NV+ Transfer rates

[trumpy81]

Thanks Stephen, I really appreciate your help. OK I can't remember exactly what firmware was on The ReadyNAS when I switched it on, so I have gone ahead and done a Factory Reset. That will take some time and I will have to restore the files that were on there and that's gonna take some time

Took me 3 Days before, so if it's any faster it should show ... lol

I'll let you know when everything is back up and I'll see if any settings make a difference this time also.

Fingers crossed

[trumpy81]

Well, after doing the factory reset and waiting for the volume to resync (9 hours), I am finally starting to upload the files back onto the ReadyNAS. The bad news is that there is absolutely no change. Write speed is averaging between 12MB/s & 14MB/s, don't know about read speed but I suspect it will be just as dismal as it was before

It appears that this is the best I'm going to get from this particular NAS

[BikeHelmet]

Turn jumbo frames off. Try turning journalling off too. Then reboot the NAS and test again. You should be able to get higher speeds than you're getting.

How are you measuring read/write speeds? An hour at even 2MB/sec is 7.2GB - far more than your data set, indicating your file copy speed isn't very accurate. Have you tried replacing it with something more accurate like TeraCopy? (Free for personal use.)
http://codesector.com/downloads/

[StephenB]

Turn jumbo frames off. Try turning journalling off too. Then reboot the NAS and test again. You should be able to get higher speeds than you're getting.

How are you measuring read/write speeds? An hour at even 2MB/sec is 7.2GB - far more than your data set, indicating your file copy speed isn't very accurate. Have you tried replacing it with something more accurate like TeraCopy? (Free for personal use.)
http://codesector.com/downloads/

He started by saying he had tried jumbo frames on and off, and that it made no difference.

Journalling slows write speeds, but I don't think it will slow read speeds. Since both his read and write times are on the slow side, that doesn't seem likely. In any event, it is a bad idea to turn off journalling unless you have a UPS.

I agree that the speed for his transfer of 160,000 small files is not correct - 3 GB per hour is actually less than 1 MB/sec. Not sure that means his other speeds are off - the numbers in the 160K test are clearly approximate.

TeraCopy or other copy accelerators could well speed things up, though he should be getting faster speeds with straight windows drag-and-drop.

[trumpy81]

BikeHelmet, I did try turning on Jumbo Frames, but that had no effect on the transfer rates at all. Full Journaling is off, Journaling is on. I have turned off Optimise for OS/X also, but that has made no difference either.

I do have an MGE Nova 1100 AVR UPS and it is on the compatibility list, but I don't have the NAS plugged into it, not enough receptacles on the UPS for the NAS. I have the Main Computer and 2 Monitors plugged into the UPS so that I am able to shut down all programs before shutting down the main computer if the power fails.

When transferring a lot of small files, getting an accurate transfer rate is difficult because there is a lot of fluctuation in actual speeds. I use Sysmetrix to gauge the throughput of the network and it reports the average transfer speed. But as you and Stephen have both pointed out, my transfer rates are even more dismal than I thought.

I started uploading 1898 files totalling 1.51TB at 5:30am Saturday, it is now 7:45am Sunday and so far only 1522 files have been transferred totalling 1218 GB - 546MB for the system files already on the NAS before I started the file transfer.

It's not hard to see why I am disappointed in the transfer speeds I am getting with this particular NAS, especially when you consider that I can achieve, and regularly do get 90MB/s transfer speeds between my Main computer upstairs and the second computer downstairs, which indicates that there is nothing wrong with my overall network setup.

With all the settings that I have enabled/disabled by now I would have thought that I would have stumbled upon the magic combination that would allow this NAS to transfer at better speeds than I am seeing.

I may have to contact Netgear and see what their take is on this matter, they were quite helpful when I contacted them about the 3TB drive issue I had. That was my fault though, I was looking at the wrong compat. list when I bought the drives. Luckily, I already had 4 2TB drives on hand so it was simply a matter of swapping them for the 3TB drives I had bought for this NAS.

[BikeHelmet]

Jumbo Frames slow the NV+ down. You definitely want them off.

Are your PCs all running Windows 7?

Using these options I get 35MB/sec read speeds, 15-20MB/sec write speeds:





Have you updated to the latest Realtek NIC drivers, by any chance?

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/dow ... Down=false

What firmware version is your NAS running?

Have you tinkered with any of the options in the Device Manager? (Advanced tab for your NIC) That's where Flow Control is listed at. I didn't have to tweak anything in there, but I did raise the buffer counts to the max possible.

[trumpy81]

BikeHelmet, I suggest you read all of this thread. All of the suggestions, except for updating the Realtek drivers have been performed. I am using the Realtek Drivers as supplied by Asus and I am currently in the process of updating the NAS to 4.1.9. You may be aware that the Realtek receive and transmit buffers cannot be increased above the current limits of 512 and 128 respectively. Also, my Realtek Drivers at present, do not cover IPv6 for some reason. I have been unable to find a driver update for this particular Realtek chipset though. The chipset is RTL8211/8212 and is not listed on The Realtek Taiwan website. It is builtin to the Asus X58 Sabertooth motherboard.

