OS.  All things point to unRAID and not the hardware.  I even tried the new 5.0 b2.  Nice new interface, same terrible performance.

 

If anyone has any other idea, I'd love to try it, otherwise it appears I might be back to a conventional RAID-5 set up which really sucks.

Has anyone else tried the same experiment:  Same hardware, different *nix install, different results? 

 

Anyone with any other ideas or shall I consider this thread dead, everyone scratching their heads?

I feel for you . It looks like you have tried pretty much everything. The only thing I can think of is perhaps something is corrupted in the initial UnRaid install. When you tried 5.0, did you wipe clear the Flash drive and then install, or did you do an upgrade?

 

I have no problem streaming uncompressed bluray mkvs over the network. Though I haven't tested max throughput, XBMC tells me some movies are streaming at 40Mb/s without a hiccup...

 

Other thought, though longshot: Perhaps the flash drive has issues? Have you tried a completely different drive?...

I feel for you . It looks like you have tried pretty much everything. The only thing I can think of is perhaps something is corrupted in the initial UnRaid install. When you tried 5.0, did you wipe clear the Flash drive and then install, or did you do an upgrade?

 

I have no problem streaming uncompressed bluray mkvs over the network. Though I haven't tested max throughput, XBMC tells me some movies are streaming at 40Mb/s without a hiccup...

 

Other thought, though longshot: Perhaps the flash drive has issues? Have you tried a completely different drive?...

It will not be the flash drive. It is completely un-involved once you have booted into unRAID unless you are starting/stopping/configuring the array.

 

The huge difference between your other OS and unRAID might be the NIC driver.  What driver did ubuntu use?  Which one is being used by unRAID.  Other than that, the differences should not be that great when reading from the array unless the array is doing something else causing a bottleneck in your server.  (parity being calculated on large number of disks on PCI bus might cause the slower performance)

Anyone with any other ideas or shall I consider this thread dead, everyone scratching their heads?

 

Had you tried to disable all on-board SATA and move disks to the add-on Silicon image controller?

 

Dec  7 09:54:25 BIGHOSS kernel: scsi0 : sata_nv

Dec  7 09:54:25 BIGHOSS kernel: scsi5 : sata_via

Dec  7 09:54:25 BIGHOSS kernel: scsi8 : sata_sil

 

Yes.  I formatted the USB stick when I went to 5.0 b2.

 

I'm using Ubuntu 10.10 as the test. 

 

@GK20 - I have NOT tried that actually.  I also have a VIA based card in there as well I have not pulled.  Maybe it's the three different SATA chipsets playing havok with unRAID. 

 

Does unRAID use Ubuntu?  Maybe it is a driver issue.

mikechy,

 

I don't know at this point how commited you are to unRAID. If you still are, I have a couple of suggestions:

 

I just reread through the entire thread and a couple of things struck me. You refer to your read speeds as 25 Mb/s. I read this as mega bits per second. If in fact you are referring to mega bytes per second I am used to the notation MB/s. BluRay has a maximum bit rate of around 50 Mbits/s. This is 6.25 MB/s, which you appear to be seeing.

 

I would grab two of your 2T Seagate drives and assign one as disk1 and the second as disk2. Do not assign a parity disk. (you can wipe out any earlier configuration data and start fresh by issuing an "initconfig" from the console. After refreshing the web console you can assign disks as you wish.)

 

Copy a large file (10+ gigabytes) to disk1.

Copy that same file from disk1 to disk2 (not over the network)

Copy from disk1 to your desktop.

 

I just did this same exercise with my test server and achieved the following using 1T WD EACS drives:

 

Copy from desktop to disk1 - 60 MBytes/sec (Teracopy)

Copy from disk1 to disk2 - 61 MBytes/sec (Midnight Commander)

Copy from disk1 to your desktop - 43MBytes/sec (Teracopy)

 

My test sever has a Supermicro C2SEE that uses a Realtek ethernet chip. Interesting to see the degradation in read speeds, but not like what you are reporting.

 

I also tried the last test with my main unRAID server which uses an Intel ethernet chip. I achieved about the same read speeds.

 

 

Does unRAID use Ubuntu?  Maybe it is a driver issue.

 

No, Slackware

 

Silicon image chipset/driver is known to be solid in unRAID community

ohlwiler:  I am still commited to making unRAID work for me.  It will even at the slower speeds because I am converting  all of my Bluray ISOS to COMPRESSED MKV's which I have tested to stream just fine.  I would love to keep some of them as ISO's however, which if your post is correct, even getting 20MB+ should work.

 

I do mean mega BYTES, I appologize for the confusion as I see now that I am using the wrong abbreviation. 

 

Here's currently what I have configured:

 

the ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (4 NVidia SATA and 4 SIL SATA on board)

Intel 10/100/1000 Pro NIC (shut OFF the two on board NICS)

4 GIG RAM

(disk1) One Seagate ST3500630AS 500 G  (Running off of the NVIDIA SATA.  ALL OTHERS SHUT OFF IN BIOS)

(disk2) One Seagate LP ST32000542AS 2TB (Running off of the NVIDIA SATA.  ALL OTHERS SHUT OFF IN BIOS)

 

NO parity drive is set up.  Here's the results.  I even copied internally both directions to check the read/write of each HD.

