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Forum Discussion
Poor streaming connection/speed
ReadyNAS NV+ v2
WNDR4500
2 x Powerline AV500
Tvix N1 Network Player
Hello. My first post at the ReadyNAS forum (previous Stora owner!).
I hope someone can help me; I'm getting really frustrated with my 'streaming experience'. Alot of folk out there seem to be able to stream HD using the ReadyNAS, so when my Stora had problems, I decided to 'upgrade' to the NV+ v2. I have spent quite a lot of money with Netgear trying to play HD media over my network; over the past few months I have been slowly upgrading my older Powerline adapters to the AV500, invested in the WNDR4500, as well as moved 'up' (?) from the Stora to the ReadyNAS, but I still cannot play HD video from the ReadyNAS through the WNDR4500 and Powerlines to my Network Player.
I did have a gigabit switch (at the Network Player end of the Powerlines so my Sky box can get online, but even with this now removed from the 'pathway' there is no improvement.
I know it's not an issue with the player as the same file will play beautifully (even at double speed) when I attach a USB2 drive directly to the player.
There is such a wealth of settings that could be made within the router and the ReadyNAS, so I'm hoping someone could give me some guidance? I have also upgraded all my cables to CAT6 (there are a couple of CAT5 but these should be OK?)
My setup is pretty basic...
ReadyNAS ---> Router ---> Powerline ---> Powerline ---> Network Player
The Powerlines are both plugged directly into the mains (no extensions). All the devices I have should (according to the literature) be capale of supplying more than one HD stream, so what have I got wrong?! Anyone got any advice please?
On the ReadyNAS I have RAIDiator 5.3.9 and the following Services; SMB NFS, ReadyDLNA, UPnP, HTTP, HTTPS and genie activated. It is setup as X-RAID2 and is fully populated with 2TB WD Reds showing '827.7 GB free of 5.4 TB'.
On the WNDR4500 I have QoS rules giving the ReadyNAS 'Highest' priority.
I had some great support from the Stora forum, so I'm hoping I can finally get to the bottom of my new problems here! Thanks in advance, guys!
Stephen
WNDR4500
2 x Powerline AV500
Tvix N1 Network Player
Hello. My first post at the ReadyNAS forum (previous Stora owner!).
I hope someone can help me; I'm getting really frustrated with my 'streaming experience'. Alot of folk out there seem to be able to stream HD using the ReadyNAS, so when my Stora had problems, I decided to 'upgrade' to the NV+ v2. I have spent quite a lot of money with Netgear trying to play HD media over my network; over the past few months I have been slowly upgrading my older Powerline adapters to the AV500, invested in the WNDR4500, as well as moved 'up' (?) from the Stora to the ReadyNAS, but I still cannot play HD video from the ReadyNAS through the WNDR4500 and Powerlines to my Network Player.
I did have a gigabit switch (at the Network Player end of the Powerlines so my Sky box can get online, but even with this now removed from the 'pathway' there is no improvement.
I know it's not an issue with the player as the same file will play beautifully (even at double speed) when I attach a USB2 drive directly to the player.
There is such a wealth of settings that could be made within the router and the ReadyNAS, so I'm hoping someone could give me some guidance? I have also upgraded all my cables to CAT6 (there are a couple of CAT5 but these should be OK?)
My setup is pretty basic...
ReadyNAS ---> Router ---> Powerline ---> Powerline ---> Network Player
The Powerlines are both plugged directly into the mains (no extensions). All the devices I have should (according to the literature) be capale of supplying more than one HD stream, so what have I got wrong?! Anyone got any advice please?
On the ReadyNAS I have RAIDiator 5.3.9 and the following Services; SMB NFS, ReadyDLNA, UPnP, HTTP, HTTPS and genie activated. It is setup as X-RAID2 and is fully populated with 2TB WD Reds showing '827.7 GB free of 5.4 TB'.
On the WNDR4500 I have QoS rules giving the ReadyNAS 'Highest' priority.
I had some great support from the Stora forum, so I'm hoping I can finally get to the bottom of my new problems here! Thanks in advance, guys!
Stephen
39 Replies
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
- Hello,
a) This could be the problem then?... There is a total useable capacity of 5.4TB (4 x 2TB using X-RAID2), with 14% free (798.7 GB).
b) The SMART Attributes for disk 1; (The other three show almost identical figures)
Raw Read Error Rate; 0
Spin Up Time: 4275
Start Stop Count: 264
Realloacated Sector Count: 0
Seek Error Rate: 0
Power On Hours: 9397
Spin Retry Count: 0
Callibration Retry Count: 0
Power Cycle Count: 264
Power-Off Retract Count: 263
Load Cycle Count: 0
Temperature Celsius: 32
Reallocated Event Count: 0
Current Pending Sector: 0
Offline Uncorrectable: 0
UDMA CRC Error Count: 0
Multi Zone Error Rate: 0
ATA Error Rate: 0
The PC I'm using to test the NAS is a Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit PC with an i5-2500K running at 3.30 GHz with 8GB RAM.
