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#1 2009-04-27 07:56:17

demeo
Member
Registered: 2009-04-27
Posts: 6

Gigabit speeds not reached

I just bought a DNS-323 and love it. However, I can't seem to reach gigabit speeds. My setup is a PC with gigabit connection and a DNS-323 directly connected to a D-Link 825 (gigabit router). I have a gigabit connection beyond my router as well which I can transfer up to speeds of 60MB/s (at least 25MB/s). I expected the same transfer speeds to and from my DNS-323. However, I can ONLY reach 12MB/s using fillezilla over FTP. After running NASTester 0.4, I have an average write speed of 5.23MB/s and an average read speed of 10.11MB/s.

My 323 specs:
- 1.06 firmware
- 2x 1.5TB Seagate hard drives at RAID 1
- Speed is 1000
- Jumbo Frame at 9000 (I've also tried turning this off completely with NO change)

It's like my connection from my router to my 323 is 100MB/s instead of 1000MB/s since my transfer speeds outside my router are perfectly acceptable. Would the RAID1 slow my read/write speeds so significantly?

Thanks for any suggestions!

Last edited by demeo (2009-04-27 15:02:14)

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#2 2009-04-27 12:13:41

kikashi
Member
Registered: 2009-03-17
Posts: 11

Re: Gigabit speeds not reached

I have no experience with RAID1, but I can confirm that when I moved from a 100mbit to a gigabit switch (and switched on jumbo frames) my write speeds over samba went up from 8 megabyte/s to about 18 megabyte/s.

IIRC then RAID1 should in theory slow down your writes and speed up your reads.

Stupid question probably, but are you sure that you are not connected to your router via the wireless network?

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#3 2009-04-27 14:51:41

demeo
Member
Registered: 2009-04-27
Posts: 6

Re: Gigabit speeds not reached

kikashi wrote:

Stupid question probably, but are you sure that you are not connected to your router via the wireless network?

Yes, I am sure. Both my PC and DNS-323 are connected via cat5e. I'm using the cat5e cable that came with my 323, so I cannot say for sure that it works at gigabit speeds.

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#4 2009-04-27 15:20:51

skydreamer
Member
From: At the Atlantic Coast
Registered: 2007-01-06
Posts: 232

Re: Gigabit speeds not reached

That is normal. I am experiencing higher transfer speeds of about 20 MB/s but also nowhere near the best expected performance with 1TB RAID 1.
There are threads discussing this in great detail on this forum.

Also make sure that you have the SATA-1 compatibility mini-jumpers removed from the Seagate disks, they ship with them installed.

It has nothing to do with the network setup but internal performance of the DNS-323. My personal estimate is that the performance will get worse with the size of the hard disks as there is more demand on the limited internal RAM resources.

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#5 2009-04-27 15:34:58

demeo
Member
Registered: 2009-04-27
Posts: 6

Re: Gigabit speeds not reached

skydreamer wrote:

Also make sure that you have the SATA-1 compatibility mini-jumpers removed from the Seagate disks, they ship with them installed.

What will removing the mini-jumpers do?

skydreamer wrote:

That is normal. I am experiencing higher transfer speeds of about 20 MB/s but also nowhere near the best expected performance with 1TB RAID 1.
There are threads discussing this in great detail on this forum. 

It has nothing to do with the network setup but internal performance of the DNS-323. My personal estimate is that the performance will get worse with the size of the hard disks as there is more demand on the limited internal RAM resources.

I've seen several threads about slow transfer speeds, but I was hoping this was my fault in some way and not expected results.

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#6 2009-04-27 20:06:07

skydreamer
Member
From: At the Atlantic Coast
Registered: 2007-01-06
Posts: 232

Re: Gigabit speeds not reached

demeo wrote:

What will removing the mini-jumpers do?

The 702.11 drives and before where shipping with a jumper that limited the interface transfer speed to SATA-1 i.e. 1.5 Gbits/s. The jumper could be removed and the speed then increases to 3Gb/s, which is SATA-2 speed.

