My RN102 is painfully slow

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Guillaume_R wrote:

 

I just ran NASTester (doing nothing else with my PC), here are the results :

Average (W): 33,87 MB/sec
Average (R): 25,99 MB/sec

Average (W): 35,79 MB/sec
Average (R): 26,63 MB/sec

Average (W): 36,22 MB/sec
Average (R): 27,23 MB/sec

 

That looks pretty good to me ?

Here are the results I get with my own RN102 (which currently has 2x1TB Ironwolf disks):

Running a 400MB file write on \\10.0.0.13\music 5 times...
Iteration 1:     78.07 MB/sec
Iteration 2:     73.84 MB/sec
Iteration 3:     79.04 MB/sec
Iteration 4:     78.94 MB/sec
Iteration 5:     75.21 MB/sec
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Average (W):     77.02 MB/sec
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Running a 400MB file read on \\10.0.0.13\music 5 times...
Iteration 1:     70.18 MB/sec
Iteration 2:     69.20 MB/sec
Iteration 3:     70.13 MB/sec
Iteration 4:     70.34 MB/sec
Iteration 5:     69.70 MB/sec
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Average (R):     69.91 MB/sec
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This test was run on a Windows 10 desktop with an SSD hard drive.  I don't think the different disks in our NAS will affect the results much (if at all).It's possible that Windows 7 might slow your speeds down some, since it is using SMB 2.1 instead of SMB 3. 

One aspect here is that the test results do depend on the speed of the local computer drive.  So try benchmarking your PC disk, and see how well it performs. If your local disk is reasonably fast (~100MB/sec is typical for a 3.5" mechanical disk), then I think your NAS could be faster.  Though if your performance is good enough for you, then you could leave well enough alone.  

If your volume is very old, then one thing you could try is

• backing up the files
• do a factory reset, and reconfigure the NAS
• restore the files from backup

I did this myself some time ago, and it did boost the speed quite a bit.

You could also try doing the balance, and let it run to completion.  Then see if that makes any difference.

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Guillaume_R wrote:

 

One thing that would be really interesting for me is basically a "How to properly configure your Nas" kind-of guide. Could you recommend some good ressource on-line ? 

 

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I don't know of a really good resource for this.  There is a post in the idea exchange which suggests settings on the RN100 series, though I don't personally agree with all of the recommendations.

It is important to not allow your data volume to become too full.  Generally you want to keep it at least 20% free space.

I suggest turning off services in system->settings->services that you don't use. My RN102 has SMB, RSYNC, HTTP, HTTPS, UPNP, and ReadyDLNA enabled there.  If you don't use Rsync or ReadyDLNA, you could turn those off (along with UPNP).  

On the volume settings wheel, I disable checksums on the RN102.  That will improve performance some.  I keep quota enabled.  That can hurt performance a bit, but it also lets me see more details on disk space usage - which I find is worth a small performance penalty.

In the share settings, I have Bit Rot Protection turned off (and also Auto Defrag).  Bit Rot Protection will effect performance some.  I don't know if Auto Defrag is a big factor.

I don't use the "smart" snapshots - the reason why is that the oldest snapshots are never deleted.  Instead I use Custom snapshots, with "only take snapshots with changes" set.  Generally I set the retention to 3 months, and set the schedule to take snapshots daily.  This gives me some ability to roll back to older file versions, without consuming a lot of disk space.  Turning snapshots off altogether is another approach, but I do occasionally use the rollback feature.

I do recommend running the maintenance tasks on the volume settings wheel on a schedule.  I run each of them (balance, scrub, disk test, defrag) once every three months on my own NAS. 

However, the scrub and disk test will slow performance when they are running.  The tradeoff on those two is that running them regularly can identify disk or file system issues before the disks actually fail.  But of course if the performance hit is too severe, then you can't really use the NAS.  So you could adjust the frequency of those to a slower schedule if you want.

Balance and Defrag should normally complete fairly quickly (once you get the balance to complete the first time).  Generally if they take too long, the best thing to do is run them more often.