Hi there, hoping someone can help me as I'm at my wits end.
For the last 2 years I have used the same network setup. I have a Sky hub upstairs, connected directly to that is my RN104 (set to RAID1 with 2 3TB Seagate drives), my home PC and a TP-link. Downstairs I have the other TP-link connecting to an 8 port Netgear switch which connects to my TV, Raspberry Pi (previously a WDTV live media hub), PS4 etc, all over wired Ethernet. This setup worked well for me with no issues whatsoever.
Last month I decided to upgrade my broadband to Virgin as I only get around 4.5MB download from Sky and there is no fibre in my area yet. This involved a slight change of setup due to the Virgin Superhub 3 being situated downstairs. I therefore moved my NAS downstairs and connected it directly to the router. I had to swap out the switch for a 5 port 100MB Netgear switch as for some reason Virgin didn't like my old one. Also connected directly to the router was my media player.
The problem I then encountered was that when streaming any media from my NAS over wired LAN I get buffering every few minutes. It wouldn't matter the size of the file or media type. I looked in to this and tried various fixes to no avail, including swapping Ethernet cables, plugging both units in to the switch and direct to the router. In the end I gave up and cancelled Virgin to go back to Sky.
Guess what, after swapping everything back to the way it was before I still get the buffering issue, though admittedly not as bad as before but it seems a little intermittent. Over the weekend I watched a 2.8GB file with no issues. After this I went to watch a 1.5GB file and the buffering started back. I have checked error logs on the Nas (nothing sinister found) and upgraded the firmware on the Nas to 6.5 (previously running 6.2.2) but this does niothing. I have tried this with 2 different media players, both of which worked perfectly well before. I have also tried both the old and new switch.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Please help.
Yes I know, my other switch (the one I use with sky) is a GB switch. The 100Mbit worked fine before I upgraded though, I have tried both recently with the same issue.
When with virgin I took the switch out of the equation alltogether and plugged duirectly in to the router.
If you have a mixed gigabit/fast ethernet network, then the gigabit switch (or router) feeding the fast ethernet device needs enough buffering to handle the downspeeding. Otherwise they need to dump their queues and create packet loss.
You could check for
-jumbo frames enabled... They shouldn't be enabled if you have 100 mbit devices on the LAN.
-801.3x flow control. If you see options for flow control in the clients you should make sure they are set.
-check device network stats for packet loss.
You might also try connecting a switch to the router (with all wired LAN connections routed through that switch). Ideally that would be the 8 port gigabit switch, but for testing purposes you could connect the 5 port fast ethernet switch to the router and connect the 8 port upstairs.
I tried changing the MTU on my NAS from 1500 to 3000 but that made no difference, this is what you mean by enabling jumbo frames yes? Apologies my networking knowledge is limited.
What do I set flow control to?
When I was with Virgin the switch was plugged directly to the router. I tried connecting direct to router and direct through switch with the same undesirable result.
