#413 Slow tranfer between SATA disks

[Ian Ellis]

I had FreeNAS setup on a system with a Western Digital Caviar GP 1TB drive connected to a Silicon Image 3112 SATA RAID controller (but not in RAID) on a Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard.

Everything was great except when I tried to copy the files from that drive to an identical one hooked up to the same controller to make a backup. The first attempt resulted in the system rebooting itself. At that point I downgraded the system from 0.69b2 to 0.686.4 and hooked to system up to a monitor. Then I tried again, but this time I saw that there was some sort of write error. I was unable to reproduce the problem after that. Reformatting the destination drive, rebooting the system, unmounting and re-mounting both drives all resulted in similar behavior from then on. The copy would go unbearably slowly (it took several minutes to transfer 1GB) and sometimes the system would hand for minutes at a time or simply hard-lock during the copy.

I have managed to determine that this is a software, not a hardware issue. I booted from an Ubuntu LiveCD and formatted the destination drive ext3. When I used Ubuntu to perform the copy it went much faster, transferring approximately 1GB every 20s.

Regretfully, aside from more configuration information, this is all I will be able to provide. The server is for use in my dad's office, and he needs it running soon. So, I am setting it up with Ubuntu server running eBox right now to see if that works.

[Franck Bourdonnec]

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Hello,
you don't tell how you made the copy!

From the NAS console with 'cp' or similar tools.
From a remote station playing with some sort of 'copy/paste' mouse click from share to share ?

If it is from console (slow transfert), lot of potential networking problems are eliminated.
It not, you must try from console to cut the problem.

Franck

[Ian Ellis]

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Hey,

Sorry about that. I used "cp -Rp" (so no verbose output, I know that can majorly slow things down) via ssh. I checked the status of the copy using "du -s," sometimes with the "-h" flag, in the destination folder. Since I thought the "du" command might slow things down a bit, I did leave the copy alone for several minutes at times before re-issuing the command.

I don't think it matters, but the install was the "embedded" type on a USB flash drive.

--Ian