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Average transfer speed (read and write) plummeted after replacing hard drives
Hello everyone
TL;DR: I just replaced my 3TB hard drive with some brand new 8TB hard drive, and the average speed plummeted, from 70MB (switch 1)/100MB (switch 2) to a steady (but slow) 40MB on both switches.
Long version:
I bought this ReadyNAS RN102 6 years ago along with two 1.5TB hard drives, and created an X-RAID array called data (yes, I know :D )
One year later, I replaced the 1.5TB had drives with brand new Western Digital RED WD30EFRX 3To hard drives, keeping the same array data, using the XRAID option to automatically expand the array size, which was 2.7To, and working perfectly well (70-100MB transfer speed, depending solely on which switch is used.)
The available space shrank dramatically recently, so I bought two brand new Seagate IronWolf 8 TB, ST8000VN0022 hard drives, tested it on windows (and speed was greater than 100MB/s on both drives). So I changed one drive, waited for resync, changed another drive, waited for resync and expand, and voila, 7.2TB available.
But I noticed a low speed between the RN102 and my linux computer (which use NFS and usually works at 50MB/s), about 20MB/s. Weird. I then try a 37GB file read from the NAS to my Windows 10 Desktop (CIFS/SMB) and got a slow 40MB/s transfer speed, instead of 70MB/s speed (switch 1)
I then tried the same 37GB file read from the NAS to my Windows 10 Laptop (CIFS/SMB), hooked on the switch 2, and got 40MB/s as well, instead of a whooping (and usual) 100MB/s transfer speed (I usually got 60-70MB on the dual ac wifi connection, but the current speed is now 40MB/s...).
I then tried every maintenance option I found: Test drive, defrag, balance, scrub. No change.
Do you have any idea to get back a standard speed?
The NAS has no apps, and antivirus is disabled.
Last chance, destroying the array and rebuild a brand new one, which is possible since the WD 3TB hard drives are readable on Linux, but will be extremely long and painful to transfer all the data from the old drive to the new ones. And the speed may stay at 40MB/s...
But before destroying the array, I'd like to try all other options I've got before.
Thanks in advance!
12 Replies
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If this is still original RAID array, I do recommend doing a factory default and reloading it from backup. I did that a couple of years ago, and saw a significant performance improvement.
HiEstivalG
A RN102 NAS is the entry level NAS. I am actually surprised that you got 70MB/s + speed before. I had one a while ago for testing various things but I would typically be in the range of 30-50MB/s and that was with a 2TB RAID 1.
Expanding the volume size to 8TB is going to take more processing for the single core ARM CPU and 500MB of ram, housed in the NAS. It is not really unexpected that the speeds are going to drop as a result.You can of course try to factory default the unit in order to get a clean filesystem. However, with 8TB you are probably starting to hit the upper limit of what the unit can realistically handle.
Perhaps it is time to upgrade NAS since it seems your data needs have increased? I reckon that if you monitor the NAS via top command (or similar) while transferring data you will probably see the unit being flat out.
FWIW, with my own RN102 I was seeing 70 MB/s read speeds after the reset. I was using it as a backup NAS - configured as jbod with 6 TB and 8 TB disks. That was a few years back though, and the memory footprint of the current firmware is bigger now than it was back then.
Hi Hopchen
I was quite happy with a 70MB/s speed, but it seems that the speed is very dependant of:
_The computer. My previous desktop topped at 50MB/s
_The switch. With a less than 2 years gaming laptop and a new switch, I got 100MB/s with a big file.
I never monitored the unit through top before, and I now got a 70-80% system cpu usage (read or write), which is HUGE. I don't remember such a high system usage, even in my earliest linux days (in the 20th century!! Ho, my!)
Since the only option left is to rebuild a new array, I will try a JBOD setup first, as StephenB suggested, and check for the system usage, and see if the transfer speed is better.
And I will post here the results in a few weeks.
edit: Just tried a direct write:
dd bs=1M count=2048 if=/dev/zero of=test2
2048+0 records in
2048+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB, 2.0 GiB) copied, 35.0169 s, 61.3 MB/sNo I/O wait (wa stays at 0.0%) but a 90% system cpu usage. I think JBOD setup will be better but I guess that RAID1 configuration will be quite slow, I will check if disabled XRAID is better.
