I am preparing a couple of disks for use in an Unraid storage server. Unraid uses a Slackware distribution and seem to prefer ReiserFS on the storage disks. I am planning to copy data from my other disks to my new WD20EARS on an Ubuntu10.4 system, and then install the disks in the Unraid server. The other hardware is the onboard SATA of an HP Pavillion 4660 (AMD board).The WD20EARS is connected to the first SATA hosta adapter. From specs it says chipset is NVIDIA GeForce 6150 LE Southbridge: nForce 430 (also called MCP51)
My problem is unexpectedly poor performance when copying data from a 1000 GB drive on the second SATA host adapter. A file copy starts off at 30MB/s and is rapidly decelerating to 20 MB/s, when I cancel after a minute or so. I was expecting far better performance on disk to disk copy. Using the Ubuntu disk utility to measure performance, I get a very (inverse)spiky performance graph. See the linked pic.
On the Unraid forums some people suggest the performance will increase (by 10-20%) if the Advanced Format jumper is set. I try to set a jumper on the pair closest to the SATA connector (7-8 by info on support site), then Ububtu does not see the drive after booting. This operation is made with no partition on the drive. It doesn’t even show up in the disk utility.
SHould the disk to disk performance be this low? Is there a reason for the performance graph to look like this? My other disks show a more level curve, like I would expect. And is there a reason why Ubuntu will not acknowledge this disk with the Advanced format jumper set. I am sort of disappointed and consider returning this disk to store…
Happy for any advice,
Lars Olof