Seagate were not very good at communicating this and you need to dig quite deep in the technical documentation to discover it.

I found the RAID1 speed to increase by approximately 20% with the jumpers removed.

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#7 2009-04-27 22:01:17

estauss
New member
Registered: 2009-02-05
Posts: 2

Re: Gigabit speeds not reached

skydreamer wrote:

demeo wrote:

What will removing the mini-jumpers do?

The 702.11 drives and before where shipping with a jumper that limited the interface transfer speed to SATA-1 i.e. 1.5 Gbits/s. The jumper could be removed and the speed then increases to 3Gb/s, which is SATA-2 speed.

Seagate were not very good at communicating this and you need to dig quite deep in the technical documentation to discover it.

I found the RAID1 speed to increase by approximately 20% with the jumpers removed.

Would this also help with the drives set up in standard format as well?

Thanks

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#8 2009-04-28 01:29:59

skydreamer
Member
From: At the Atlantic Coast
Registered: 2007-01-06
Posts: 232

Re: Gigabit speeds not reached

estauss- I am not sure what you mean.

Everything is covered in here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

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#9 2009-04-28 06:36:51

demeo
Member
Registered: 2009-04-27
Posts: 6

Re: Gigabit speeds not reached

skydreamer wrote:

demeo wrote:

What will removing the mini-jumpers do?

The 702.11 drives and before where shipping with a jumper that limited the interface transfer speed to SATA-1 i.e. 1.5 Gbits/s. The jumper could be removed and the speed then increases to 3Gb/s, which is SATA-2 speed.

Seagate were not very good at communicating this and you need to dig quite deep in the technical documentation to discover it.

I found the RAID1 speed to increase by approximately 20% with the jumpers removed.

There are no jumpers on the hard drives. Any other ideas besides the limitations of the hardware?

Thanks for your help!

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#10 2009-04-28 10:18:47

Biscotte
Member
Registered: 2007-05-21
Posts: 81

Re: Gigabit speeds not reached

I had read in these columns about the Seagate jumpers.  Took a look on their site and not found anything.  Skydreamers comment:
''Seagate were not very good at communicating this and you need to dig quite deep in the technical documentation to discover it.''
was an understatement.  I had a dig around pretty deep to find the diagrams .  .  then removed the offending article!
Currently backing up and reformatting terabyte drives.  I have a gigabit system with cat5e and some cat6 cabling - notably between my main computer and the DNS-323s.

Demeo
With the Seagate jumper set I had been getting     8 - 11 meg/second
Without the jumper I am now getting around     8 - 11 meg/second
This is about the same as you, and much better than the 4 meg/sec I was getting with the 100 mbit NICs and cat5e cables. 
Even 4meg/sec is OK for music server and so on, (but a pain for monster size backups).   

Biscotte

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#11 2009-04-28 16:56:12

estauss
New member
Registered: 2009-02-05
Posts: 2

Re: Gigabit speeds not reached

skydreamer wrote:

estauss- I am not sure what you mean.

Everything is covered in here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

I have 2 drives but they are not in raid, they are just separate volumes.

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#12 2009-04-28 19:08:08

Biscotte
Member
Registered: 2007-05-21
Posts: 81

Re: Gigabit speeds not reached

All of my drives are in separate volumes
323 Box one  -  two discs - working areas at home
323 Box two -   two discs - backup areas at home (box mainly switched off)
323 Box three - two discs - offsite

Biscotte

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#13 2009-04-29 10:59:26

demeo
Member
Registered: 2009-04-27
Posts: 6

Re: Gigabit speeds not reached

I still have not been able to get speeds equivalent to my other gigabit network devices.

However, after disabling transmission, iTunes server (mt-daapd), and the UPnP server, my transfer speeds jumped as high as 20MB/s over FTP.

With all of the benefits of the DNS-323, I can live with these "slow" transfer speeds. smile

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#14 2009-04-29 12:18:10

skydreamer
Member
From: At the Atlantic Coast
Registered: 2007-01-06
Posts: 232

Re: Gigabit speeds not reached

demeo wrote:

I still have not been able to get speeds equivalent to my other gigabit network devices.

