NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Forum Discussion
SMB over RN528X not working
Setup:
- Core i7 PC, Win10 Home x64, with Intel X550-T2 dual 10GbE NIC card, and EVO 970 Plus SSD hard drive
- XS716E 10GbE switch
- RN528X with dual 10GbE ports
- RN212 with dual 1GbE ports
- Qty 6 Cat6A ETH cables, 3' each
- PC/RN528X/RN212 all connected to switch
- Switch backhauls to Orbi WiFi6 router, which administers DHCP for entire network - no Static IP's other than a printer
- "SMB Plus" app is loaded on both NAS boxes; all values are left as default (experimented with encryption disable/enable, and SMB version min/max, none of these made a difference)
Using NAS Performance Tester 1.7, or ATTO, or Cyrstal Disk Benchmark, all return similar results.
PC-to-RN528X: 1 GB/s read, 600 MB/s write (NAS Performance Tester 1.7 shows 900 MB/s write, it's the only discrepancy)
PC-to-RN212: 117 MB/s read, 117 MB/s write (NAS PT 1.7 agrees in this case)
Using Task Manager/Performance Monitor, I can see that only one ETH is active on the PC, with transfers to/from either NAS. From YouTube videos I see others are observing both ETH ports sharing the load equally. So from my point of view, SMB is not working.
Expecting RN212 to run at over 200MB/s when SMB is working. Not sure if to expect anything more from the RN528X as I may be running up against its limits. However in Netgear's "NAS Performance Guide" it does show the RN528X capable of 2+ GB/s. My PC has qty 2 970 Evo Plus that I've tested and they can easily move data well above 1GB/s in either direction, so that's not the limitation.
First things first. Are there any WINDOWS 10 HOME settings I need to modify? Looked at "Turn Features On/Off" and saw that SMB1.0 is not checked. Don't believe that's an issue since that's a very old protocol and I understand ReadyNAS boxes support SMB3.1.1 natively.
Checked NIC card settings. RSS is enabled - saw on an L1 Tech YouTube vidwo that he disabled RSS. Tried that, didn't help.
Spent a lot of time on this, any help greatly appreciated.
34 Replies
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
If you just have two independent ports from your PC connected to your router/switch, that's the way it works. Your PC is only initiating the exchange on one port, so the NAS can only respond on that one. And, of course, all connections from the NAS to the PC must be capable of the speed you are wanting.
If you do have the two PC ports joined with link aggregation and all links in the pathway are capable of the faster speed, what aggregation method are you using?
Sandshark wrote:If you just have two independent ports from your PC connected to your router/switch, that's the way it works. Your PC is only initiating the exchange on one port, so the NAS can only respond on that one. And, of course, all connections from the NAS to the PC must be capable of the speed you are wanting.
If you do have the two PC ports joined with link aggregation and all links in the pathway are capable of the faster speed, what aggregation method are you using?
Thanks Sandshark. Already went down the Link Aggregation path - resulted in zero speed improvement. Link aggregation only helps when you're dealing with multiple clients. My goal here is different - just want faster NAS reads/writes to one PC. Since you asked, for Link Aggregation I did the following: (1) configured X550-T2 for StaticLinkAggregation using Powershell, and verified the combined link was listed by Windows as 20 Gbps, (2) set up the XS716E for static LAG (it doesn't support LACP), with LAG1 on Ports 1&2 (RN528X), LAG2 on ports 3&4 (RN212), and LAG3 on ports 7&8 (PC), and (3) configured NAS NIC's as Bonded using RoundRobin option. Transfers were identical to just one ETH port, as expected since I only have one PC running.
The promise of SMB multichannel is much different. When properly configured, Windows automatically bonds DHCP-assigned ports between devices and automatically shares bandwidth over those ports, whether 2, 3, 4 or more (in my case, 2 ports on each device). I've watched numerous YouTube demos of this working between a single PC and a NAS, and have read multiple articles explaining same. In most cases, the PC used by these guys is running a Windows Server flavor (2012 or higher). Windows Server is "plug and play" for SMB multichannel - you can literally just plug in two cables into the NAS and get double the bandwidth instantly (again, only limited by your PC's and NAS's HW). But there's precious little info out there for Windows 10 users. I've confirmed through Powershell that SMB2.0 is "True" and so is SMB Multichannel. So in theory Windows is set up and should just "work". I'm looking for examples from anyone who has actually made this work over pedestrial Windows, as opposed to Windows Server.
NETGEAR Academy
Boost your skills with the Netgear Academy - Get trained, certified and stay ahead with the latest Netgear technology!
Join Us!
