SABnzbd Forums

I'm running sabnzbd on Windows and looking for a way to reduce the disk I/O being used during the unpacking process.

I've read around about ionice, but I don't see the option for this  anywhere. Is it a Linux only option? Is there a way to limit the disk I/O in Windows?

Only Windows 7 has some support for this, but not in a generic way like on Linux.
A program has to arrange for this by itself.
So, as long as par2 and unrar aren't modified to support this, there's not much hope.
SABnzbd on it's own isn't very disk-intensive.

I am using Windows 7 Enterprise but I'm unsure how to set this up.

It doesn't seem very disk intensive during downloading at all but a fair bit during unpacking. It's currently unpacking on a RAID-5 array (which is already quite slow to write to), and I find when streaming a 1080p movie from the drive it tends to 'chop up' a bit during unpacking. I know this is a bit picky 

I'm quite familiar with Windows 7 but I've never seen any tools to limit or prioritize disk access, just CPU stuff. If there's a way to do it I'd really appreciate some insight or a step in the right direction.

No, you misunderstand.
On Linux you let ionice run another program (like par2) with lower disk priority.
In Windows 7, the program itself (so par2) needs to do additional API calls to change its own disk priority.
So as long as the authors of par2 and unrar don't build this in, you won't get it.

Got it; that's unfortunate but good to know regardless. Thank you very much.

So what about OS X? Is there a way to get this to work since I think OS X comes with a nice utility out of the box?

Alas, the OSX kernel does not support it.
Despite his Steveness' claims, OSX isn't that modern (at least not under the hood).

shypike wrote: Alas, the OSX kernel does not support it.
Despite his Steveness' claims, OSX isn't that modern (at least not under the hood).

Could this not tap into the built in "nice" command or does that not do the same thing?

"nice" is about CPU priority, ionice is about disk priority.
The two have little in common in the kernel.
With modern CPUs, CPU-priority isn't that interesting any more.
Disk priority is much more important, as in most systems the disk channel is the bottleneck.

Well, that's disappointing. Thanks for the heads up!