I have 2x20TB, 7x8TB, and 1x6TB spinners and 3x500GB SSDs, so a typical RAID setup isn’t really possible. I’m not buying any more hard drives for awhile.

I switched to unRaid from Windows/Drivepool/Snapraid because. Well I don’t really know why, wanted to try something new. Wish I had started with the trial instead of paying for the license, but hindsight is 20/20 as they say. Thankfully it wasn’t too expensive.

My big issue is just write speeds. I run sabnzb/sonarr/radarr/plex, and I’ve got everything configured properly, but sabnzb can barely handle 20 mb/s even though my 1gig cable isp pulls 100 mb/s.

I actually pulled the parity drive out of my array just to get better speeds because with parity you’re automatically 1/2-ing your disk write i/o. With WD shucks 5400 rpm’s I should be able to hit over 100 mb/s writes, but with parity plus sabnzb repairing I’m lucky to get 40 mb/s. It’s just abysmal.

I never had any slowdowns using windows and drivepool. Even during repair + download operations. Obviously snapraid is on demand so parity doesn’t play into things.

I have tried the cache drives, but then it just fills up and you’re in an even worse place where you have to wait on mover to move the data from the ssd cache to the array, but if you’re still downloading then you’re trying to download to the array and repair on the array too. That’s even slower than if you don’t have the cache setup.

I guess if I was downloading a tiny amount everyday it wouldn’t be such a big deal, but I’m trying to catch up on the time sonarr/radarr weren’t running while I moved my existing data to unRaid, as well as some new keywords for downloading x265 and upping some 720p content to 1080p. So think about a long, multi TB, queue in sabnzb.

So now I’m in the boat of thinking, maybe I should go back to windows. I’ve read about mergeFS and snapraid, but it seems like a fairly high learning curve when Windows worked fine for years. I wish I had never switched.

Am I missing something? I have reconstruct write “on” and took out the parity drive, and it does alright downloading, but a repair during download still brings it to a crawl. Is there something better out there I’m not thinking of?

Any tips would be appreciated.