Problems with a storage space

[macdaddy2012]

TLDR: I am creating a storage space of 5x 10tb drives to function as a DAS in single redundancy parity. The Storage space will mostly store large video files and I want to set the allocation unit size larger than 4k to speed up writes. Problem is, I'm getting abysmal write speeds on drives that can sustain ~250MB/s writes each. Write performance will quickly tank below 100MB/s and sometimes stall completely when either transferring a folder of mixed files or just simply a few large files.

 

Basic process is as follows

1: create a 5 drive pool using the GUI

2: use powershell to create the storage space with an interleave of 256k using 5 columns. This was done following this process.

 

https://wasteofserver.com/storage-spaces-with-parity-very-slow-writes-solved/

 

3: format the volume in disk management as NTFS AUS 512k (2x the interleave)

 

Get-Virtualdisk ... | fl

shows interleave as 262144 (256k?)

 

and "allocation unit size" as 1073741824 (which I believe is 1GB???) Why is this? I definitely didn't set that.

 

fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo

shows "bytes per cluster" as 524288 (is this the 512k AUS I set?)

 

however "bytes per sector" shows 4096

 

I also tried erasing the volume in disk management and formatting in powershell using the following

Get-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName ...| Get-Disk | Initialize-Disk -Passthru | New-Partition -AssignDriveLetter -UseMaximumSize | Format-Volume -FileSystem ntfs -AllocationUnitSize 524288

Assume I'm a total idiot and don't know what I'm doing, this is my first storage pool and I'm trying to figure it out. Should the "bytes per sector" be reading 4096? Should "allocation unit size" be reading 1GB???

I'm hoping for somewhere in the ballpark of 1GB/s writes on this storage pool, the 4 data drives should be capable of it in theory if the parity calculations don't take me out to lunch. Any help is appreciated.

 

-edit

Something I'm noticing watching write based file transfers, write throughput on the storage space will drop to zero, read activity from the source file will drop to zero, a few minutes will pass and then activity will resume. When looking at the storage space GUI, a drive will show a warning (with no explanation).  All 5 drives are in this enclosure:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08DLTKXCP?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details

 

Maybe a drive is getting disconnected for some reason? This thread indicates a power limit on the enclosure could be the problem

https://superuser.com/questions/1502759/windows-10-storage-space-keeps-getting-disconnected

But the enclosure I'm using has a 150w psu and the combined power draw of the drives is around 35w, nowhere close.

A reviewer notes the following:
"Good material, Nice enclosure if you intend to use each HDD individually but I don't recommend it in SW raid, especially in Linux. maybe that's the case with me only but each restart will give you a new dev id for my HDDs and a random drive will fail until the next restart"

Could this be causing an issue with storage spaces? The warning and file transfer problems appear specifically in the middle of a file transfer not on a restart. Haven't rigirously tested restarts yet but it doesn't seem too happy on restarts either.