Unable to execute two actions at once


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Hey guys,
I have been having a small issue with my Unraid share since I first set it up and I have just recently gotten to looking into it. The issue comes in the form of not being able to do more than one thing at once when accessing it from my windows 10 laptop. As an example, if I am copying or moving a file to the share/network drive I cannot rename a file at the same time, or even open the right click menu. RMB clicking on a file just gives a spinning wheel and once the copy/move is done, the menu pops up and everything is back to normal. I can still navigate the folder structure but it is noticably slower.

I am unsure if this is a specific problem or just goes under the general umbrella of "My server/share is slow". Regardless I would greatly appriciate any tips you might have on how I could improve this as I have had a poke around the internet but this(this being "Network drive slow speed windows 10") seems to be such a general question that there are 100 different solutions out there, some of which seems to just be flipping random settings or downloading and running proprietary software to solve the issue.

The general setup I have going is 4, 2TB western digital blue hard drives and 1, 250GB western digital nvme ssd as cache. I have four shares, running a windows VM and running a plex docker. According to both my router statistics and the unraid dash it should be running a 1000 Mbps link to the router from the tower. My laptop is connected over wifi though.

If there is anything I've left out that you'd need to give a more accurate diagnosis, please tell me, I am still not very expirienced in this field.
Thanks for the read!

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I have a very high powered system with 32GB of memory and 12 core i7 processor and when the array is copying files or performing any functions I can definitely see a slow down on anything I try to do. Even if it's just browsing the GUI. Forget when downloaded files are being unrarred, that will almost stop me from even tapping into Plex and watching a direct stream. And from looking at the dashboard with all the stats, everything looks pretty. Lots of memory left, plenty of CPU power left. It just happens pooling a bunch of mechanical drives that basically have been around for 20 years without much "this will change everything" moments still ends up to be the old school hard drive speeds and limitations. Bless the SSD. 

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5 hours ago, opentoe said:

I have a very high powered system with 32GB of memory and 12 core i7 processor and when the array is copying files or performing any functions I can definitely see a slow down on anything I try to do. Even if it's just browsing the GUI. Forget when downloaded files are being unrarred, that will almost stop me from even tapping into Plex and watching a direct stream. And from looking at the dashboard with all the stats, everything looks pretty. Lots of memory left, plenty of CPU power left. It just happens pooling a bunch of mechanical drives that basically have been around for 20 years without much "this will change everything" moments still ends up to be the old school hard drive speeds and limitations. Bless the SSD. 

Shiiiiiiiiit, so essentially, upgrade to full SSD server or suffer the slowdowns when copying?
Rip my wallet...

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4 hours ago, Underscoreus said:

Shiiiiiiiiit, so essentially, upgrade to full SSD server or suffer the slowdowns when copying?
Rip my wallet...

IOWait lag is unavoidable, you can only try reducing the impact.

Have an SSD array is one way to do it but you don't quite need to go that far.

  • Have fast HDD will help. Those 20-year-old / 2TB HDD are incredibly slow. Try to phase them out of your server by upgrading to fewer large capacity drives. At the very least, it reduces the number of points of failure in the server.
  • Keep the HDD spin up (set spin down timer to never). Waiting for drives to spin up will 100% of the time cause lag.
  • Turn on turbo write.
  • Pass through an (additional) NVMe SSD to your VM using the PCIe method (i.e. like a GPU) and use it as boot drive.
  • Watch out is drives that are on their way out also will cause lag.

 

Also which WD NVMe? The SN500 is DRAM-less and thus slow.

 

 

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5 hours ago, testdasi said:
  • Have fast HDD will help. Those 20-year-old / 2TB HDD are incredibly slow. Try to phase them out of your server by upgrading to fewer large capacity drives. At the very least, it reduces the number of points of failure in the server.
  • Keep the HDD spin up (set spin down timer to never). Waiting for drives to spin up will 100% of the time cause lag.
  • Turn on turbo write.
  • Pass through an (additional) NVMe SSD to your VM using the PCIe method (i.e. like a GPU) and use it as boot drive.
  • Watch out is drives that are on their way out also will cause lag.

 

Also which WD NVMe? The SN500 is DRAM-less and thus slow.

 

 

  • I can't speak to how old the technology behind the HDD's are if thats what you are reffering to when taking about 20 year old drives, all I can say is that I bought them new (because I really do not trust used drives) from a store 6 months ago.
  • Assuming the setting you are talking about is "Spin down delay" then yup, got it set to never. Kinda worries me about drive longevity, but I hope they won't just drop dead after a year...
  • Cool, did not know about turbo write, thanks. I assume that they have not yet implimented the auto function yet?
  • I would if I knew how. As it is I can't even pass through a normal gpu to my VM's.
  • I don't think these drives should be on their way out. They are only 6 months old. I guess they could be bad but I don't think they are.
  • This is the serial number for the ssd, don't think its the SN500 but I might be wrong: WDC WDS250G1B0C-00S6U0. Essentially just the result of me trying to get an NVME SSD kind of on the cheap to use as a cache device.
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13 hours ago, Underscoreus said:

Shiiiiiiiiit, so essentially, upgrade to full SSD server or suffer the slowdowns when copying?
Rip my wallet...

I'll send you my address or bitcoin address so you can send me the cash. Once I get the funds, I'll start ditching out the mechanical drives and only use SSD. By the way, I have 82TB. Using SSD only would be impossible right now. Also my controller cards do not support the TRIM function.

 

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On 3/1/2020 at 3:41 AM, Underscoreus said:

I have been having a small issue with my Unraid share since I first set it up and I have just recently gotten to looking into it. The issue comes in the form of not being able to do more than one thing at once when accessing it from my windows 10 laptop. As an example, if I am copying or moving a file to the share/network drive I cannot rename a file at the same time, or even open the right click menu. RMB clicking on a file just gives a spinning wheel and once the copy/move is done, the menu pops up and everything is back to normal. I can still navigate the folder structure but it is noticably slower.

This is normal. I get acceptable delays on my system when doing something heavy like sw transcoding during Emby streaming or when I transfer files + browse the filesystem but I'm accessing my server over a VPN, so the latency is kinda expected. But the copy + rename also depends on what you are accessing. If its going to different drives, its more likely to succeed particularly if opne operation is to the cache drive and another to the array.

 

Your laptop over wifi is really slow the transfer, but you should have decent performance still as the system won't be saturated. unless for some reason your cache drive can't get the max thru put possible for it.

 

Best performance improvement I can suggest is to have a decent amount of RAM 8GB upwards for basic caching by the Unraid OS.

Another is just swapping out your drives for higher performant drives - I'm currently using a mix of Toshiba N300 and Seagate Archive SMRs (8TBs) and get 180-230MB/s R/W on each. (Specs in my sig)

 

I don't upload to the server much, so my cache drive is more for running torrents - keeping the array spun down and minimizing parity writes. and I use 2 unassigned SSDs for container appdata, Emby metadata and VMs

 

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