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Forum Discussion
Slow USB backup speed - ReadyNAS Pro 6
Hi all,
I am trying to backup my ReadyNAS Pro to an external USB drive connected to a back USB port, however, the backup speed is incredibly slow. There is approximatly 2 TB of data on the NAS...
I haven't benchmarked this myself, but I believe the normal backup speed for NTFS on the Pro-6 would be around 10 MB/s. NTFS cluster size could be part of the issue, but I don't think that would account for all of it. It should be 4 KB.
Another option on formatting is to switch to EXT. But if you do that, I strongly recommend getting EXT drivers on your PC, so you can read the backup on another device. Paragon has an inexpensive package that supports it: https://www.paragon-software.com/us/home/linuxfs-windows/
Is it possible that the Seagate drive is SMR? Many of the larger Seagate external disks are, and that can have a big impact on sustained write performance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording
If you have another (perhaps older) USB drive, you could try a test with that connected to the NAS, and see if you get better speeds.
The Pro 6 only has USB 2.0, so you will get faster backup speeds over gigabit ethernet. Current disk drivers in Windows (or Mac) might also give you better performance with SMR. The disk drivers in your Pro pre-date that technology.
Thanks for the suggestions. I checked and the cluster size is set to 4 KB. The SMR idea is a possibility, I think it is an SMR drive. Unfortunately I don't have a standard drive around to test with right now.
I feel like the speeds I'm getting are still low for writing to a previously empty SMR drive, since it would not have to overwrite previous tracks, but I don't really know the details of how this operates.
I guess I'll have to find a different drive to test with if I want to narrow down the issue further.
David_H wrote:
I feel like the speeds I'm getting are still low for writing to a previously empty SMR drive, since it would not have to overwrite previous tracks, but I don't really know the details of how this operates.
I don't think the disk knows that it doesn't have to overwrite, since it isn't file-system aware. The only mechanism would be if it is aware of never-written tracks. That seems unlikely, though I guess it is possible.
Back when these drives were first introduced, there were driver modifications made in linux to improve their performance. But the pro-6 was already near end-of-life when that happened, and they weren't back-ported to it. That's why I am thinking that you might get better speed if you back up over the network (connecting the drive to a PC).
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