Future Unifiguy here, this was obviously copying to my C: on Windows. When I transfer to my secondary drive NVMe, there’s a lot less ups and downs with transfer speeds. I’m going to leave this here just to note how stupid I am, but if anyone has these issues then basically write to a drive that doesnt host your operating system and you will be fine.
I’m running the system in RAID5 for now, I do want to try RAID6 but the performance deltas do not look attractive, and the UNAS Pro seems to indicate that all the drives will be formatted and I’d lose all my data. I dont want to take the time to rebuild the array, and retransfer everything from backups, so we’re stuck on RAID5 for now. See below for the original post.
…below is my stupidity reigning
I know I am skipping forward here, but as I was thinking about what I had just written about the Aggregation Switch and felt I had to note the inconsistancy of the transfer speeds on the UNAS Pro i.e. that there is a product that does what it needs to do flawlessly, and there’s a product that only does what it does ‘well enough’
Just for note, my UNAS Pro is populated with 7x Ironwolf 4TB spinning rust drives. They are not NVMe drives, they are not large capacity SSD drives. My expectations are tempered through experience that the drives will not saturate the full 10GB connection.
I know this. I expected this. I bought the system knowing this. Calm down.
Also, as I’ll discuss later, I bought the UNAS Pro as JUST A NAS. Not a server, not a docker or VM/container platform, just as something to hold my ethereal 1s and 0s. I believe what it does, it does well, however the practicality of this function leaves something to be desired. So…
What I have found is that copying data TO the UNAS Pro is much more consistant than copying FROM the UNAS Pro. Let me give an example.
I have a movie, The Substance, at 15.5GB it’s the largest movie that I, er, found on my Plex movie drive and you can see that the transfer speed FROM the UNAS Pro is up and down. Indeed, the max is around 430MB per second, but then it tanks to 0MB per second before rising and falling until completion.
Using this as an example, I then moved some of the files from my Steam folder for Titanfall 2 to the UNAS Pro and you can see a much more consistant transfer speed.
Moving these files back from the UNAS Pro to another folder on my PC and we’re back to the same ups and downs, peaks and troughs as seen before.
Often, again, tanking down to 0MB per second on transfer speed.
I dont know what the issues are here, ultimately when it’s fast, it’s fast. But it’s the inconsistancy that bothers me. I am copying these from the RAID array on the UNAS to a NVMe drive on my PC. My network is connected directly from an SFP+ port on my PC to an SFP+ port on the Aggregation Switch.
I can only hope that this gets better over time, or, that I spend more time investigating what the issue is with replacement cables etc. Ultimately I think it’s just the caching/write speed of the RAID array of the mechanical drives. The UNAS Pro has ZERO caching ability with an SSD or NVMe so I think I’m just stuck with it as-is for the meantime. Will have to see what the future holds.