Thank you everyone ;)
Hi EstivalG , I can confirm the 40MB/s transfer speed. I get that from my retired RN104 with two volumes (RAID0 and RAID1), which I'm using as a guineapig for trying things out.
If you like you can try some hints in the below link and see, whether you can improve performance of your RN102 in general (In essence RN102 and RN104 do only differ in the number of bays they hold).
Should you find a way to boost the transfer speed back to 70MB/s using the more recent firmware releases, I will be more than happy to adopt your approach as soon as it will be available.
Kind regards
Good work on that article Retired_Member :)
Retired_Member wrote:
Hi EstivalG , I can confirm the 40MB/s transfer speed. I get that from my retired RN104 with two volumes (RAID0 and RAID1), which I'm using as a guineapig for trying things out.
I decided to benchmark my own RN102, and I discovered that my speed depends on the SMB protocol version. I tweaked the the max protocol with SMBPlus, and tested the results with NasTester 1.7. The measured read speeds are:
- SMB 1.0: 41 MB/sec
- SMB 2.1: 70 MB/sec
- SMB 3.1: 63 MB/sec
When I reported my 70 MB/sec results a couple of years back, I was still running Windows 7 (SMB 2.1) so the results haven't changed with newer firmware.
The drop off with SMB 3.1 isn't that surprising - I suspect Windows 10 is using transport encryption, and the RN102 has no hardware support for that.
The slow speed with SMB 1 was a bit surprising to me.
Test Details:
The RN102 is running 6.9.5, and the volume is XRAID (two 1 TB Ironwolf disks). Bit-Rot protection (CoW) is off on the share; Volume Quota is enabled. Strict sync is disabled, and SMB 3 transport encryption is set to "enabled". Antivirus is off. SMBPlus is the only app running on the NAS.
The PC is an older desktop running Windows 10; the PC is using 10 gigabit ethernet, but of course the NAS is using just gigabit. The PC hardrive is an SSD.
The NAStester results are:
SMB 1.0
Running a 400MB file write on \\10.0.0.13\Documents 5 times... Iteration 1: 39.43 MB/sec Iteration 2: 39.64 MB/sec Iteration 3: 40.24 MB/sec Iteration 4: 38.87 MB/sec Iteration 5: 39.67 MB/sec ----------------------------- Average (W): 39.57 MB/sec ----------------------------- Running a 400MB file read on \\10.0.0.13\Documents 5 times... Iteration 1: 40.36 MB/sec Iteration 2: 40.71 MB/sec Iteration 3: 39.82 MB/sec Iteration 4: 41.65 MB/sec Iteration 5: 40.67 MB/sec ----------------------------- Average (R): 40.64 MB/sec
SMB 2.1
Running a 400MB file write on \\10.0.0.13\Documents 5 times... Iteration 1: 68.44 MB/sec Iteration 2: 67.45 MB/sec Iteration 3: 66.73 MB/sec Iteration 4: 66.87 MB/sec Iteration 5: 68.45 MB/sec ----------------------------- Average (W): 67.59 MB/sec ----------------------------- Running a 400MB file read on \\10.0.0.13\Documents 5 times... Iteration 1: 75.39 MB/sec Iteration 2: 67.61 MB/sec Iteration 3: 67.51 MB/sec Iteration 4: 68.58 MB/sec Iteration 5: 69.27 MB/sec ----------------------------- Average (R): 69.67 MB/sec
SMB 3.1
Running a 400MB file write on \\10.0.0.13\Documents 5 times... Iteration 1: 69.35 MB/sec Iteration 2: 68.94 MB/sec Iteration 3: 69.08 MB/sec Iteration 4: 67.34 MB/sec Iteration 5: 69.00 MB/sec ----------------------------- Average (W): 68.74 MB/sec ----------------------------- Running a 400MB file read on \\10.0.0.13\Documents 5 times... Iteration 1: 63.87 MB/sec Iteration 2: 63.06 MB/sec Iteration 3: 61.22 MB/sec Iteration 4: 63.89 MB/sec Iteration 5: 64.10 MB/sec ----------------------------- Average (R): 63.23 MB/sec
Thanks for the detailed analysis, StephenB , very helpful.
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