 

BTW.  Didn't realized Midnight Commander came on unRAID.  NICE!

 

 

 

Really clutching at staws here but what about your router? As I've said before, I'm no sort of expert but there is something nagging at the back of mind about router configuration or something. 

Just to chip in.

 

I also tried an ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe board. I attempted to preclear a 2TB WDEARS drives and discovered that no matter which of the 8 SATA ports I used the preclear script was only achieving 15Mbps on the READ stages. The WRITE stages were within tolerance at 85-95Mbps.

 

I believe this rules out the network as a factor as the CAT5 cable was not plugged in while I was preclearing directly from the terminal.

 

TBH I didn't faff about with it long and switched to an Abit-NFM2 board for the preclearning. On this board I was able to preclear 2 drives simultaneously at over 100Mbps both READ and WRITE.

 

Dan

@Yannis.  I've tried two different gigabit switches.  I have not removed the router from the mix since traffic, I assume, wouldn't be hitting it once it hits the switch.

 

@DaniloSilva - Very interesting.  I precleared four drives at once on the A8N board (using the NVidia Sata ports). I was getting 90 MB/Sec + during all stages on the two Seagate LP drives and 70 MB/Sec + on the older drives I was doing. Also tested a drive to drive copy above that would seem to show that the read speeds for both are ok.  Your experience however would definitely seem to point to something odd going on with the SATA ports on this mobo. 

 

Last week I moved the unRAID setup to another Asus mobo with similar performance results.  I believe the chipset on the other Asus board was nVIDIA nForce4 on the Northbridge.

 

I have another gigibit switch on it's way that was for another use but I'm going to try it out just for giggles.

 

I've already started to move my collection to the two drives I have in place, so I've made the commitment to use unRAID.  I just might be buying a new mobo.

 

 

NO parity drive is set up.  Here's the results.  I even copied internally both directions to check the read/write of each HD.

 

I think those results show that the fault lies with the network. 21 MB/Sec is also fast enough to stream a BluRay. How spikey is your transfer if you monitor the Networking tab of Windows Task Manager? I suspect you are seeing some pauses if your playback fails for BluRay images.

@ohlwiler - I was monitoring the network while streaming just last night and I did notice there were spots where the network throughput would drop sharply for 5-10 seconds.  At first I assumed it was just buffering but playback did skip slightly.  I was using XMBC for playback in this case.

 

The fact that I had issues on the other system would also point to some kind of network issue going in one direction.  I suppose it could be possible that the Cisco switch I borrowed was either faulty or because it's older like the one I have, has some older or buggy TCP implementation.  The switch that should be here this week is a brand new Netgear 24 port managed switch.  I'm crossing my fingers.

 

Thanks everyone for feedback.  The unRAID community is definitely one of  the reasons I'm using this product.

@Yannis.  I've tried two different gigabit switches.  I have not removed the router from the mix since traffic, I assume, wouldn't be hitting it once it hits the switch.

 

snip.......

 

Yeh, you'd think so. However, there are some flaky things that can happen withg routers. I'm thinking along the lines of something like application sharing (torrents and what not) which can be configured on the router. Routers can often "remember" mac addresses so if you use a mobo which was previously used for something else on the network, the router might "think" it is still being used for that application, and not the new unRaid server. I probably haven't explained that very well and as I've said, I'm no expert so could be talking crap, but as you've tried everything else, it is just a thought.

For better or for worse I just purchased a key so I'm in

 

I've read enough accounts of decent speeds to know it's something in the hardware mix I have here and not unRAID itself. 

 

I'll pull the router and test.  At this point, it's one of the few common denominators in the environment.

You also might try running a port scanner on your whole network - something like Nmap maybe.

 

 

Hey if you do ever figure this out then please let me know.

 

In principle that Mobo is perfect for unRAID - 8 SATA ports, 2 PCI-E 16x slots and 2 PCI-E 1x slots.

 

Incidentally I installed Win7 on my board for test purposes and it achieves excellent LAN R/W performance so I think it's likely an unRIAD incompatibility at this point.

If I ever do pinpoint it, I definitely will post and update to this thread.

 

I've actually used this model mobo in several builds both for workstation as well as file server and it's an OUTSTANDING motherboard.  I figured it would be a winner for unRAID considering the 8 x SATA and the fast slots.  They still sell for $150 + online.

It screams on both.

 

 

Third time is a charm!!!

 

Swapped out the Cisco 10/100/1000 switch for a NetGear GSM7224 24-port Gigabit Managed Switch and my this has seemed to solve the problem!  Not sure why the NIC drivers for unRAID had such a problem with those other two switches but this one it seems to like.  Now I have to order another one for the job this one was supposed to go to

 

I'm now geting 75-80 MB UP (No parity installed yet) and 35-38 DOWN!

 

Hallelujah! All is right with the world now...

 

Thanks everyone for the time and suggestions. 

Hurrah!!!

 

It's a Festive-Time Miracle!!

 

 

Congrats Mikechy! It's great to see perseverance pay off!

 

DB.