Windows 7 FastCopy

I had cause today to copy ~440GB of data between two drives on my Windows 7 VM. Both drives were assigned to the VM as PHY: devices and the OS had PV drivers installed but even so, the copy operation was painfully slow with speeds of less than 20 MB/s and an estimated copy time of 6 hours.

Without the time or inclination to troubleshoot why the transfer was so slow, I did a quick search for windows 7 fast copy and came across a tool called, handily enough, fastcopy.

I installed and fired it up and set it to do the same operation. It finished in 1.5 hours with an average speed of ~70MB/s. Will be using this for similar operations in future.

Now to figure out why the OS copy operation was dog slow...

Current SetUp

MediaServer8 + Expansion Chassis In-Situ

Following on from my post on putting in place an external expansion chassis, I'd ordered a few cables to make the set-up a little more workable.

Specifically, a DVI cable with a 90-degree connector on one end now allows me position the expansion board correctly in the external chassis so that all slots are now externally accessible. I've also installed an eSata backplane that has two Sata cables internally. This allows me connect two hard drives in the expansion chassis to the MediaServer8 eSata ports.

The photo above shows MediaServer* and the expansion chassis positioned in my attic. This location is close to the termination point for all cabling in the house (Cat5, Speakers, RF) as well as telephone/fibre entry points. It's all a little messy right now, I need to get some order on those cables!

Netrunner

One of my longer term goals has been to set up a general purpose workstation VM on MediaServer8. I've toyed with a few Linux variants but recently decided to try Netrunner. The 'rolling' version  is an ArchLinux distro with KDE based on Manjaro.

It was a bit fiddly to set up and get GPU passthrough working. This is not aided by the fact that the display does not switch on until very late in the boot process so unless running via VNC, you can't see what's going on.

A little coaxing and persuasion, however, combined with a good deal of patience paid dividends and I got a consistently reliable boot with GPU passthrough.

As an added bonus, I discovered that I can even connect two displays to the HD5450 card and both will be driven for an extended desktop.

unRaid 6beta10

Nice to wake up this morning to a fresh build of unRaid. And easy to install as well. Previous updates required manual download and installation but this one shows up in the UI and it's just a matter of clicking the update link (and restarting the system).

This is not an earth-shaking release but it does have a couple of UI changes that are undocumented. Most noticeably, the links to the VM management tools are now moved to the main menu;

Secondly, the output of the newly-named 'System Devices' function under tools now includes discrete listings of USB and disk devices in addition to LSPCI output.

It would be nice if the updated was notified via the UI (rather than having to go into 'Plugins' and clicking the 'Check for Updates' button but otherwise this seems like steady progress.

UPDATE: Beta10a is now available - some misc fixes for Xen auto-start and other bits.

Thinking Outside The Box

Right now I've got my system stacked with expansion cards;

1x GPU for unRaid booting
3x GPUs for passing through to VMs
1x 2 port SATA expansion card
1x Octopus Tv tuner PCIe card
1x Octopus expansion tuner (no slot required)
1x PCI M-Audio Delta card

The Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 is a great board with 5x full length PCIe slots, a single 1x PCIe slot and a single PCI slot.

However, there's a problem: the 1x PCIe slot is tight up against a heatsink and any cards with any overhang at all simply won't fit. The ideal card in my setup to occupy this slot is the Octopus TV tuner but I can't get it in there. Therefore, I've got that card in a 4xspeed  full-length slot and a 2-port SATA expansion card in the 1x PCIe slot.

The Perils of Beta Testing

Regular viewers will be aware that I've been using beta versions of unRAID 6 to run multiple virtual machines on MediaServer8.

I haven't been cursing edge with the betas, mainly due to time constraints, plus I was stuck on beta5 for a while as there as a kernel issue in beta 6 that prevented it from recognising my Marvell motherboard SATA controlllers.

However, I have been updating regularly and most recently installed beta 7. This allowed me install BtrFS on my cache and install multiple drives to cache as well. Indeed I'd done this to play around with Docker which up to beta 7 required BtrFS. Frustratingly, this requirement was removed in Beta8 so my time was somewhat wasted setting that up, or so I thought.