[flymods]

I definately agree that pure NAS solutions might have a speed increase but it still feels high to be hitting the top of the gigabit Ethernet specifications with Samba consistently. But as someone who's only halfway through moving to gigabit on my home network, I can't personally say whether your benchmarks for FreeNAS are high, nor your Unraid low, just that they feel high to me. I also have my download box auto transfer completed files onto my Unraid box, so I don't ever see a transfers progress, let alone get to rate how fast it's moving.

I do have to ask though, were your tests conducted with a cache drive or not? That increased the transfer speed even on my 1/2 and 1/2 network.



Which entirely removes RAID from the equation, in both any speed increase, or any redundancy.



I back up all my important personal data with DR too, but for space-expensive things like media which technically are replaceable, having a parity disk is a suitable level for me. To me, the worst case scenario with Unraid is that I will lose the data on 2 of my disks (2nd failing before I realise the first has gone), not the whole array like a RAID solution, which I can them reacquire over time. Best case scenario is a complete rebuild from the parity disk after I catch a failed drive. But no, thankfully, I haven't yet had to rebuild my array from the parity disk.



I'll take some screenshots of the latest beta for you tonight so you can see the improvements I'm talking about in case you haven't already. Not for any reason than that I totally agreed with you on the first impressions but after discovering the stable didn't have kernel support for USB3 (which my IcyBox caddy uses) I was forced to go beta. It feels much more like a paid-for product now, rather than a childish attempt or an afterthought.

Apologies to everyone for the massive off-topic, and I would like to note I have no ties to Unraid beyond being a recent user (6 months or so).

I will check out the beta no need to send screen shots but thanks for offering

I don't really know what else to say about the network speeds to make you believe that what I'm acheiving is normal for most NAS solutions. The I/O of several disks together is always going to be higher than individual disks and after that point its just presenting the data over tcp/ip at whatever speed your network will support (in my case gig). I use my server for more than just media and ive benchmarked it from windows, linux, and mac and its consistantly over 100 MB/s but I built my main share with 3 GB/s 1TB hard drives for better performance and I/O, my backup raid group is redudant and backs up my main share twice a month in the middle of the night using rsync which is ideal since it only captures the differences since the last sync.

I would really love to hear from someone thats had drive failure with unraid. I want to know how long it took to rebuild and be back up to 100% including replacing the bad drive. The reason I say this is because most software type raid solutions are crap and recovering is usually not easy. This is why most companies use a hardware dedicated raid card for redudancy not software (obviously not an option for most home users).