Title says it all really. I currently have a 24 bay setup with 19 bays populated. my current setup is 

 

r7 1700

64gb RAM at default speed

nvidia p4000

hba lsi 9240 8i 

Expander RES2SV240

1GB NIC soon to be 10GB

 

Basically im looking to maximise my drive speeds as best i can. From reading other threads I was kinda leaning towards an expander upgrade to the RES2CV360 and use a dual link to the existing HBA, currently single link to the RES2SV240. Im just curious will the HBA be the bottleneck in this instance and should i upgrade it for best performance? Cheers in advance. 

 

 

unraid is not about a speed. what speed are you currently running and what you are expecting?

Its not so much about the speed.... as improving my personal experience within my home. Atm i am having slowdown viewing 4k content from my plex server while 2 to 3 others are watching from my server. This is direct play 4k content so i know its not a transcoding issue. Im essentially just trying to eliminate the bottlenecks which may be causing this. It may simply be the read speed of the drives are causing the issue but I just want to elimate the throughput of the drive access as a possible cause. 

Edited April 16, 20206 yr by tazire

There won't be any bottlenecks reading from a single disk, there will be during a parity check/ disk rebuild, but improving that won't resolve your problem.

Its not something i had noticed until this lockdown though... with more and more people accessing my plex server it seems the throughput of the HBA or expansion is possibly slowing down my experience. Just that with 2 or 3 people possibly reading data from 2 or 3 different drives at once it leaves less throughput for me to watch what i want. 

 

Im just wondering if the upgrade in expansion card and going to a dual link to the HBA will improve my experience?

You may load the play media in cache memory.

4 minutes ago, Benson said:

You may load the play media in cache memory.

How do you do this? Sorry never heard of this.

 

Unless you mean transcode to RAM which I already have setup. 

Edited April 16, 20206 yr by tazire

5 minutes ago, tazire said:

How do you do this? Sorry never heard of this.

I will clear (flush) all cache memory and then read whole file once. In your case, file must less than 64GB.

 

I always do that during watching movie, no disk need spinup.

Edited April 16, 20206 yr by Benson

I only have a very odd 4k file thats maybe more than that. But the other thing is this was never an issue for me prior to the lockdown. And the increase in people using my server. Its just the usage on the server seems to be slowing down my experience. So i was just trying to figure out if there is anything i can do to get everything back working seemlessly.

 

Without going to much into the problem my main question is would a change in expansion card and change to dual link to the HBA improve the throughput and possibly my experience? This is very much a hobby for me too so i enjoy all the upgrading and learning about this stuff too. I mean i really have no real reason to upgrade to 10Gb networking but again i just enjoy all that kinda stuff.

 

Anyway thanks for the input either way. 

Edited April 16, 20206 yr by tazire

1 minute ago, tazire said:

Without going to much into the problem my main question is would a change in expansion card and change to dual link to the HBA improve the throughput and possibly my experience?

Current HBA with single link is still good for 2GB/s+, unlikely that you need more than that except during a parity check/disk rebuild, you can go to dual link and it will double the available bandwidth, but very unlikely to make any different for file streaming.

You don't need change the HBA, but dual link would help mainly in write performance ( construction write ) and parity operation, as @johnnie.black said, no help for streaming case in general.

Perfect thanks for the definitive answer. I might try dual link with my current setup as I believe I have unoccupied backplanes I can just disconnect just to see what if any difference I feel In other uses. 

 

I have a few other things I'll be doing separately to try improve my streaming experience in the mean time. 

 

Thanks again