Hey all,<br><br>I recently completed a total overhaul of my home server infrastructure. I found an insane deal on a Poweredge 2950 on eBay - Dual 4-core Xeons, 8GB RAM, SAS RAID all for $300 - and set it up as my new VMWare ESXi 5 server. It now holds all my VMs, including my domain controller which serves DNS/DHCP/legacy WINS etc, my PlayOn/Plex Media Server / Boxee Media Manager aggregator, my Win2008 file server, and my newly-virtualized MythBuntu master back end. Storage is an Apple Xserve RAID fiber array, with two RAID-5 sets of 2.7TB and 4TB.<br>
<br>I also have a slave back end, currently using local disk for its recordings storage, and an HDHomeRun PRIME for its three tuners. More on that later.<br><br>I have a 2TB LUN dedicated to my Windows server which holds all my DVD and Blu-Ray rips. I consistently get between 85 and 95 MB/second SMB transfer speeds between it and my windows machines throughout the house over wired gigabit Ethernet. My original plan was to set up an NFS mount on the Windows server and present at least another 2TB LUN, dedicating that storage for MythTV recordings. I would then point my MBE to that storage and move the HDHomeRun PRIME to that MBE. The reasons for this are twofold: First, many of the technologies I want to use including MythFuse, MythBoxee and XBMC's Mythbox app don't support multiple master BEs - They expect all recordings to be in the same place. Second, I like having everything centralized, and front-ending it with a Windows server means that I can grow the storage in the back end and have it be mostly transparent to the clients. <br>
<br>Now, I'm a Windows Systems Admin by trade. I suck at all things Unix, plain and simple. When going through the NFS setup and speaking with friends who are smarter than me, they all suggested I just share everything over SMB. However, I did some testing last night, and the fastest transfers I can get to/from my Windows boxes and my two Myth BEs is 30MB/second. All testing was done with a 14GB MKV. The Myth servers are running XFS, and the Windows servers are NTFS with an 8192k allocation unit size. While this may be adequate for my needs, I don't feel comfortable just accepting that I'm going to lose 60% of my transfer speed potential. As I mentioned, my MBE is a vm (Please don't hurt me), but my SBE is physical and both are displaying about the same transfer rate. Neither of them are running the latest version of Ubuntu... I believe they are both on 10.10.<br>
<br>So, after this wall of text, my questions are: Is this slowness expected due to the Linux implementation of SMB? Or is there something horribly wrong with my setup? Should I attempt NFS again, or are there ways to tune SMB to make it faster? Do newer versions of Ubuntu play more nicely with SMB? <br>