NV+ Transfer rates

[trumpy81]

GDay All,

I have just installed a RND4000 V3 NV+ onto my network and I'm a little disappointed with the transfer speeds. At best I get an average of 7.2mb/s up and down which is dismal compared to the 90mb/s transfer rates I get between the main computer and the computer downstairs. I get similar performance between my PVR computer also. All have gigabit NICs. The two machines upstairs connect directly to the router while the machine downstairs connects via a switch. The ReadyNAS is upstairs and connects directly to the router.

I have tried turning on Jumbo packets, but that made no difference at all. I don't know what else to try or what to look for in the settings to correct the performance issue. I would expect to get 20 or 30mb/s transfers with my current setup.

Anyone have any suggestions or tips to get better transfer rates?

My specs:
Main computer: Realtek Gigabit NIC (Built-In Asus Sabertooth X58)
Netgear CG3000 Gigabit Cable Modem/Router (Optus).
3x Seagate ST2000DL003-9VT166 [1862 GB]
1x Hitachi HDS722020ALA330 [1862 GB]

[StephenB]

Try doing a direct connect between the NV+ and one of your PCs, and see what speed you get. (http://www.readynas.com/kb/faq/boot/how ... _pc_or_mac)

BTW, by 90 mb/s do you mean 90 megabytes per second or 90 megabits per second. Normally 90 megabytes per second is upper-case (90 MB/s).

[trumpy81]

I did mean MB/s (megabytes per second) damn keyboard .... lol

I'll try the direct connection idea and get back to you with the results.

[trumpy81]

Using Direct Connection I get an average of 13 MB/s better but not great.

[StephenB]

Ok. I would look for ethernet errors on the NV+ network stats, and also confirm that the disk health is good.

Then do some tuning with direct connection. Often turning off the "offload" options on the PC NIC speeds things up.

[trumpy81]

Disk Health is good. I tried turning off the Offload options for my NIC but they made things slow down if anything. Network Errors according to the ReadyNAS show the following:

Auto Negotiation = 6
Bad Packets = 0
Disconnect = 0
False carrier = 5
Idle errors = 1275
Link failures = 0
Recieve errors = 30695
Symbol errors = 0
VLAN tags = 0
TCP Retransmits = 177
Unrecovered TCP Retransmits = 36

Does that give any clues?

[StephenB]

Are you using cat 5e or cat 6 cable? Also, if you look at the numbers before/after a transfer are you seeing increases in the errors?

[trumpy81]

I'm using Cat 5e cables. Not sure what the ReadyNAS was supplied with though, I assume it's Cat5e also.

Before doing a 1GB transfer the error numbers were as before except for TCP Retransmits = 181. No change after the transfer.

[StephenB]

ok, so there is no increase in the error stats during the 1 GB xfer.

Not sure if the NV+ was shipped with a 5e cable or not, though the grade is almost always printed on the cable, so you can check.

Do you have flow control enabled on the realtek? Also, did you test both read and write speeds?

[trumpy81]

Tried a 2.5GB write to the NAS. Average speed was 14.0MB/s. Flow Control is enabled on the Realtek NIC.

[StephenB]

ok. What firmware are you running? Any add-ons?

Also, is there any sign that the NAS is resyncing? Or any errors in the SMART+ logs under disk health?

[trumpy81]

I disabled Flow Control on the Realtek NIC and repeated the read/write tests with the same 2.5GB file. Read speed averaged 20MB/s, Write speed averaged 15MB/s. A big difference. Still not great on the write speed, but certainly a lot closer than when I started.

Then I did a test with 158,000 small files (4.2GB), average write speed was between 2.0MB/s and 4MB/s. I let it transfer for about 1 hour before cancelling. 3GB had transferred by that stage.

Deleting the small files from the NAS took just as long and was just as slow too.

There are no signs of any resyncing and no discernible smart errors on any of the drives. The X-Raid array reports as Redundant. 3055 GB (55%) of 5533 GB used.

Running RAIDiator 4.1.8

I have iTunes Streaming server and ReadyDLNA server with Tivo support enabled. (I don't actually have a Tivo, but thought it wouldn't hurt with my current Probox PVR)

Bonjour and UPnP are running. No additional add-ons installed and no other standard add-ons running.

Original Shares (Backup & Media) were deleted and 2 shares added with CIFS only.

BTW the cable that came with the ReadyNAS is Cat5e. It was marked on the cable but it was hiding amongst all the other specifications on the cable ... lol

[StephenB]

It is interesting that disabling flow control helped. That suggests to me that you should try increasing the number of receive and transmit buffers on the Realtek. Flow control shouldn't really be kicking in on a direct connect (particularly on reads, since the PC should be able to keep up).

You might also try turning off "interrupt moderation", and see if that helps or hurts.

