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Netgear RAXE500 SMB (SAMBA) Readyshare USB3.0 slow/ buggy on Android
Hi, just bought the RAXE500 router to replace the RAX80. I'm very happy with the WiFI performance on it compared to my previous RAX80.
The only issue which I and many others I believe are facing is, with the SMB (SAMBA) file server.
On android, the thing is, I need to input the username & password everytime I try to open Readyshare even with username/password unchecked on the GUI of the router.
The transfer speed using the smb protocol seems to be capped at around 5 - 6 Mb/sec which is way too slow.
This isn't an issue on Windows PC. Only hppens on Android.
Kindly look into the firmware, and see if it can be fixed.
I think this has to be something to do with the smb version used on the RAXE500, which version does this router use btw, smb v1 or smb v2?
8 Replies
Is anyone working at NETGEAR aware of this issue? Atleast, give us an update if you're working on a firmware to fix this issue.
Don't be silent about it. It's our hard earned money that you have taken for a product that has flaws, so you should stand by your product and take things seriously.
Which drive do you have connected to the RAXE500?
I currently use a USB 3.0 SATA dock, and with both an 8TB WD red, or a 2TB SATA SSD, the speeds average for reads and writes to my desktop PC connected via the 2.5GbE port, is 151MB/s (and even in that case, the speed seems to be a software limit and not a hardware one since the CPU usage of the router remains very low during both reads and writes.
Over WiFi, using a laptop with an Intel AX210, speeds will hover around 130-147MB/s.
On android, it heavily depends on the device, and it is not fully related to hardware, instead it is more related to how the device is configured as well as the software used.The RAXE500 supports and uses SMB 3.1.1 which is currently the latest standard.
For example, on my ZTE Axon 10 Pro smartphone, even though it will connect at a PHY rate of 866.7Mbps and get a real world speed of about 600Mbps, it would read and write from the USB storage on the router at around 6-7MB/s.
On my older ZTE Axon 7 (significantly slower CPU), but rooted and using a different network stack, it can get around 15MB/s, in both cases, the CPU usage is low.
Overall, it has to do with how the OS is configured and the type of network traffic it is optimized for. SMB tends to use a single TCP connection and is heavily dependent on the IOPS of the endpoints for the connection.- I'm using a Buffalo HDD (HD-PZU3) on USB 3.0 port.
Also, I've connected the HDD/SSD enclosure which supports SAT III, where a Toshiba HDD is attached to it.
6-7 MB/sec on Android via WiFi is slow, you said it yourself. Your android can obtain higher speeds.
With that much speed, you can't play High bitrate videos, such as Dolby Atmos 4K or any other 4k videos that require high bandwidth connection.
This wasn't a problem on the older routers such as the Netgear RAX80, and since you clarified the SMB version being 3 , it seems to be clear that this might be the problem for android.
I'm getting around 90 Mb/sec writing to my laptop's internal drive via HDD connected to the router with FTP protocol, but only get 50-60 Mb/sec uploading the same file to the HDD connected to Router's ISB 3.0 port via FTP. - The workaround for playing High Bitrate files I suppose is using a DLNA player instead of the normal SMB (Samba) server on Android.
And for transferring files FTP works best for android.
Samba is slow on this router.
Even my older WiFi 5 router, Netgear R7800 can get me upto 30 Mb/sec writes and reads through SMB samba, so 6-7 Mb/sec on Android is nothing. Only good for 1080p videos.For me, on Android, both my R7800 and RAXE500, the SMB performance is the same for both USB 3 connected drives and eSATA. Though on desktop, the eSATA performance on the R7800 is much higher with some 3rd party firmware, hitting 90+MB/s while USB 3.0 will be in the 70MB/s range.
The SMB performance issues with android are weird with no real consistency between devices, which performance all over the place on low end, mid range, and high end devices.
The same applies to older SMB standards such as SMB 1.5 on older 802.11n based routers with speeds still in the 6-7MB/s range. This is with high end ones from the time period (WNDR4700) which has a read speed of about 98MB/s and a write speed of 45MB/s, using an internal hard drive that came with my WNDR4700.
Overall for SMB I am not sure if router makers can do much to improve smartphone performance with them. It seems that router makers go with fairly standard implementations, and smartphone makers simply aren't focusing their development time on improving performance for SMB traffic.
As for speeds in relation to video playback, 5MB/s is enough for most h.264 4K 10 bit HDR content, as they are typically in the 20-30mbps range, though it will not handle h.264 4K 10 bit with 4:2:2 sampling, though in those conditions, h.265 will work.
If you would like to test that, you will see that launching a video over smb using a file explorer app that supports it, and then directly opening the video using VLC for android, you will see that that combination of videos will play smoothly.
Beyond that, VLC player's own browser rather than launching through another app is capable of reaching higher speeds by launching multiple connections for newer SMB versions (though that behavior would normally reduce performance for a desktop PC since SMB in general encounters more overhead from it, but on android the benefits there outweigh the inefficiencies.
