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2.5GBe USB LAN
I have an old Ultra2 2Gb RAM running 6.10.9 OS. NAS is working great but 1Gb LAN is a bottleneck. I've bought cheap 2.5GBe USB LAN adapter based on realtek chip, attached to USB3 port and installed latest driver - r8152-2.19.2. Installation was successful, 3rd LAN interface appeared, link speed is 2500. But file copy speed is bad - i've got only ~80MB/s on 2.5 link (on native 1G l have ~110MB/s ). Then I connected the adapter to my laptop and got ~ 260MB/s, so the problem is in the NAS, not the adapter. Any suggestions\settings of speed improvement on NAS ?
12 Replies
Doesn't help much using such a device on a NAS certainly never intended to be operate on these legacy NAS devices (all Netgear NAS are ...)
The limitation to about 80 Mb/s was always on the storage side (the HDDs, the Raid - overall the CPU, the memory.
Some percent more might be reached by using SMB 3.0 transport and jumbo frames - but that does not make any wonders possible.
I've already using smb3 and jumbo frames. 1x native lan reaches ~ 100-110MB/s, 2 x naive lan bonded ~140MB/s. Why with 2.5G it less ?
This limitation to about 80 Mb/s vs the "full' Gigabit Ethernet must be somewhere on the USB side of that NAS. Strongly doubt ad-hoc driver installations are possible anyway for various reasons...
Good point... Just tried dd from external HDD connected to USB3 and got ~106 MB/s. Not sure is it HDD or USB limitation, do not have SSD to check...
Have you checked the advertised link speed of the interface with ethtool?
You could try installing iperf on the NAS and a PC - that would let you measure the network throughput independently of the RAID.
You can also test the RAID throughput using dd ( of=/dev/null for read tests; if=/dev/zero for write tests). That will give you some idea on how much you might actually gain if you get the 2.5G running at full speed. Though this wouldn't account for SAMBA, which will slow things down.
Yep, ethtool shows 2500 link speed. Not tested with DD, but with native 2x 1Gb interfaces bonded, round-robin I've got ~140MB/s
I have an old Ultra2 2Gb
Do you have an Ultra 2 (RNDU2000)? Or an Ultra 2 Plus (RNDP200U)?
Ultra 2 (RNDU2000), just upgraded ram to 2gb
How did you install the driver? It's going to need kernel support, and the kernel doesn't have any drivers for 2.5GbE devices, AFAIK. It only natively supports 1GB and below and 10GbE. I'm suspicious that it's using the native Realtek driver, which is 1GbE max, not what you installed.
Actually it's a kernel module, just downloaded from https://www.realtek.com/Download/List?cate_id=585 and compiled.
Do you still have a 1GB interface connected and enabled? If so, it's likely actually using that interface. Check what interface the Performance screen show is being used.
If you need WoL capability, you can connect one 1GB connection but have it disabled. A WoL to its MAC address will still wake the NAS, but the OS won't try to use it.
nope, i've temporary disconnected 1G for tests
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