PRO 6 poor read performance??

Thanks for your comments.

mdgm wrote:
StephenB wrote: forgot to post the logged Bonnie output - DD Result:59.2MB/s. As indicated in the article ReadyNAS Performance Expectations that's pretty much what you'd expect from a single hard drive.

I've read that article, and didn't see any information related to the number of hard drives installed in the NAS.

I see the "60 MB/s disk I/O of most desktop-class PCs" reference (though that number is clearly dated) - is that the number you had in mind? Connecting this particular drive (Seagate ST31500341AS) via e-sata directly to the PC, formating it as NTFS, and running Netgear's iometer script resulted in about 122 MB\s performance for both reads and writes. This is consistent with reviews on the drive (tomshardware.com for instance).

Anyway, if there is something else on how performance varies with the number of hard drives, maybe you can give me a quote to search on or something; as I'm not seeing it.

mdgm wrote:
What size file are you testing with? You should test with a file that is at least twice as large as the amount of RAM in your PC.

So far I am running Netgear's iometer.icf with no modifications. This uses a 1 GB file. I tried a drop-and-drag test with an 8 GB file, and got essentially the same results. I think Bonnie defaults to a 3 GB file, I simply ran the add-on as installed.

The PCs I've used for testing have 2-4 GB of RAM, the NAS has the 1 GB it was shipped with.

Ok, I now have 4 disks installed, which I added one at a time, waited for the volume expansion to complete, and then tested.

Bonnie (add-on disk diag) reported

1 disk - 59.7 MB/s
2 disks - 110 MB/s
3 disks - 219 MB/s
4 disks - 319 MB/s

So the disk throughput definitely goes up as you add more disks.

However, the iometer speed did not change on my Windows 7 machine. No matter how many drives were installed, I still see 55-60 MB/s of read performance, and 80-83 MB/s of write performance. So there is more investigation needed on that.

What disk(s) are in your PC? Are you using RAID in it? If you have a single mechanical hard disk in your PC that would probably be the bottleneck.

When I had this sort of problem before it turned out to be outdated NIC drivers.
I was running Win7 32bit using an Intel PRO/1000 PT PCIe.
Even after updating the drivers I found Read speed to be lower than Write speed.

I did manage to get 90MBps Write and 80+MBps Read.

This was to/from a ProPioneer with 5 drives using 9K Jumbo Frames through 2
Netgear GS108tV1 switches and CAT6 LAN.

Thx for the replies.

mdgm wrote:
What disk(s) are in your PC? Are you using RAID in it? If you have a single mechanical hard disk in your PC that would probably be the bottleneck.

I started with one ST31500341AS, and now have 4 ST31500341AS. using XR2. As noted in an earlier post, I added them one at a time (waiting for the volume expansion to complete). The internal "Bonnie" add on measured faster disk throughputs (> 300 MB/s with 4 drives), but the network read speed did not change much.

victorhortaliveson wrote:
When I had this sort of problem before it turned out to be outdated NIC drivers. I was running Win7 32bit using an Intel PRO/1000 PT PCIe. Even after updating the drivers I found Read speed to be lower than Write speed. I did manage to get 90MBps Write and 80+MBps Read. This was to/from a ProPioneer with 5 drives using 9K Jumbo Frames through 2 Netgear GS108tV1 switches and CAT6 LAN.

The Windows 7 machine is a T410 laptop with an i7 processor. I found a newer NIC driver, and have fiddled with settings - so far I haven't seen much improvement there. I've tried direct connect, but generally find that connecting through my GS108TV2 gives the same results, and is much simpler. Cabling is Cat 5E, but very short (5 feet cables). Jumbo frames help on the Win7 for reads, but seem to hurt it for writes.

One challenge on the Windows 7 system is that I cannot turn off the antivirus stuff (it is a corporate machine, and I cannot change the domain policies).

The Vista machine has a RealTek adapter, I haven't found newer drivers (except for suspicious hits on "driver update" software sites). I can turn the firewall off on that (which does help some).

BTW, is NFS faster? If so, which clients are folks using? What about iSCSI?

When I said PC, I was referring to your Windows machine not the NAS.

How many and what disks are in your Windows machine? Are you using RAID in your Windows machine?

FYI my PC was an i3-540 on a Gigabyte M-ITX mobo using an Intel SSD.
I had much the same I/O results using the mobo NIC - Realtek RTL8111E.


Have you tried changing the Flow Control settings ? I changed them to be active.
I also remember that there were problems with the settings on the switches.

You might also install NetMeter on the PC and have a look at the trace of the data transfers. I found that there was a lot of up/down traffic that caused stop/start behaviour.

It's here : http://www.metal-machine.de/readerror/i ... ;dl=item23

mdgm wrote:
When I said PC, I was referring to your Windows machine not the NAS. How many and what disks are in your Windows machine? Are you using RAID in your Windows machine?

Oops, sorry I misread it. The T410 is a laptop, it has a single 500 GB hard drive (7200 rpm, but only 60 MB/s). So I can only get useful numbers for it with IOmeter, since if I copy information to the drive, I will be limited by it. I have some esata drives that are faster, but haven't had a chance to plug them in. The Vista machine does not have raid. The C drive is a performance WD 1 TB (forget the exact model), there is also a 2 TB WD and a 1 TB Seagate. All run in excess of 100 MB/s. I also have an XP desktop with 3-4 fast drives, but haven't tried that one for benchmarking. (Also doesn't run raid).

victorhortaliveson wrote:

FYI my PC was an i3-540 on a Gigabyte M-ITX mobo using an Intel SSD. I had much the same I/O results using the mobo NIC - Realtek RTL8111E. Have you tried changing the Flow Control settings ? I changed them to be active. I also remember that there were problems with the settings on the switches. You might also install NetMeter on the PC and have a look at the trace of the data transfers. I found that there was a lot of up/down traffic that caused stop/start behaviour. It's here : http://www.metal-machine.de/readerror/i ... ;dl=item23

thx for the pointer on Netmeter. Flow control is on in the NIC cards (and also is enabled in the GS108Tv2). The Vista machine has RealTek RTL8168C(P)/8111C(P), the T410 has an Intel 82577LM. IF anyone has suggesting settings for either, that would be useful.

BTW, I get much faster IOmeter readings if I change the number of outstanding transactions from 1 to something higher. So there may be a clue there.

StephenB wrote:
BTW, I get much faster IOmeter readings if I change the number of outstanding transactions from 1 to something higher. So there may be a clue there.

I had the same sort of problem.
I was using ViceVersa to mirror between two ProPioneers through the PC. If I started two instances then the overall transfer rate increased dramatically. It was as if something was timing out with one instance but wasn't with more than one.
I forget how I solved this, but I reinstalled practically everything inc the OS on the 2 NASs.
Having a misbehaving drive also makes Read rates drop off.

I remember now that there have been lots of forum posts on this subject. It causes the biggest problems on HD movie streaming. See : https://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopi ... 21&t=44713

Seems to be an interaction between NIC drivers, network settings and some recent bugs in ReadyNAS CIFS firmware.