Slow Duplication

[PJShots]

SYSTEM... HP Microserver N40L, Server 2008 R2, 4GB RAM, 2x2TB WD, 1x1TB WD, 1x2TB Hitachi.

 

When duplicating folders, drive pool is really slow (1GB per min in some cases). My disks are fine; can copy/paste data at 80MB/s. In Windows Server's resource monitor the files are going at 128Kbs sometimes. 

 

Anything I can try to speed things up. Also, is there a way to pause/stop it as despite the slow transfer speed, no cpu usage, it still drags on the system.

 

Trying to put folders back to 1xduplication now and its removing the 2nd copy, just as slow as applying it the first time round...

 

Thanks for the help; great program though but a bit thin on options.

 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

That's definitely not typical.  It should definitly transfer at faster speeds. But this could happen if it is copying a lot of small files (such as pictures). Otherwise, it should be copying at "normal" speeds.

 

 

I'm assuming you're using DrivePool 2.x, right?

If so, could you do this: http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_2.x_Log_Collection

[PJShots]

It was duplicating my music store, so about 20,000 files 4-30MB each I guess. I've stopped folder replication for now, as I'm awaiting another 2TB disk. I'll try again once its here and we'll see how it goes.

 

If it does slow again I'll post back with the info requested above. Thanks for the help.

[PJShots]

Hi again,

 

Uploaded a log for you.

 

It seems to still be slow. When using explorer to transfer files from anywhere its fine, but accessing files from the pool in applications is slow and the drivepool software has started 'Checking' my files again. I use the scanner also, which says all is healthy (scanned over night, so not the issue and has been disabled since)

 

Any help with this would be great, otherwise I might request a refund. Looks like a real good piece of software and I even tested it with better success in a virtual machine with Server 2012 R2, worked fine, but not on the box it needs to work on.

 

Thanks.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

PJShots,

 

Thanks for uploading the logs. 
We'll take a look at them and see if we can isolate the issue. 

 

 

But let me assure you, the duplication should definitely not be that slow. It should just about as fast as a normal file copy. 

[PJShots]

AFter doing much more reading on the net, I cam across an article about the drive cache bios option... It turns out that after having the server well over a year, the option was disabled. Never noticed it before and never had any issues with transfer rates before now.

 

However, turning this option on made a BIG difference. Drivepool duplicated 3.7GB (2 ISO files) in a couple of minutes. So, it seems that its a required setting for the HP Microserver.

 

I'll keep trying it out and hopefully it'll work fine now. Time will tell.

 

Thanks for the support, link to the article about cache is http://forums.freenas.org/threads/interesting-hdd-performance-issue-n40l-please-have-a-look.8432/ (apologies if links are not allowed, was just in case anyone else has this issue in future)

[Christopher (Drashna)]

PJShots,

 

Yeah, that would make a huge difference!

The specific issue is IDE vs AHCI, IIRC. And yes, the different it can make is such as that between night and day! 

In fact, AHCI is required for hotswap capability.

 

 

Also, I would recommend opening Device Manager, and making sure that Write Caching is enabled on each of the drives (especially the system disk). If it's not, you can see the same significant drop in performance. 
Also, there are usually two levels of write caching. The second one isn't recommended (and has a warning that you should definitely heed). The first one is the one you want checked.

 

 

 

 

And links are absolutely allowed. We don't have an issue with that (if we did, we'd block the ability outright). Just as long as they're not spammy, or excessive.