I have 2x20TB, 7x8TB, and 1x6TB spinners and 3x500GB SSDs, so a typical RAID setup isn’t really possible. I’m not buying any more hard drives for awhile.
I switched to unRaid from Windows/Drivepool/Snapraid because. Well I don’t really know why, wanted to try something new. Wish I had started with the trial instead of paying for the license, but hindsight is 20/20 as they say. Thankfully it wasn’t too expensive.
My big issue is just write speeds. I run sabnzb/sonarr/radarr/plex, and I’ve got everything configured properly, but sabnzb can barely handle 20 mb/s even though my 1gig cable isp pulls 100 mb/s.
I actually pulled the parity drive out of my array just to get better speeds because with parity you’re automatically 1/2-ing your disk write i/o. With WD shucks 5400 rpm’s I should be able to hit over 100 mb/s writes, but with parity plus sabnzb repairing I’m lucky to get 40 mb/s. It’s just abysmal.
I never had any slowdowns using windows and drivepool. Even during repair + download operations. Obviously snapraid is on demand so parity doesn’t play into things.
I have tried the cache drives, but then it just fills up and you’re in an even worse place where you have to wait on mover to move the data from the ssd cache to the array, but if you’re still downloading then you’re trying to download to the array and repair on the array too. That’s even slower than if you don’t have the cache setup.
I guess if I was downloading a tiny amount everyday it wouldn’t be such a big deal, but I’m trying to catch up on the time sonarr/radarr weren’t running while I moved my existing data to unRaid, as well as some new keywords for downloading x265 and upping some 720p content to 1080p. So think about a long, multi TB, queue in sabnzb.
So now I’m in the boat of thinking, maybe I should go back to windows. I’ve read about mergeFS and snapraid, but it seems like a fairly high learning curve when Windows worked fine for years. I wish I had never switched.
Am I missing something? I have reconstruct write “on” and took out the parity drive, and it does alright downloading, but a repair during download still brings it to a crawl. Is there something better out there I’m not thinking of?
Any tips would be appreciated.
There’s nothing to it, except to be patient. Unless you start messing with cache (which can suck if you’re transferring a lot and running out of space) you aren’t making it faster, also I somehow suspect you might have some SMRs too with the small drives…
unraid is really great for the (unique and I don’t know why, as this is the only one that makes sense for a lot of users) arrangement with the drives being separated so you actually can’t lose more data than the drives you’ve lost, but it comes with its own countless quirks. Not the speed in itself, which is a consequence of this arrangement, plus of doing a lot of stuff in fuse (user space), but all the arbitrary choices: weird Slackware with bugs that don’t get fixed for years even if they were fixed everywhere else, boot only from USB and DRMed, mostly everything is containers and plugins, maintained by third parties and installed on your own risk, as opposed to regular stuff you install from a repository maintained by any major Linux distribution and so on.
Overall I’d say be a little patient, and stick with it, leave the parity on, you’d be happy you have it. Also you can’t just enable/disable it, I’m not even sure about the process of doing that but I’m sure if you touch it in any way it’ll have to do a whole re-sync, which would really kill your performance. Maybe after all this was a contributor to your lack of speed, some parity check/sync which is actually reading all drives and checking or writing the parity?