NV+ Transfer rates

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.

trumpy81 wrote:
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.

trumpy81 wrote:
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!

trumpy81 wrote:
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.

trumpy81 wrote:

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.

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! ... :lol:

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 ... :lol:

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.

'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.

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.

trumpy81 wrote:
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.

trumpy81 wrote:
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?

trumpy81 wrote:
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. :P ) With about half that speed available, you can expect at least 4-8 streams (depending on bitrate) to work smoothly.