Wireless Performance to ReadyNAS - at my wits' end...

I have been having problems with wireless access to my ReadyNASes for a few weeks now.

I think I can trace the problem back to replacement of my old router and access point with new stuff. The problems have started in earnest from then.

Wireless performance is a real dog. Typically I am only achieving transfer speeds of under 500kb per sec on Wireless transfers. This seems to be true for both of the PCs I am testing with. Gb files take hours to transfer.

Wired performance is adequate in that I have been seeing transfer rates of 7-13 MB per sec. While that means performance is not excruciatingly slow, it still is not good.

Particularly frustrating is the time it takes to load thumbnails on picture files. You're talking 10-15 seconds for each one to come through (on Wireless). On wired connection it's not great, but it's nothing like as bad.

The equipment:

ReadyNAS Duo - RAIDiator 4.1.12
ReadyNAS NV+ v2 - RAIDiator 5.3.8
Router Netgear WNDR4500v2
Access Point Netgear WNAP320
Switches are GS605 or GS608
Cat 5 cable connections
The PCs have, respectively, a wireless g card and a wireless n card. They are running Win7; one is 32 bit the other is 64.

The problem is equally bad on the Duo as the NV+. The speed on wireless is no better on the machine with the n card.

What have I tried?
- Trying to get a Wired connection to work first - see results above
- Turning off firewalls and anti-virus - minor improvement
- Disabling the Disk Write Cache - nothing noticeable
- Checking jumbo frames is off. I could confirm this on the Duo but the NV+ is rather more inpenetrable and I couldn't find anywhere to change this setting
- Disabling the 'Large Send Offset' in the Properties of the network adapter (only available in the Wired Network Card anyway)
- Messing with the MTUs. My router has a default of 1492, presumably because it's using PPPoE to the internet. The ReadyNAS boxes were initially 1500. I tried changing this down to 1492 on the Duo and this did help - thumbnails would load at one every second or so, so a lot faster. However I cannot find a way to change the MTU on the NV+ v2. Additionally I've played with the MTU on the PCs. I did a few tests to determine what 'should be the optimum' and by my calculation it should be 1500. I have tried 1492, 1460 and 1430. Same result with all - no better

What do I try next?

Richard

PS I've tried to go to the 'How to Optimise the ReadyNAS performance' page but at the moment it just returns a 404. So apologies if there are steps in that document that I need to take first.

Performance

22 Replies

Replies have been turned off for this discussion

fastfwd

Virtuoso

Nov 10, 2013

wetenhr wrote:
I would love to know what you have to do in order to achieve some of the extraordinary transfer speeds others have reported on Wired! Would be great to achieve that as occasionally I have large transfers to achieve on backups (100s of Gb) and it makes a difference. If there are certain NICs that are known to work better than others (mine is an Atheros AR8151 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet card) then I would swap in a heartbeat if I knew it would work.

wetenhr wrote:
I would love to know what you have to do in order to achieve some of the extraordinary transfer speeds others have reported on Wired! Would be great to achieve that as occasionally I have large transfers to achieve on backups (100s of Gb) and it makes a difference. If there are certain NICs that are known to work better than others (mine is an Atheros AR8151 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet card) then I would swap in a heartbeat if I knew it would work.

Well, I get these wired-Ethernet speeds on my Pro Pioneer:

NAS performance tester 1.4 http://www.808.dk/?nastester
Running warmup...
Running a 400MB file write on drive W: 5 times...
Iteration 1:     110.80 MB/sec
Iteration 2:     101.27 MB/sec
Iteration 3:     110.19 MB/sec
Iteration 4:     105.26 MB/sec
Iteration 5:     101.78 MB/sec
------------------------------
Average (W):     105.86 MB/sec
------------------------------
Achievement unlocked: 100MB+/sec write speed!
Running a 400MB file read on drive W: 5 times...
Iteration 1:     104.71 MB/sec
Iteration 2:     112.04 MB/sec
Iteration 3:     111.73 MB/sec
Iteration 4:     107.82 MB/sec
Iteration 5:     105.54 MB/sec
------------------------------
Average (R):     108.37 MB/sec
------------------------------
Achievement unlocked: 100MB+/sec read speed!