However, after disabling transmission, iTunes server (mt-daapd), and the UPnP server, my transfer speeds jumped as high as 20MB/s over FTP.

With all of the benefits of the DNS-323, I can live with these "slow" transfer speeds. smile

I am glad that the disk capacity has nothing to do with the slow speed, as the disk capacity grows so does the amount of RAM for mounting and caching the FS but I suppose it is still below the physical limits of the DNS-323.

Just to put your figures in perspective I have a very fast and resourceful Linux server running softRAID on the same disks that I am using in DNS-323 and while the former reaches top speed of 60MB/s on RAID-1 I get approximately 22MB/s on the latter.

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#15 2009-04-29 17:57:56

mig
Member
From: Seattle, WA
Registered: 2006-12-21
Posts: 532

Re: Gigabit speeds not reached

demeo wrote:

With all of the benefits of the DNS-323, I can live with these "slow" transfer speeds. smile

There are newer NAS devices available which use the Marvell "Kirkwood" 88F6281 CPU clocked at 1.2 GHz,
with 512 MB of DDR2 RAM http://www.marvell.com/products/embedde … /index.jsp
These NAS devices are getting over 50Mbytes/sec transfers according to testing by smallnetbuilder.com
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/componen … temid,190/

Some examples of these are
  QNAP TS-119 (single disk)  http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30791/75/
  QNAP TS-219 (dual disks)
  BuffaloTech Linkstation Pro LS-XHL http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30760/75/

Last edited by mig (2009-04-29 18:05:16)


DNS-323 • 2x Seagate Barracuda ES 7200.10 ST3250620NS 250GB SATAII (3.0Gb/s) 7200RPM 16MB • RAID1 • FW1.03 • ext2 
Fonz's v0.3 fun_plug http://www.inreto.de/dns323/fun-plug

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#16 2009-04-29 19:41:42

Biscotte
Member
Registered: 2007-05-21
Posts: 81

Re: Gigabit speeds not reached

demeo
As I said above, I get 8 to 11 meg/sec between NAS units.  Between computers in the house and the 323s it is up around the 11 to 14 meg/sec. 
Obvious question but I am curious - why do you need to have high transfer rates?  I do my big backups at night - 2.5 tera live space and twice as much again that is syncronised overnight - 8 hrs is a good long time.   Speeds above are ample for almost everything else. 
Looks like one of those climbing Everest questions and the answer is because it is there . . .
Just asking

Biscotte

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#17 2009-04-29 21:31:08

talkingRock
Member
Registered: 2009-03-26
Posts: 100

Re: Gigabit speeds not reached

Are you guys talking mega bytes or mega bits?    I'm getting around 60-65 mega bits peak using rsync, which, depending on how you account for the 10b8 encoding is about 8 mega bytes on gigabit ethernet.  100megabit ethernet gives me more like 45-50 megabits or 5 megabytes.

So, I'm either doing much worse or much better than average, depending on what units you're using.

Using "atop" it appears that neither the cpu nor the drive are maxed out during the transfer.   The gigabit ethernet is clearly not maxed out, so either there is something slow on my source machine, or there is a slow internal bus or bad configuration on the dns-323/321.     I suppose I should run an experiment transfering from one d-link box to the other.

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#18 2009-04-29 22:32:58

demeo
Member
Registered: 2009-04-27
Posts: 6

Re: Gigabit speeds not reached

Thanks for the links, mig!

Biscotte wrote:

Obvious question but I am curious - why do you need to have high transfer rates?

I'm simply comparing the transfer speeds between other devices on my 1GB connection to those of the 323. As I said in my first post, I can easily reach speeds of 60MB/s when I back up to a computer outside my D-Link 825 router (still gigabit, obviously). Basically, I wanted to make sure my DNS-323 was working correctly since it barely reached speeds of 10MB/s with only the gigabit router between my computer and it. Now, I know that this is normal given the hardware in the device. My concerns are gone and I'm completely satisfied with my purchase.

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