I have bought new backup HDD (WD Elements) for my RN102. Started backup of some 3TB but only getting speed of 12MB/s. HD is formatted EXT4.I saw a thread from 2016 talking about slow USB3 backup speeds, related to NTFS drivers for OS version 6.4 and 6.5. Any ideas what I can do to increase this backup speed?Thx.

piet8stevens wrote: Any ideas what I can do to increase this backup speed? First of all, use the rear USB ports instead of the front one. The rear ports are USB 3.0, the front is USB 2.0 You might also want to connect the disk to a PC (reformatting it of course), and then testing disk performance there. Maybe try to copy the same folder over an ethernet connection, and see what speed you get.

piet8stevens wrote: In total, 6,305 items were copied, for a total of 64 GB in roughly 6 minutes (I looked at the PC clock, did not time the seconds), ie, roughly 180 MB/s. This was from the NAS? I'm guessing not, because the speed is too high there: a gigabit ethernet connection can't carry more than 120 MB/sec with any NAS The RN100 series isn't fast enough to deliver more than about 75 MB/s over gigabit ethernet. So something isn't quite right with the measurement. Assuming it was a local copy, I'd try doing a copy from the NAS to the USB drive, and see what performance you get. You could also try NasTester ( http://www.808.dk/?code-csharp-nas-performance ). The idea here is to check the performance of the RN102 itself. FWIW, I don't recommend using ext formatting for backups unless you have another machine that supports ext. A backup you can't read isn't very useful.

piet8stevens wrote: So, the question is why the usb3 on an RN102 for a direct copy is so slow. Yes. And one possible reason is that the RAID array is underperforming. That's why I suggested that you test the transfer speed of the NAS itself.

piet8stevens wrote: So, it seems it is an issue with RAID read/write times, rather than a usb3 issue. Thank you for providing advice and the link to the testing software. What can I do about RAID read/write times? It does look that way. Since you do have some familiarity with linux, you could check the RAID read speed directly on the NAS with ssh, using dd to copy to /dev/null. You could also look at the disk health - perhaps using smartctl -x. If you've never run a balance on the volume, then I do suggest doing that.

piet8stevens wrote: 1b. smartctl: I installed it on the NAS, but when I try to run it on the raid, it asks for a type to be specified (-d option). Which type It should have been already installed. On options, smartctl -a /dev/sda will give you the smart stats for the first drive. It is also possible to test the drives with --test=long (though you can also do that from the volume settings wheel in the GUI). Personally I like -x. That adds in an error log (among other things), which did find some issues with one of my WD60EFRX drives. But the output is long. I'd also download the log zip file from the web ui, and look for btrfs or disk errors in the system.log and kernel.log. Note you can also see that stuff with journalctl in ssh. Though if you do that you'll want to use a filter. For instance # journalctl --no-tail -r | grep -i btrfs Also, how full is the data volume? piet8stevens wrote: 1a. dd - on home directory: write speed of 83.6MB/s, read 132MB/s (after clearing cache) - on raid: write speed 9.4MB/s, read 21.7MB/s (after clearing cache) after balance, write speed on the NAS raid (with dd) has increased to 16.7MB/s. Read speed is still the same at 21.4MB/s. (raid) This is a little curious. Do you mean /home by "home directory"? That actually is mount point on the data volume. If you mean / then that is it's own volume - but it is also RAID-1. If you have a spare disk, you could try doing a factory install with just that disk in place, and measure the speed after setup. Best to label the real disks by slot as you remove them (powered down) so you can restore them to the same slots later on. If that gives you the expected speeds, then if both operational disks are healthy, then I'd suggest is to do a factory default with the operational drives in place (painful), rebuild the NAS, and restore the data from backup. The idea there is to get a clean file system.

RN102 USB backup speed usb3 OS6.10.2

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StephenB
Guru - Experienced User
Mar 19, 2020
piet8stevens wrote:

Any ideas what I can do to increase this backup speed?

First of all, use the rear USB ports instead of the front one. The rear ports are USB 3.0, the front is USB 2.0

You might also want to connect the disk to a PC (reformatting it of course), and then testing disk performance there. Maybe try to copy the same folder over an ethernet connection, and see what speed you get.
- piet8stevens
  Aspirant
  Mar 19, 2020
  Hello, thank you for our reply.
  The speeds I reported are from the back USB3 ports. I had the RN102 reformat the HDD to ext4.
  When I connect the drive directly to my laptop (windows 10) via USB3, I get copy speeds between 10 and 210 MB/s, depending on file size. Here, the hdd is formatted NFS. In total, 6,305 items were copied, for a total of 64 GB in roughly 6 minutes (I looked at the PC clock, did not time the seconds), ie, roughly 180 MB/s.
  
  I copy from an SSD on the laptop.
  On the NAS, I have WD Red drives in raid 1. The HDD I copy to is a WD green one.
  
  So, on the laptop, the speed is roughly 18x faster than on the NAS. That seems to be quite a factor!
  - StephenB
    Guru - Experienced User
    Mar 20, 2020
    piet8stevens wrote:
    
    In total, 6,305 items were copied, for a total of 64 GB in roughly 6 minutes (I looked at the PC clock, did not time the seconds), ie, roughly 180 MB/s.
    
    This was from the NAS? I'm guessing not, because the speed is too high there:
    
    a gigabit ethernet connection can't carry more than 120 MB/sec with any NAS
    
    The RN100 series isn't fast enough to deliver more than about 75 MB/s over gigabit ethernet.
    
    So something isn't quite right with the measurement.
    
    Assuming it was a local copy, I'd try doing a copy from the NAS to the USB drive, and see what performance you get. You could also try NasTester ( http://www.808.dk/?code-csharp-nas-performance ). The idea here is to check the performance of the RN102 itself.
    
    FWIW, I don't recommend using ext formatting for backups unless you have another machine that supports ext. A backup you can't read isn't very useful.

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RN102 USB backup speed usb3 OS6.10.2

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