unRAID Array Performance

[Taddeusz]

On Thanksgiving while we were watching the game I noticed that when I copy a file over the network to the array while SageTV is recording from an HDHR the video starts breaking up. I probably would have never noticed this had I not been watching "live" tv while copying these large multi-gigabyte files across the network.

I do have a cache drive but I noticed that it only gets used if a file doesn't already exist in the destination. If a file with the same name already exists on the array unRAID will put replace the file on the array rather than writing the new file to the cache and deleting the old file from the array. I'm guessing this prevents the case of the same named file simultaneously existing on both the cache and array.

Not sure if this might be a problem with my hardware? It is a little older. But my main drive controller is an LSI 9211-8i. Any ideas what could be causing this?

[BobPhoenix]

Can't really say on your problem. It should be possible with out my solution: But what you are getting is why on unRAID/SageTV docker I went with a similar formula I used when I had an ESXi host and an unRAID v5 VM and a Windows SageTV VM. I had recording drives for the Windows instance on a controller passed through to the Windows VM. For the SageTV docker I have separate recording drives from the cache and/or array drives and if I can swing it on a separate controller from the main array. Then when the recording drive(s) are full I move the recordings en-mass (12TB often) to my unRAID servers if I want to keep them - which is most everything except news that I record.

[Taddeusz]

I need to do some more specific testing but I'm not entirely sure that the storage is the problem. I just need time to do the testing. Yesterday I disabled NIC offloading so I need to figure out if that changed anything.

I say this because there wasn't a problem until the throughput all of a sudden increased from around 75MB/s to about 113MB/s. The larger value is about the maximum throughput of gigabit ethernet. I'm not sure what's causing the throughput to all of a sudden increase or why receiving from two sources doesn't seem to be managed properly?