BTW, if your original firmware was 4.1.6 or earlier, you might not have 4K sector alignment on the NAS. 4K alignment is needed to get good performance with 2 TB drives. Here is info here on how to confirm alignment: http://www.rnasguide.com/2011/06/22/why ... -readynas/

If you don't have 4K alignment, you would need to do a factory reset to get it.

[trumpy81]

Sorry for the delayed response, I've been a bit busy with other things.

I tried with 'Interrupt Moderation' disabled, no change.

I checked 4K sectors but I'm using 16384. I think I had 4.1.6 installed from the start. The first thing I did though was to update the firmware to 4.1.8. It may have been part of the install procedure, not sure now.

Went through all the logs looking for clues. Only thing I found was that the NTP servers, time-e.netgear.com & time-h.netgear.com, don't work in my neck of the woods, so I changed to time.microsoft.com.

There are quite a few errors in httpd_errors.log though.

With the NAS back on the network, I'm seeing around 12MB/s Read and 14MB/s, but nothing I have tried has improved things from there.

[StephenB]

block size and sector alignment are two different sections in the link I posted. You didn't go far enough down.

All systems that started with 4.x have 16384 block size. System that started with 4.1.7 or later also have 4K sector alignment.

[trumpy81]

Thanks Stephen, I really appreciate your help. OK I can't remember exactly what firmware was on The ReadyNAS when I switched it on, so I have gone ahead and done a Factory Reset. That will take some time and I will have to restore the files that were on there and that's gonna take some time 😞

Took me 3 Days before, so if it's any faster it should show ... lol

I'll let you know when everything is back up and I'll see if any settings make a difference this time also.

Fingers crossed 😉

[trumpy81]

Well, after doing the factory reset and waiting for the volume to resync (9 hours), I am finally starting to upload the files back onto the ReadyNAS. The bad news is that there is absolutely no change. Write speed is averaging between 12MB/s & 14MB/s, don't know about read speed but I suspect it will be just as dismal as it was before 😞

It appears that this is the best I'm going to get from this particular NAS 😞

[BikeHelmet]

Turn jumbo frames off. Try turning journalling off too. Then reboot the NAS and test again. You should be able to get higher speeds than you're getting.

How are you measuring read/write speeds? An hour at even 2MB/sec is 7.2GB - far more than your data set, indicating your file copy speed isn't very accurate. Have you tried replacing it with something more accurate like TeraCopy? (Free for personal use.)
http://codesector.com/downloads/

[StephenB]

BikeHelmet wrote:

Turn jumbo frames off. Try turning journalling off too. Then reboot the NAS and test again. You should be able to get higher speeds than you're getting. How are you measuring read/write speeds? An hour at even 2MB/sec is 7.2GB - far more than your data set, indicating your file copy speed isn't very accurate. Have you tried replacing it with something more accurate like TeraCopy? (Free for personal use.) http://codesector.com/downloads/

He started by saying he had tried jumbo frames on and off, and that it made no difference.

Journalling slows write speeds, but I don't think it will slow read speeds. Since both his read and write times are on the slow side, that doesn't seem likely. In any event, it is a bad idea to turn off journalling unless you have a UPS.

I agree that the speed for his transfer of 160,000 small files is not correct - 3 GB per hour is actually less than 1 MB/sec. Not sure that means his other speeds are off - the numbers in the 160K test are clearly approximate.

TeraCopy or other copy accelerators could well speed things up, though he should be getting faster speeds with straight windows drag-and-drop.

[trumpy81]

BikeHelmet, I did try turning on Jumbo Frames, but that had no effect on the transfer rates at all. Full Journaling is off, Journaling is on. I have turned off Optimise for OS/X also, but that has made no difference either.

I do have an MGE Nova 1100 AVR UPS and it is on the compatibility list, but I don't have the NAS plugged into it, not enough receptacles on the UPS for the NAS. I have the Main Computer and 2 Monitors plugged into the UPS so that I am able to shut down all programs before shutting down the main computer if the power fails.

When transferring a lot of small files, getting an accurate transfer rate is difficult because there is a lot of fluctuation in actual speeds. I use Sysmetrix to gauge the throughput of the network and it reports the average transfer speed. But as you and Stephen have both pointed out, my transfer rates are even more dismal than I thought.

I started uploading 1898 files totalling 1.51TB at 5:30am Saturday, it is now 7:45am Sunday and so far only 1522 files have been transferred totalling 1218 GB - 546MB for the system files already on the NAS before I started the file transfer.

It's not hard to see why I am disappointed in the transfer speeds I am getting with this particular NAS, especially when you consider that I can achieve, and regularly do get 90MB/s transfer speeds between my Main computer upstairs and the second computer downstairs, which indicates that there is nothing wrong with my overall network setup.

With all the settings that I have enabled/disabled by now I would have thought that I would have stumbled upon the magic combination that would allow this NAS to transfer at better speeds than I am seeing.

