I suspect it is something wrong or misconfigured in the container because I can reliably reproduce this issue by doing one transfer and getting 100MB/s and always on the second (or additional) transfer getting 10MB/s until I restart the container.

• Not sure what all to include here but the pool set up in Proxmox as RAIDZ2 with lz4 compression.

• 64GB DDR5 that is showing low utilization the entire time. It has never gone over 10GB usage.

• I have not done any tuning or enabled jumbo frames on samba

• Both machines are sitting next to one another and connected to a 2.5Gb switch that is also connected to my router’s 1Gb ports. From what I gather, they shouldn’t need to communicate through the router since they’re on the same subnet and everything.

• I haven’t installed any drivers, but another user suggested using the ethtool command on the NIC and it’s showing a 2.5Gb connection speed.

• The windows machine has a Realtec RTL8125B 2.5Gb PCIe network card that I just purchased for this purpose. Previously I was using the motherboards built in 1Gb NIC. I have installed the driver for this on the windows machine.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by benchmarks? These are all SATA drives

It has 64GB installed. I have read that ZFS can slurp up RAM, but I’m seeing barely any usage. Usage has remained under 10GB the entire time for the whole system.

I’ve had a chance to run this and ethtool is showing 2500Mb/s for the speed on the host. I also tried it on the bridge and inside the container and those both show “10000Mb/s”

Looks like at most one drive hits 50% for a second, then I’ll have several refreshes showing 0% utilization on all drives, then a refresh showing 10% utilization followed by another several refreshes showing 0% utilization again. On Windows, the drives being transferred from are also showing low utilization.

https://youtu.be/zLFB6ulC0Fg

5 are WD HC530 datacenter drives and two are the 14TB EZAZ from Easystores. I don’t think any of the larger WD drives are SMR but I don’t have a definitive answer.

I haven’t installed any drivers on the Proxmox machine. That one has the 2.5Gb NIC built into the motherboard so I probably misspoke when I called it a “card” in the OP if that makes a difference. I’ll try this when I get home but I have run ‘lspci’ and it shows the NIC on both the host and container (Intel Killer 3100 2.5Gb though it’s listen as Killer 3000 2.5Gb) plus my iperf3 tests were showing ~2.3Gb speeds between both machines and the container.

As far as the 100GBe switch, I only need to transfer the media off the old machine once so I was just trying to go with something inexpensive since the standard 1Gb ethernet should be fine for most things after this initial transfer.

If you’re using QBittorrent, you can throttle upload/download speeds in the settings. I believe it wants speeds set in kibibytes (KiB) so you’ll need to convert your megabit internet speeds to your desired kibibyte limit (say maybe 50% or less of your available bandwidth).

It is the fault of the retailers because it’s well known that things don’t always get handled with care in shipping, especially when you’re talking about automated machines and people handling millions of boxes. They’re the ones packing these items to ship and damaged items are needless waste. I buy car parts online and they manage to pack these often heavy and awkwardly shaped parts correctly so that they don’t sustain damage. Newegg could do the same with some HDDs.

I just got 5 drives from them and both orders were packed well.

I don’t know if this will be of any help, and I dont fully understand the intricacies, but I run into similar issues with my HomeAssistant setup when the certificates expire (every couple of months?). The issue is that HA doesn’t pull the new certificate without a reboot, so I typically just restart it every once in a while to ensure that it has the newest certificate.

A single hdd can be fast enough to serve UHD ripped 4k video, but it’s much closer to the limit than an ssd would be, and might not be a great experience if you will be doing anything else with that drive at that time.

You might be mixing up your units here as 4k UHD is typically <90Mb/s while large HDDs typically cap out at 120MB/s, which equates to 960Mb/s (bits vs bytes). You could likely stream 10 4k UHD movies at once from a single HDD before running into bandwidth issues and with the cost of SSDs versus HDDs, it’s almost a no-brainer to go with an HDD.

And what would those “multiple reasons” be? Where is OP storing 400TB worth of downloads?

Yeah it only comes with 6 trays, so you’ll need to order more, but you can fill out the entire front section with drives.

I’m currently at 3TB a month and that’s with capping my seeding speeds to 2Mbps and remote streams to 3Mbps (essentially SD quality) to conserve what little upload speed I have to split amongst my users.

I don’t know why you’re so adamant that this can’t be the cause when video is hands down the most common reason for high data usage. Downloading a video is just 1x the file size in data usage but streaming to friends and family can easily increase that 1x infinitely based on the number of users. Then throw seeding on top of that and you increase it another 5x or what have you.

I’m browsing Tautulli right now and the little 4k content I have has a bitrate of 25Mbps for an hour long TV episode while movies like Akira in 4k has a bitrate of 90Mbps, Bladerunner 2049 70Mbps, Encanto 72Mbps. That crap adds up quickly. Imagine 6 kids who all have Encanto playing over and over again in the background, which amounts to 1TB of data used in 6 hours if they all play it 3 times.

What do you suspect is the cause of so much data usage if not video streaming?

I use a Fractal Design Define R6 but their newer model is around the same price (it actually appears to be $60 cheaper than the Silverstone case on NewEgg) and can hold the same number of drives. They’re solid cases.

https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/define/define-7/

For your lack of SATA ports, you can either buy a new mobo (use PCPartPicker and filter by SATA ports) or an LSI SAS HBA card to gain additional SATA ports.

Plenty of 4k HDR videos are 50+GB each and OP could have a dozen people or more watching each day plus new downloads, online backups, seeding, etc.

I have a decent sized server with terrible upload speeds in the 15Mbps range that I share with some friends and family, and I still have 5-6 people streaming from my server almost constantly. If I had a symmetrical connection, I wouldn’t be shy about sharing it more and uncapping the remote bitrate settings and I could easily see myself hitting these numbers even though almost all my content is 720p and 1080p.

Video is what gobbles up that much data. They likely have friends and family streaming from their media server.