• 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).

I wouldn’t call them leechers since they are seeding back to build said ratio. I think it’d be more accurate to call them a single component of a larger ‘structure’ including people like myself who permaseed from home on a slower connection. If it were all people like me, we’d all be waiting days for new releases to fully download and if it were all seedboxes, we would have zero seeders for anything older than a month or two. Many private trackers incentivize long-term seeding to help control this imbalance, and I think it works well in my experience.