Your Duo won't achieve those speeds, of course, but here's my setup; maybe configuring your system similarly will increase your speeds:

PC: Quad-core i7 laptop, Win7/64

NIC: Realtek RTL8167-based PCIe gigabit, driver version 7.073

Router: Cisco/Linksys E4200 running DD-WRT

NAS: Pro Pioneer with 5 drives, RAID5

Cables: Cat-5, I think (but none of the cables is longer than 2 meters, so it probably doesn't matter)

Wireless speed could probably be improved, but it isn't terrible:

NAS performance tester 1.4 http://www.808.dk/?nastester
Running warmup...
Running a 400MB file write on drive W: 5 times...
Iteration 1:     14.19 MB/sec
Iteration 2:     14.32 MB/sec
Iteration 3:     14.21 MB/sec
Iteration 4:     14.40 MB/sec
Iteration 5:     14.52 MB/sec
------------------------------
Average (W):     14.33 MB/sec
------------------------------
Running a 400MB file read on drive W: 5 times...
Iteration 1:     10.35 MB/sec
Iteration 2:     9.87 MB/sec
Iteration 3:     10.95 MB/sec
Iteration 4:     9.17 MB/sec
Iteration 5:     11.15 MB/sec
------------------------------
Average (R):     10.30 MB/sec
------------------------------

WiFi card: Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300, driver version 15.2.0.19

Router: Cisco/Linksys E4200 running DD-WRT

fastfwd

Virtuoso

Dec 23, 2013

Update: Changed my router to an Asus RT-N66U running DD-WRT. All else configured as above.

Wired speed was already close to the gigabit Ethernet limit with the old router, and is basically unchanged with this one:


NAS performance tester 1.4 http://www.808.dk/?nastester
Running warmup...
Running a 400MB file write on drive W: 5 times...
Iteration 1:     111.11 MB/sec
Iteration 2:     111.42 MB/sec
Iteration 3:     97.32 MB/sec
Iteration 4:     110.50 MB/sec
Iteration 5:     89.89 MB/sec
------------------------------
Average (W):     104.05 MB/sec
------------------------------
Achievement unlocked: 100MB+/sec write speed!
Running a 400MB file read on drive W: 5 times...
Iteration 1:     113.64 MB/sec
Iteration 2:     110.50 MB/sec
Iteration 3:     114.29 MB/sec
Iteration 4:     112.04 MB/sec
Iteration 5:     108.40 MB/sec
------------------------------
Average (R):     111.77 MB/sec
------------------------------
Achievement unlocked: 100MB+/sec read speed!

Wireless speed (5.2GHz 802.11n, as before) is better with this router:


NAS performance tester 1.4 http://www.808.dk/?nastester
Running warmup...
Running a 400MB file write on drive W: 5 times...
Iteration 1:     20.82 MB/sec
Iteration 2:     21.22 MB/sec
Iteration 3:     21.94 MB/sec
Iteration 4:     22.06 MB/sec
Iteration 5:     19.11 MB/sec
------------------------------
Average (W):     21.03 MB/sec
------------------------------
Running a 400MB file read on drive W: 5 times...
Iteration 1:     13.67 MB/sec
Iteration 2:     12.45 MB/sec
Iteration 3:     13.81 MB/sec
Iteration 4:     13.61 MB/sec
Iteration 5:     13.59 MB/sec
------------------------------
Average (R):     13.43 MB/sec
------------------------------

Forum Discussion

Wireless Performance to ReadyNAS - at my wits' end...

22 Replies

Related Content

Wireless Performance Mixing AC3000 / AC2200

RN102 slow performances

WIFI performance D6400 AC1600

RAX-15 Router extremely poor wireless performance

RAX120 v RAXe500 performance

NETGEAR Academy

ProSupport for Business