Storage Spaces seriously slow (6-10mb write speed)

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CokemonZ

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#251329 19-Jun-2019 11:53

Hi All,

I have been buying these: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/OImaster-4-Bays-2-5-inch-SATA-HDD-SSD-Hard-Drive-Mobile-Rack-Backplane-with-Key/32778843469.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.5e324c4dWmYtOK

and these: https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Portable-External-Photography-STDR5000100/dp/B01LZP2B23/ref=sr_1_3?crid=2FKYE9UVGT9JK&keywords=5tb+seagate+external+hard+drive&qid=1560901556&s=gateway&sprefix=5tb+seagate%2Caps%2C370&sr=8-3

And shelling them, and putting them in a super old workstation I have (Core 2 Quad 9400) running windows 10 pro 1803

I now have 8 drives of between 4 & 5tb and managing storage is getting to be a pain.

So I got a 10 tb external hdd to backup parts of my collection of data and wanted to build one large parity storage space.

It's mostly for reads, with a bit of writes as new collections come down the pipe.

However with 3 drives in a parity pool I am getting 6 - 10mb write speeds, whereas on a raw drive I will get between 90 & 110mb.

The setup is parity, with a simple ntfs formatted volume (not expandable/dynamic).

This is unusable. Any ideas?

The only thing I was thinking is that the physical sector size of my drives is 4096, whereas the logical is 512, but everything I've read says it only causes issues the other way, where logical is 4096 and physical is 512.

*edit a coupe of changes for accuracy

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#2260844 19-Jun-2019 12:45

Could look at a different product. I';ve been using drive bender for a number of years, similar concept. Came from WHS.

For other free options you could swap to an unraid....but that depends how good you are on linux. Drivebender will run on Windows 10

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mentalinc

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#2260849 19-Jun-2019 12:54

Drivepool is another option which doesn't format the disks, still just NTFS and contents are accessible outside the tool if required.

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CokemonZ

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#2260857 19-Jun-2019 13:06

Thanks for the suggestions.

Do you have a real world comparison, parity config speeds vs raw disk?

CokemonZ

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#2260858 19-Jun-2019 13:07

And not going Linux - just a bit too much outside my comfort zone

michaelmurfy

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#2260864 19-Jun-2019 13:35

CokemonZ: And not going Linux - just a bit too much outside my comfort zone

How come? UnRaid is very user friendly - https://unraid.net/

This, or FreeNAS would be better for you IMO. Plenty of guides, easy to use and can install apps onto their own containers.

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CokemonZ

1051 posts

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#2260874 19-Jun-2019 13:45

The machine is multi-purpose and I have no Linux experience.
It is a
Plex server
Also use camera sync to this
Sonarr machine
Radarr machine
File server for home pcs
Qbittorrent workhorse
Backblaze backups

I am just terrified of the amount of work that will need to go into setting it up on another os that I have no experience with.

I couldn't even get ipv6 working in my edge router - showing you my level of comfort with alternative systems.

CokemonZ

1051 posts

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#2260887 19-Jun-2019 13:56

So had a quick look at both drivepool and drive bender, and they look similar except drivebender is $10 more expensive and comes with the drive health monitor included.

Considering what I'm doing doesn't require duplication or backup the thought was storage spaces with parity would give me 'enough' redundancy. It seems both of these tools use duplication for any redundancy. is that correct?

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timmmay

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#2260903 19-Jun-2019 14:22

I use a storage spaces mirror across two internal disks on my i7 2600. Disk benchmark says I get 57MB/sec read and 58MB/sec write on a quick test.

CokemonZ

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#2260906 19-Jun-2019 14:27

Yeah- it seems to be parity that covers it into molasses

billgates

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#2260918 19-Jun-2019 14:39

The issue here is not Storage spaces. Your logical sector size should be matching your highest physical sector size in the disk pool. Change your storage space to 4K and it should resolve your issue.

Do whatever you want to do man.

CokemonZ

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#2260925 19-Jun-2019 14:53

So - how do I change it to 4k?

Even getting rid of the storage space and formatting the drive to ntfs with 4k blocks it still shows 512.

I have also tried formatting the storage space drive with ntfs at both 4k and 512 and had similar write results

Other deep dark parts of the internet say the opposite and the logical sector size is controlled by drive firmware - not something I can touch:

The drives are physically a 4k block storage, but the firmware in them is presenting the drive as 512 byte sectors, which is why you see a physical and logical sector size that are different. this is primarily for backwards compatibility with systems that don't recognize the 4k sector format.

The 8TB spindles drives that are 512e are the same way: 512e is the advanced format in which the physical sector size is 4,096 bytes, but the logical sector size emulates 512 bytes sector size.

There is no need to modify any settings on your system.

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1729635-windows-showing-4k-block-sector-size-should-be-512

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/178899/optimizing-logical-sector-size-for-physical-sector-size-4096-hdd

gbwelly

1243 posts

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#2260934 19-Jun-2019 14:59

billgates:

The issue here is not Storage spaces.

It kinda is. I have 5x 3.5" drives and 8th gen i7, and it tops out at 37MB/s write. It's not even CPU bound, it's something to do with their implementation of parity. The internet has plenty of people complaining about abysmal write performance when using parity vs mirroring.

CokemonZ

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#2260937 19-Jun-2019 15:07

yes - that's what I've been reading as well, 10mb writes is just too bad to be useable though - I didn't expect it to be this bad!

Would more drives improve it? There are only 3 in there at the moment, and I'm reluctant to go through the hassle of moving all my data around if its going to stay this poor. I could live with 35mb or so write speeds.

And that the sector issue is in reverse - it impacts performance when the physical sectors and smaller than the logical - not the other way around.

CokemonZ

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#2260941 19-Jun-2019 15:16

Also the OS appears to recognise these as 4k drives - I am sure this is not the issue:

richms

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#2260978 19-Jun-2019 17:16

There is a setting to say that its battery backed which when enabled will make it a crapload faster but you're at the risk of powerdowns losing your data. I turned it on for my space that I store media on since its not really a big issue when I am copying stuff onto it if it gets messed up if powered off part way thru since I can just restart it again.

Richard rich.ms

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