The NAS was updated at first switch on and was 4.1.8 at the time of the factory reset. I'm hoping 4.1.9 will be the magic bullet but I won't hold my breath ... lol

I do have another question to ask you and Stephen though, does your NAS fan increase in speed at random intervals?

My fan seems to have a mind of it's own and will increase in speed and volume at what appears to be random intervals. I could understand it if the drives were increasing in temperature, but they don't appear to be. I don't have an actual thermometer to read the drive or even the enclosure temp with and the Smart logs don't indicate any changes in temp of the drives, so there is nothing to show why the fan speed increases. There is no mention of the increased fan speed anywhere within the logs either.

[BikeHelmet]

The chipset is RTL8211/8212 and is not listed on The Realtek Taiwan website. It is builtin to the Asus X58 Sabertooth motherboard.

I suspect that's just a marketing name. Realtek has all their HD Audio drivers and PCIe NIC drivers in the same zips/installers. If you grab the right installer from the page I linked, it'll probably install just fine, despite not listing that particular one.

The NAS was updated at first switch on and was 4.1.8 at the time of the factory reset. I'm hoping 4.1.9 will be the magic bullet but I won't hold my breath ... lol

Good luck. T15 has good reports so far. Hope it helps.

Edit: Ahh, 4.1.9 was just released!

I do have another question to ask you and Stephen though, does your NAS fan increase in speed at random intervals?

Last time I checked, they did - but my NAS is now in another room, so I can't say for certain if it's been doing it recently.

My fan seems to have a mind of it's own and will increase in speed and volume at what appears to be random intervals. I could understand it if the drives were increasing in temperature, but they don't appear to be. I don't have an actual thermometer to read the drive or even the enclosure temp with and the Smart logs don't indicate any changes in temp of the drives, so there is nothing to show why the fan speed increases. There is no mention of the increased fan speed anywhere within the logs either.

It could be related to CPU usage. If you SSH in and run top, you can see the CPU usage bouncing all over the place as the NAS and your addons do things.

[trumpy81]

If you SSH in and run top, you can see the CPU usage bouncing all over the place as the NAS and your addons do things.

BikeHelmet, I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'run top' ?

I completed the update to 4.1.9 and it did make a small improvement to the write speeds. I'm now getting an average of 15.5MB/s, but it fluctuates between almost 0 and 18.2MB/s when transferring files between 300MB and 2GB.

The fan speed seems to adjust much less frequently and to a slightly slower speed than before also. Overall, at this point in the game, I'd have to say that FW 4.1.9 is a winner! ...

I did manage to find an update for my NIC Drivers. Oddly enough though, the NIC on this motherboard is PCI and NOT PCIe. I have no idea why ASUS chose to use a PCI chipset instead of PCIe, but that's how it goes ...

The drivers made no difference though and they still don't include IPv6 for some reason. Since IPv6 has finally been rolled out I find it odd that this NIC doesn't seem to support it, or maybe it does but there are no options to change it? I'm sure the NIC's in my other machines do support IPv6 though.

[BikeHelmet]

'top' is a linux command which gives you CPU/memory usage stats for all the processes currently running. Think of it as a text-based 'Task Manager'.

IPv6 should work fine over any NIC - but there won't be any acceleration or offloading, so your CPU has to do all the work. Over the PCI bus (rather than PCIe), and with extra CPU overhead... I can't see you ever getting full gigabit speeds for IPv6 stuff. Oh well, not a major loss.

[trumpy81]

BikeHelmet, as you may have guessed, I'm not much into Linux, just never had the time or motivation to learn it. I do have various flavours of Ubuntu installed in VM's but I don't play with them much, unless I am using LinuxCNC (EMC2). It comes in handy for dry runs/testing of my G-Code, but other than that, I rarely use it.

I still wonder why I am not getting better upload speeds though. There does not appear to be any problems with my network or the attached hardware and yet I still see poor performance when uploading/downloading to this NAS.

There doesn't appear to be any problems with streaming though. I streamed two movies via DLNA, one to my LCD TV and the other to my PVR in the lounge room simultaneously and did not get a glitch on either. So I'm pretty happy about that.

[BikeHelmet]

BikeHelmet, as you may have guessed, I'm not much into Linux, just never had the time or motivation to learn it. I do have various flavours of Ubuntu installed in VM's but I don't play with them much, unless I am using LinuxCNC (EMC2). It comes in handy for dry runs/testing of my G-Code, but other than that, I rarely use it.

Ahh well, don't bother then. It requires installing an addon before you can even connect. (SSH) To simply go look at top stats... not worth it.

I still wonder why I am not getting better upload speeds though. There does not appear to be any problems with my network or the attached hardware and yet I still see poor performance when uploading/downloading to this NAS.

Now that speeds are mostly fixed, have you tried directly connecting to the NAS?

There doesn't appear to be any problems with streaming though. I streamed two movies via DLNA, one to my LCD TV and the other to my PVR in the lounge room simultaneously and did not get a glitch on either. So I'm pretty happy about that.

Yeah, you need surprisingly little bandwidth to stream stuff. With my max speed at 35MB/sec I can do 17 SD video streams at once. (And that might be a CPU/videocard limit rather than NAS limit, since they drop frames rather than getting locked up; I tried playing them all on my PC. ) With about half that speed available, you can expect at least 4-8 streams (depending on bitrate) to work smoothly.