It has gigabit network - 'Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller' which Windows says is using up-to-date drivers. As far as I am aware, the 'Advanced properties' are all at their default settings, though there are some that I have wondered about changing to see if the NAS performance could be improved, but without 'expert' guidance I have resisted tempation!
Would any other information be useful?
Thanks. - The SMART info looks good. Hopefully reallocated sector count, current pending sector, and ATA error rate are 0 on all drives.
There have been some NV+ v2 users who reported reduced performance with >80% disk full. You are at 86% full. So it is possible that you are seeing this. Though 5.3.9 was supposed to include some fixes for that.
The pro and v1 NAS keep stats on ethernet errors. I'm not seeing that in the v2 software guide, but you might look for them. If you have spare ethernet cables, you might try swapping them, and seeing if ethernet performance improve.
As far as settings go, use the defaults with the following adjustments (if needed):
enable flow control
disable interrupt moderation
disable anything with "offload" in the name.
disable jumbo frames. - Good morning,
... yup. All zero on all four drives.StephenB wrote: Hopefully reallocated sector count, current pending sector, and ATA error rate are 0 on all drives.
Jumbo frames was already disabled. I have enabled Flow Control, disabled Interrupt Moderation, and all the parameters with 'offload' in the name were enabled, so I've disabled them all. Another couple of NASTesters run gave the same (actually marginally worse) write and read speeds of 29 and 23 MB/s respectively. I have tried two sets of cables from PC to router and router to NAS, but I have others and will try another pair later. - Ok.
You might also look for any power management settings, and see that they are all set to maximum performance during the test. That includes power management for both the card and the PC.
Also make sure antivirus and internet security software is turned off during the test.
The read performance in the > 70 MB/s range is for large sequential file access. That's all NAStester (http://www.808.dk/?code-csharp-nas-performance) measures. If you are testing small files or directory reads, performance will be much slower.
Also, if the test program is copying to a local PC drive, then the local drive can also limit performance. NAStester doesn't do that.
You can take the router out of the equation by doing a direct connect test (outlined here: http://www.readynas.com/kb/faq/boot/how ... _pc_or_mac). - Hi,
Thanks again. I can't see anything that could be limiting performance on the PC or network card side of things, though I have just changed the card's speed setting from 'auto-detect' to Gigabit. To be frank, I am not certain what some of the settings are (so I've left them alone).
I have also carried out a direct connection after giving the PC a static IP address... I got 29 Mb/s write and 23.8 Mb/s read. All the testing I have been doing has been with the NAS Performance tester (since you mentioned a few days ago; great tool - thanks!), and with my firewall de-activated. Seems that something is almost halving my speeds - could being 85%full really lead to this much of a performance drop?
Following your suggestions earlier, all Advanced settings other than those below are disabled;
ARP Offload - enabled
Flow Control - enabled
Priority & VLAN - Priority & VLAN enabled
Receive Buffers - 512
Receive Side Scaling - enabled
Shutdown Wake-On-Lan - enabled
Speed & Duplex - 1.0 Gbps Full Duplex (was set on Auto Negotiation)
Transmit Buffers - 128
Wake on Magic Packet - enabled
Wake on pattern match - enabled
WOL & Shutdown Link Speed - 10 Mbps First
If all this looks OK, then I assume that I'm definately looking at the NAS itself as the source of slowdown? - Those are fine settings, though I'd probably keep speed & duplex on audio.
On the disk fullness - do you have an SATA spare disk lying around? If so, you could a test with a clean install, and see how that compares.
You'd
(a) power down the NAS,
(b) remove the disks, labeling them by slot
(c) install just the temporary disk and power up
That will create a clean install that you can test.
Then shut the NAS down, and restore the original disks to get back to your current state. - Thanks for the suggestion... makes alot of sense to try this. Unfortunately I don't have a spare SATA drive at the moment. I will try and get hold of one and do exactly as you suggest.
- Shortly after my last post, I decided to wipe a drive that I had in a USB enclosure (a 500GB 7200rpm Hitachi Deskstar). I took out all the previous drives and re-fitted this one alone. On boot I got 'ReadyNAS could not mount ROOt raid d'. I tried formatting the drive as NTFS to delete the files on it, and re-fitted but still got the same message on booting the ReadyNAS. I could not access the NAS by the Dashboard. Incidentally, there seemed to be no way to power down after this message is displayed - I had to pull the power cord (always makes me shudder a little!). A quick search for similar problems all seemed to suggest a call to support was required to proceed. At this point I sighed (I've been doing alot of this recently!) and refitted the previous set of 4 drives and anxiously re-booted. All seems OK, thank God, though the 'act' light has been very busy ever since.
Not sure if I want to try this again without some reassurance! - You can unformat the drive from windows by right-clicking on "computer", and then selecting manage. then right-click on the drive graphic, and delete any volumes.
Alternatively, run the "quick" write-zeros test in western digital's lifeguard program (works with any drive). Then there are no partitions for the NAS to detect.
Do you have a backup? If not, perhaps make one before moving ahead with the speed issues.
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