Now again, if you are looking for ultimate speed, you should instead be using NVMe or SSDs in cache, preferably 1TB drives at a minimum because they typically have larger on-board cache. However, you should know that this is currently not recommended by Unraid. The all Samsung SSD configuration is very promising, I have read from many different places on the internet that an all SSD array is the way to go, giving the best overall read and write performance. The Toshiba and LITEON NVMe drives both have Random Read and Write IOPS that are well above the 300K/200K mark, while the Samsung 860 Evo is at or below 90K. Which is exactly a problem we should expect when we are using an SSD with poor IOPS. Why is the Samsung SSD Parity configuration such a slow performance? Well it turns out the 860 Evo doesn’t have the best IOPS in the world. You should know that secure copy is not a great benchmarking tool but for our purposes it works fine. Each time a transfer takes place the results get written to a CSV file that we can later analyze. This script simply copies over our 45GB video file 41 times with a 30 second break in between each secure copy. This is the script I am using to execute the test. Rename or edit the script as necessary to not write over the CSV file that gets created Run the script for each of the Tests listed way aboveĪfter each test is done, delete all of the files out of the array in PNAS The steps to execute this test are simple. The only difference here is we will not be trying to fill the array to the brim but will be trying to do at least 41 transfers of the same video file in order to capture the total time and speed. The test setup is remarkably similar to the previous testing we did with “ All NVMe SSD Array in Unraid” where I will literally be borrowing the same script to do all of our write testing. Here is a very basic diagram to help build a mental image for you. I have set the MTU to be 9000, so we really shouldn’t have to worry about the network at this point. Our servers are both rocking 10GbE network adapters and we have a UniFi 10Gb Switch in the middle to reduce any network bottle necks. Here is the list of drives used for the current tests. For this test I landed on the somewhat lackluster 2TB Samsung 860 Evo TLC MZ-76E2T0B/AM SSD. I always like to start with hardware so we can get an idea of what all is being used to make these tests work. We are now ready to start setting the stage. Keep that in mind as you continue on downward. The variance in architectures alone can account for great speed increases or drastically slow performance. What you see here will not directly translate to all flash storage devices and that is because not all storage devices have the same architecture. I will be merging some of the information from the previous posts here.įirst and foremost, these tests only allow us to get a very rough idea of what to expect. I highly recommend checking out these two past posts that are similar in topic. If speed is your goal, you need NVMe cache drives 1TB or greater, especially if you plan to hit 1GBps.
Unraid setup cache drive how to#
Please note that we are not trying to achieve the fastest possible network performance, we already know how to do that. We are once again performing a simple test to observe some potential performance differences in different array configurations.