When was the last time they even refreshed the hardware? Kinda hard to justify a $200 streaming box that runs Google services on 6 year old mobile hardware.

This is already my experience but still use a Roku to access Plex. Looks like I’ll need to get something else or figure out if i can block them with Ad Guard Home

I was thinking the same thing. What would happen if you popped one out of the back of your car while driving in front of a self driving car on the freeway?

It may not be a problem that requires a self hosting solution on its own, but if you’re already self hosting video and music, why not do this too?

I’m sure you’re well aware of what a PITA it can be to rely on ‘loose files in a folder’ when trying to consume media. You don’t get your progress saved, files might not be named correctly or in an easily readable way, it can be more clunky to play files, and it can be harder to find them in something like VLC if you have a lot of music or videos on your device too. This is the whole reason why things like Plex and Jellyfin (and all the other niche options) exist in the first place. They make things easy after the little bit of initial set up.

I don’t believe that’s my issue as none of the drives are even reaching 50% utilization on either end and it also doesn’t explain why initial transfers hold at a consistent 100MB/s but every transfer after that limits to >10MB/s until I restart the samba service on the container.

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).