This topic has been marked solved and closed to new posts due to inactivity. We hope you'll join the conversation by posting to an open topic or starting a new one.
I would like to speed up transferring data to and from my RN528X and note that it has two 10Gbe port. I currently have it linked to my LAN via a 1gigabit switch so can't get more than 112 Bps transfer rate.
Can anyone suggest the best (cheapest) way to shift data to/from the NAS - I guess I will need a faster switch but also high speed ethernet adaptor for PC with USB 3.1/3.2?
Yes, you could consider creating a LAG (LACP or static) from two Ethernet ports on your NAS. This requires a configureable switch at least, to configure the two ports as a static LAG or LACP LAG - otherwise there willl be some massive loop condition on your network.
Yes, you could consider creating a LAG (LACP or static) from two Ethernet ports on your NAS. This requires a configureable switch at least, to configure the two ports as a static LAG or LACP LAG - otherwise there willl be some massive loop condition on your network.
I would like to speed up transferring data to and from my RN528X and note that it has two 10Gbe port.
How many simultaneous clients are accessing the NAS?
The LAG idea from @schumaku can deliver better throughput if you have several clients reading or writing simultaneously. But it won't do anything for you if you mostly have one client accessing the NAS at a time.
Moving on to multigig. If you have just a few clients accessing the NAS at the same time, then multigig will give better results than a LAG (even if you are using ordinary gigabit for the clients).
The NAS cannot negotiate 2.5G or 5G - so it's either 1G or 10G. But you can connect it to a 10G port on a Multigig switch. 10G ports are expensive, so a reasonable strategy is to use 2.5G for most (or all clients). Keep in mind that you will need CAT6 cabling for 10G. Cat 5e is ok for 2.5G and 5G.
One inexpensive option on the switch side would be to get a QNAP QWS-2104-2T. This has two 10G ports and four 2.5G ports. Amazon US price is currently around $140. You could then connect one 10G port to the NAS. You could connect one PC to the second 10G port, and other devices to the remaining 4 2.5G ports.
There are also some inexpensive 9 port multigig switches with eight 2.5G ports and one SFP+ port. You could also get one of those, but you would need to add a 10GBASE-T SFP+ to RJ-45 transceiver for the NAS. You can find these switches for about $100 on Amazon, the transceiver adds about $40. So they are about the same price as the QNAP switch, give you more 2.5G ports, but only one 10G port.
Netgear doesn't have any similar multigig switches anywhere close to this price point.
The client side is a bit tricky. There are several inexpensive 2.5G USB-C adapters. There are a couple out there that advertise higher speeds, but they often don't deliver the speeds they claim. If you have a laptop, then I'd suggest getting one of the 2.5G ones, and see if anything new comes along that is faster later on.
If you have a desktop with an unused PCI-E slot, then you can pick up a 10G Base-T card for around $80 US.
1) Upgrade your components to 10GbE. @StephenB mentioned various switches out there, I use a multi-gig switch (XS512EM), with a windows desktop PC that has a 10GbE NIC on the motherboard. Also have a 2nd PC with an Intel X550-T2 NIC. Finally, have a Lenovo T14S with a Sonnet TB3-to-10GbE converter. That converter is plug-and-play, but it's bulky and expensive ($300'ish). May be something newer/cheaper out there that I'm unaware of. Using spinning HDD's (4TB Toshiba N300's that came with the unit), I was fetching about 400MB/s writes and 1GB/s reads on large, compressed files. Tiny files - numbers plummeted precipitously. In the last two weeks, I swapped out all 8 disks for 8 Crucial MX500 SATA3 SSD's. Roughly speaking, now I'm fetching 550-620 MB/s writes and saturating the reads at 1.1+ GB/s over a single 10GbE link. Tiny files are also now transferring at much, much faster rates, which the experts on here have explained on numerous threads (basically, the random-access speed of these SSD's is blindingly fast compared to the spinning HDD's). As a bonus, the NAS runs nearly silently now, and consumes less power.
2) Suggest to start with a single 10GbE link and see if you're happy with it. It's true that Netgear's Performance Guide for the RN528X shows it hitting roughly 1.1 GB/s write speeds and 2 GB/s read speeds with both 10GbE ETH outputs active, each running to its own switch that fans out to 2 PC's using RAM disks. Doesn't specify any LAG or LACP configurations. However, I spent weeks trying to get LAG/LACP speeds higher over a single PC with 2 ETH connections and gave up. With multiple simultaneous PC clients, it should work as others have noted See old thread:
I recently did exactly what you want to do and did essentially what @StephenB suggests. In my case, the NAS is a rack mount one with SFP+ ports, so the switch was even cheaper with 4 2.5GBE max multi-gig and two 10GBE SFP+ ports. I got significantly better performance, but didn't realize the full potential of the 2.5GBE, especially on writes, because the NAS can't keep up, so going with 10GBE on the PC side is probably a waste.
Depends on your storage media and RAID config. With SSD's, I'm seeing max writes at ~620 MB/s in RAID 6, and when I briefly tried RAID 10, I was getting about 850-900 MB/s writes. That's 2x to 3x what a 2.5GbE port can achieve. I had a weird crash during the SSD RAID 10 build - which was probably my fault as I was running file transfers while it was doing its first-time resyncing (too impatient!!! 🙂) - so I chickened out and went back to RAID 6. Even using spinning HDD's in RAID 10, peak write speeds should exceed 500 MB/s.
Read speeds also deserve consideration. Even with RAID 6, with SSD's the 10GbE link is fully saturated on reads when moving files from the NAS to my NVMe drive on the desktops or laptop. That's 4x the speed a 2.5GbE port can achieve. If reads are important to your workflow, something to consider. FWIW, the ReadyNAS performance report also achieved saturated 10GbE using 1TB HDD's in RAID 6.
Today it's pretty easy to find inexpensive combo switches that are primarily 2.5GbE with one or two 10 GbE ports. The proliferation of 2.5GbE (it's in 95% of new motherboards now) is understandable - lower power, less expensive componentry, and less expensive to implement on a PCB (10GbE can be a PITA w/ RF shielding, finicky trace layout, etc.). Good enough for most needs, but if you're sitting on a NAS with 10GbE ports, seems a waste not to make full use of them if your config can make use of them.
Yes, with SSD's, you could get >2,5GbE performance. I probably could get a bit more than 2.5 peak if I had 10G all the way to the computer, but I based my statement on sustained rates. Mine is a 12-drive RAID6 with spinning drives -- an RD5200 converted to ReadyNAS OS6. It does utilize a 4-channel SAS controller and a SAS expander backplane, so I suppose that could be slowing things down a bit.
