Netgear Stora MS2110-100NAS ver. 1.3.3.1073 with 2 - 2tb 7200 rpm hard drives
Netgear R6250 Router
Custom PC with Win10, intel I7, 16gb ram, AC1200 wireless card
Dell Desktop with Win10, intel i5, 8gb ram, gigabit hardwire
I am looking to get some help with the performance of my netgear stora.
Streaming hd movies to my tv over the years has been made easier with the upgrades that come with newer tv models.
And this feature of the unit still works great to this day.
The part that i'm getting a horrible performance on the unit is the uploading of new files to the stora.
Over the years this has gotten worse. Originally the upload speed was great on the unit.
After so long in updates I had an issue where the upload speed drop in half.
I think I was getting between 30 MB/s to 40 MB/s transfering files no matter if it was upload or download.
After the drop in half I was getting between 10 MB/s to 20 MB/s. Not the best but still do able for transfering HD movies to the drive.
At some point I did have an issue where the stora crashed and thought at one point it was bricked.
But after mutliple attempts in reflashing and updating the stora i got it back working but still on the slower speed.
Since that time I have updated to newer and faster router, internet service, computers, and larger storage drives.
Even with the upgrades, factory resets on the stora, reflashing the stora, formating the drives the unit still ran at the slower speed.
So I gave up on trying to restore the original performance i got out of the unit.
But to now recently the performance has dropped to unacceptable.
7hrs for 3gb of data. 80KB/s to 150KB/s upload speed to the Stora. Download speed is the same.
And I also have one folder that gives me I/O errors when I try to directly transfer files into it from my computer. I can however transfer to a folder before it and then cut and paste the files into the folder once on the stora. Once the files are in place I can access them just fine.
I am currently in the process of formatting the drives. After that I will try to do the reflash of the stora again.
Then I will see how the performance of the unit is after that.
If this does not restore the speed of the stora, I will however will be looking for additional suggestions and support in seeing how I can fix this performance issue with the stora.
I'm hoping to get this fixed as I am looking to purchase a new NAS system to replace the stora once i near the cap of the stora I currently have in the system. But I'm hoping to hold this off till next year, as I currently don't have the funds to buy a new NAS and Hard Drives for the upgrade I'm looking to do.
Check if drives are with either 512B or 4KB. If they are 4KB you should partition them and align at 4K partition of drives. Stora expects that HDDs are with 512B sectors and formats drives as they are with 512B, with 4K drives it suffers mostly writing serious slowdown.
I have no idea how to format the drives for the stora besides using the built in tools. I have already return the drives I bought and put the drives I had in the stora into my personal pc. I can pull the drives out of my pc and put then back in the stora. I can let the stora reformat the drives again. But beyond that, I know nothing about linux to manual do it myself. That and I'm not sure what formatting the drives will do, as the original drives in the system lost speed and the format for them never changed.
Is there a way for you to remote access the system and check it out as there will be no personal data on the unit. I have seen in previous post that an admin or tech could remote into the system and check it out
Now I have seen in other post that the recovery image site is down? So I'm assuming the reimage I did off the stora changed nothing?
I have no idea how to format the drives for the stora besides using the built in tools. I have already return the drives I bought and put the drives I had in the stora into my personal pc. I can pull the drives out of my pc and put then back in the stora. I can let the stora reformat the drives again. But beyond that, I know nothing about linux to manual do it myself. That and I'm not sure what formatting the drives will do, as the original drives in the system lost speed and the format for them never changed.
>>> Pull just one drive of them. Check on big to label for "advanced format" sign. If it exist - drive is with 4K sector. If not - check vendor support site for exact model characteristics.
>>> If you leave Stora to reformat them, you will get same result - slow performance. You will need to re-partition both of them before mounting them in unit or do it manually in unit. Under Windows I believe that you can do it etiher with Partition wizard, Acronis based disk wizard for Seagate or WD edition (depending on brand of HDDs). Under Linux which you can boot from USB flash or DVD (Live media) you can do it with partition tool embedded on that image ... Search in Google for proper and more detailed HOWTO. It's a Linux software RAID partition with XFS filesystem on top of it.
Try to replace power adapter - old and unstable power adapter could be related to slowdowns. It can even damage mechanics of the disks.
I would begin first with one drive and new power adaper in your situation. At least if you change adapter it won't hurt anything, while old one will kill the drives.
Is there a way for you to remote access the system and check it out as there will be no personal data on the unit. I have seen in previous post that an admin or tech could remote into the system and check it out
>>> No. I have no relation in any way with Netgear. I am just ordinary Stora user in terms of access to remote client units.
