Need Advice On UNRAID Speed & Cache Drive.

[AKS_Adrian]

Hello everyone, 

 

I have a UNRAID server which I have had for around a year and a half now, which is used for storing files and running a few docker containers (Plex, Lancache, Tailscale).

 

The hardware is as follows:
CPU: Ryzen 5 2600.
Memory: 40GB DDR4 2400MHz (2x16GB Corsair Vengeance, 1x8GB Corsair Vengence).
Motherboard: Gigabyte B450M DS3H-CF.
Storage: 4x12TB Seagate IronWolf HDDs (1 as Parity).
Cache Drive: Samsung 860 PRO SATA SSD. (Yeah... I know)
 

I want to upgrade this cache drive, as the transfer speeds to and from the server are still awful, and this is not a trustworthy drive to be used; It was something I threw in after the fact, as writing to the array without the SSD was painfully slow. I now have some money to spend on a replacement cache drive.

 

Would putting an NVMe drive in the system as a cache drive fix my speed woes, or have I made a mistake somewhere in my hardware and/or software choice and am doomed to slow transfer speeds?
Do I need to switch to something else that would use a RAID system? Would that even make a difference?

 

Thank you for your time.

[Kilrah]

How slow are we talking?

 

What network connection are you using? If it's the motherboard's gigabit port then that will be your limit and the existing cache drive is plenty good for that already.

[AKS_Adrian]

28 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

How slow are we talking?

 

What network connection are you using? If it's the motherboard's gigabit port then that will be your limit and the existing cache drive is plenty good for that already.

I'm using the motherboard's gigabit port; I apologise for not mentioning that before.

 

When transferring a large MP4 file to my computer, Windows shows speeds between 1MB/s to 2.5MB/s.

When writing the same large mp4 file to the server, Windows shows speeds between 2MB/s to 3MB/s.

 

The network share between my desktop and my laptop is much faster than this, around 18MB/s.

[Kilrah]

Then that suggests something wrong with your network, you should be getting 100-110MB/s to both using wired gigabit.

[AKS_Adrian]

The server is connected to a Gigabit TP-Link switch (Similar to this one) which is connected to a TP-Link AX90 router.

My PC is connected to a different switch, the same model, which is connected to the router. The devices are physically on the opposite ends of the house.

I will try plugging both the server and my PC directly into the router to see if that makes a difference. In the meantime, is there anything else I should do?

[LIGISTX]

4 hours ago, AKS_Adrian said:

The server is connected to a Gigabit TP-Link switch (Similar to this one) which is connected to a TP-Link AX90 router.

My PC is connected to a different switch, the same model, which is connected to the router. The devices are physically on the opposite ends of the house.

I will try plugging both the server and my PC directly into the router to see if that makes a difference. In the meantime, is there anything else I should do?

Make sure all the switches are gigabit, make sure the Ethernet wires are all cat 5e or better, and make sure all devices are reading their connection as gigabit. You should easily be getting gigabit speeds. An SSD can write at 500 MBps which is 4000gigabit per second, a harddrive will do ~120, which is ~1gigabit. So even if your cache isn’t working right, your getting speeds indicative of a 100 megabit network which suggests a networking issue or an old switch or Ethernet cable somewhere in the chain.