I may have to contact Netgear and see what their take is on this matter, they were quite helpful when I contacted them about the 3TB drive issue I had. That was my fault though, I was looking at the wrong compat. list when I bought the drives. Luckily, I already had 4 2TB drives on hand so it was simply a matter of swapping them for the 3TB drives I had bought for this NAS.

[BikeHelmet]

Jumbo Frames slow the NV+ down. You definitely want them off.

Are your PCs all running Windows 7?

Using these options I get 35MB/sec read speeds, 15-20MB/sec write speeds:





Have you updated to the latest Realtek NIC drivers, by any chance?

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/dow ... Down=false

What firmware version is your NAS running?

Have you tinkered with any of the options in the Device Manager? (Advanced tab for your NIC) That's where Flow Control is listed at. I didn't have to tweak anything in there, but I did raise the buffer counts to the max possible.

[trumpy81]

BikeHelmet, I suggest you read all of this thread. All of the suggestions, except for updating the Realtek drivers have been performed. I am using the Realtek Drivers as supplied by Asus and I am currently in the process of updating the NAS to 4.1.9. You may be aware that the Realtek receive and transmit buffers cannot be increased above the current limits of 512 and 128 respectively. Also, my Realtek Drivers at present, do not cover IPv6 for some reason. I have been unable to find a driver update for this particular Realtek chipset though. The chipset is RTL8211/8212 and is not listed on The Realtek Taiwan website. It is builtin to the Asus X58 Sabertooth motherboard.

The NAS was updated at first switch on and was 4.1.8 at the time of the factory reset. I'm hoping 4.1.9 will be the magic bullet but I won't hold my breath ... lol

I do have another question to ask you and Stephen though, does your NAS fan increase in speed at random intervals?

My fan seems to have a mind of it's own and will increase in speed and volume at what appears to be random intervals. I could understand it if the drives were increasing in temperature, but they don't appear to be. I don't have an actual thermometer to read the drive or even the enclosure temp with and the Smart logs don't indicate any changes in temp of the drives, so there is nothing to show why the fan speed increases. There is no mention of the increased fan speed anywhere within the logs either.

[BikeHelmet]

trumpy81 wrote:
The chipset is RTL8211/8212 and is not listed on The Realtek Taiwan website. It is builtin to the Asus X58 Sabertooth motherboard.

I suspect that's just a marketing name. Realtek has all their HD Audio drivers and PCIe NIC drivers in the same zips/installers. If you grab the right installer from the page I linked, it'll probably install just fine, despite not listing that particular one.

trumpy81 wrote:
The NAS was updated at first switch on and was 4.1.8 at the time of the factory reset. I'm hoping 4.1.9 will be the magic bullet but I won't hold my breath ... lol

Good luck. T15 has good reports so far. Hope it helps.

Edit: Ahh, 4.1.9 was just released!

trumpy81 wrote:
I do have another question to ask you and Stephen though, does your NAS fan increase in speed at random intervals?

Last time I checked, they did - but my NAS is now in another room, so I can't say for certain if it's been doing it recently.

trumpy81 wrote:

My fan seems to have a mind of it's own and will increase in speed and volume at what appears to be random intervals. I could understand it if the drives were increasing in temperature, but they don't appear to be. I don't have an actual thermometer to read the drive or even the enclosure temp with and the Smart logs don't indicate any changes in temp of the drives, so there is nothing to show why the fan speed increases. There is no mention of the increased fan speed anywhere within the logs either.

It could be related to CPU usage. If you SSH in and run top, you can see the CPU usage bouncing all over the place as the NAS and your addons do things.

[trumpy81]

If you SSH in and run top, you can see the CPU usage bouncing all over the place as the NAS and your addons do things.

BikeHelmet, I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'run top' ?

I completed the update to 4.1.9 and it did make a small improvement to the write speeds. I'm now getting an average of 15.5MB/s, but it fluctuates between almost 0 and 18.2MB/s when transferring files between 300MB and 2GB.

The fan speed seems to adjust much less frequently and to a slightly slower speed than before also. Overall, at this point in the game, I'd have to say that FW 4.1.9 is a winner! ... :lol:

I did manage to find an update for my NIC Drivers. Oddly enough though, the NIC on this motherboard is PCI and NOT PCIe. I have no idea why ASUS chose to use a PCI chipset instead of PCIe, but that's how it goes ... :lol:

The drivers made no difference though and they still don't include IPv6 for some reason. Since IPv6 has finally been rolled out I find it odd that this NIC doesn't seem to support it, or maybe it does but there are no options to change it? I'm sure the NIC's in my other machines do support IPv6 though.

[BikeHelmet]

'top' is a linux command which gives you CPU/memory usage stats for all the processes currently running. Think of it as a text-based 'Task Manager'.

IPv6 should work fine over any NIC - but there won't be any acceleration or offloading, so your CPU has to do all the work. Over the PCI bus (rather than PCIe), and with extra CPU overhead... I can't see you ever getting full gigabit speeds for IPv6 stuff. Oh well, not a major loss.