Now I have seen in other post that the recovery image site is down? So I'm assuming the reimage I did off the stora changed nothing?
>>> Recovery server was down for a while. Then they powered it on maybe two weeks ago.... Now I am not sure if is still up. Reimage which you did won't help - OS is on flash chip and virtually it have no relation for magnetic disks slowdown.
Thank you for the detailed reply and info. I will take a look into the formatting tools and see what I can find. I will look into seeing how much parts are for the system and if any are still around but I won't hold my breath on that with the age of the system. Looks like to me I'm fighting a losing battle, but I have already got a temp solution of using a portable hd on my tv vs the stora
If portable drive does not have external power supply (it is 2.5" magnetic drive) probably it will die faster. TVs are presumably designed to use low power flash drives and portable drives without external power supply are being damaged due to inadequate power supplied by USB port of TV. In some way I would go with new power adapter and restoration of Stora as a movie and music storage. Even that it is ancient in some way it is more reliable in my eyes 🙂
In last 5 years I am working in IT repair service centres and for that years I've seen too much 2.5" portable drives "killed" by weak USB ports of TVs, DVD players, TV tunners and similarities...
Yeah, why it is a temp solution, plus my tv did have a high amp usb port that it is being used in. Plus the other half of the trick is not to leave it plugged in 100% of the time. But got to have something up for the kids while I'm doing repair work on the stora
Where are physically connected "old/main" drives from Stora at the moment?
If they are inside your Windows PC, check them with CrystalDiskInfo or HDD sentinel (trial) - they should tell you if they are 4K or not, additionally you can see SMART health for that disks... The rest is (eventually) new 12V/5A power supply and Live Ubuntu media. For me this is shortest route ...
so the drives are 4k. i tried looking at the instructions from various sites and looks way over my head with having to know all the text commands needed for linx.
plus it looks like i would need to know which raid to use as well.
however last nite my router randomly died. so after installing and configuring the new router, I figured hell why not try the stora. back to the 20 speed i was at before. so looks like it was a router issue for half of the perfomance lost in the drives. i'm sure the other half is formating the drives correctly.
so i'm going to try finding better directions another night to see if i can format them for better performance.
i thought the ubuntu was suppose to be more visually setup but i guess when it comes to messing with the drives it is still text commands
Stora by default creates partition and formats XFS FS with 512B sector alignment.
Difference is something like 15-20MB/s -> 25-30MB/s over gigabit netwok. It's up to you either to play the game with partitioning, format and data re-upload or save yourself from that activities and stay with that 15-20MB/s speed. It mostly depends on your decision and how much time you can spend on this.
The drives are already blank, so i can redo them. I will just half to keep looking for instructions that use a visual program vs text commands. I can do a few simple text commands, but when you start getting a bunch of them together or to many commands on them, I tend to mess up. I will look at the guide once I get home and see if on a bigger screen if it will look easier. So I'm assuming the max storage option does not use raid then?
You are trading space for redundancy - If you use "Maximum storage capacity" you have twice the storage space, but half of data will be lost in case of disk failure. If you choose "RAID/Redundancy configuration", you will have half of the space compared to previous option, but data will be replicated and in case of disk failure there won't be data loss. Not sure for exact option names, but they should be similar. Depending on what you need most - more space for unimportant data like second copy for DLNA broadcasting of movies, music, pictures or safe place for your valuable memories, main copy of documents & etc. you should choose which tradeoff is suitable for you. My personal choice for storage configuration on Stora is RAID - there is stored my valuable data (pictures, current project files around stock firmware, disc backups for my server) while my music is stored on USB disk attached to router and second copy of them is on separate USB disk which stays in drawer on my desk. Movies and current downloads are on router too - they aren't important for me.
I just use the stora to stream videos. Which I have a copy of on another drive. (Was backing up the videos before I started having issues, and glad I did, lol)
What I ment by raid was for the extended storage. Raid came up alot for the search on the directions.
I just didn't know if the drives were setup in raid for faster performance on the extended storage or as 2 separate storage drives
I am not sure if it have RAID0 (joining 2 drives for capacity). As far as I can remember you can use them as JBOD (two separate disks) which is like on Windows C: and 😧 and RAID1 (mirroring of data, default). If you use it as a streaming source, probably benfit of that additiona 5-10 MB/s does not deserve hassle of manual partitioning. Especially if you use fill it via torrents. However it's just my opinion - feel free to take your decisions and deal with fulfilling them.
