Constant Disk activity RN104 w/6.1.8

Any ideas? Nothing I do seems to slow the intense activity and slowness. There's got to be an answer. I've been pretty dissatisfied with this ReadyNAS unit since I bought it. It's never really lived up to what I thought a NAS should be. I guess that's what I get for buying into the low end of the market.

Can you send me your logs?: http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/21543

I would begin to disable all the add ons, the antivirus, the backup jobs and the snapshots.
If things improve, I would re-enable them one by one to get a culprit.
If things don't improve, I would to a defrag.
You could do a write speed test with a 2gb file to see if the NAS under performs (should be around 90-95Mbytes/s in read and 40-50Mbytes/s in write for the 104 over gigabit ethernet)

Come back here with the results of that. Depending on those we might have some other tests to do.

My 104 writes something every 3 to 5 seconds but that's not what you seem to describe.

OK. I sent the logs to the email in the link mdgm provided above.

To the other poster, I've turned off all services. I don't run Antivirus on the NAS since 90% of my content is video and my primary machines are Macs anyway...

I tried running a defrag -- no status update in the web panel. It just acted like it did nothing. The log says "started defrag" and nothing more. I started a scrub, just in case there was some RAID corruption causing a slowdown. As of this post, it's 52% complete (4 4tb drives take a while!).

Reading and writing to the array seem fast enough -- once I can get the file to start. It's like the NAS is too busy to initiate the thread, but once it does, transfers occur normally.

When I SSH into the box and run TOP, it all looks "normal." I'd like to run IOTOP to see where the IO processes are, but apparently that support is not compiled into the kernel (Why not? I would think that being able to monitor IO processes on such low-powered hardware would be a no-brainer!)

Hopefully, the logs will reveal what is causing the crazy amount of IO. I expect the scrub to take until tomorrow sometime to complete, and I will report back then with any changes (or lack thereof) from that process. Hopefully we can get a defrag to work, too...but from my understanding of BTRFS and the fact that I don't do a lot of write IO, I should not have a significant fragmentation issue -- but I'm willing to try it.

The first defrag can take some time (could be up to 3-4 days depending on the fragmentation), afterwards it should complete in a matter of hours (mine takes less than 2h for 5Tb). There is indeed no progress bar, you will just receive a mail at the end.

I agree with you that iotop would have been quite an help, defrag should have a progress bar too as well as backups (or at least the data processed + the amount remaining + the current file). Maybe in an incoming update.

I will be interested to hear what the situation is like once your scrub completes.

What read/write performance do you get with large files?

Well, mixed results: The scrub seemed to help with the slow performance issue, but my activity light is still on solid with few breaks. It flickers every now and again, but mostly it is on solid. That's a lot of activity. I await the response from you once you look at the logs to see if there is anything going on..maybe some log file in /var somewhere?

I believe the readynasd database is accessed pretty much constantly. This database is important and quite powerful.

What does it do? The ReadyNAS doesn't seem to be much more than an ARM-based processor with a SATA controller doing software RAID. What is so "special" about readynasd?

You started of by mentioning that "the light remains nearly solid'.
Solid On means NO disk activity, only when it blinks there is disk I/O...

Are we on the same page here?