Thecus N2100 6-7 MB/sec okay?

[SoMoney]

Hi everyone, first post!
I have:

NAS: Thecus N2100
SWITCH: DLINK DGL4300 GigE Switch/Router.
MBOARD: Gigabyte 965P v2.0 Motherboard
NIC: on board Marvell 10/100/1000


I have activated matching 7000 JumboPackets on the Thecus & My NIC.
My best speeds appear to be in the 6-7MB/sec range.

Is this good?!

[spiken]

Not really...
What kind of cable do you use ?
What s speed do you have with jumbo off ?
Try another jumbo size to see what s better.

[SoMoney]

Updated my Firmware this morning from 2.01.06 to 2.01.09 (No Change)

I'm using the cable the came with the N2100. I've tried all MTU(JumboPacket)Settings.....
Since Windows onlly gives you 3 MTU settings to choose from I even tried editing my registry to add 4000 and 7000 specifically to match thecus.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0004\Ndi\Params\*JumboPacket\enum]
"0"="1514 Bytes"
"1"="4088 Bytes"
"2"="9014 Bytes"
"3"="4000 Bytes"
"4"="7000 Bytes"


7000 gives me the best speed 7MB/sec. What do others get?

I'm backing up my Movie folder right now (400GB). Its been running from 12AM untill now 8AM and looks to be approximately 75% done.
I dont see any errors or dropped packets, so im not sure what a new cable will do but Ill try:


NASBOX:~# ifconfig -a
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:14:FD:10:432
inet addr:192.168.1.100 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.254.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:7000 Metric:1
RX packets:88213975 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:450384776 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:1289737692 (1.2 GiB) TX bytes:314172517 (299.6 MiB)
Interrupt:27

[spiken]

To use GigE connection you must have cable at least Cat5e or Cat6, that s print on it.
According to smallnetbuilder most of the time the best result is using 4K jumbo size. An other thing is if your your lan have both 100Mb and GigE connections silmutaneous to your nas you should deactivate pause frames option to improve your performance.
To change your windows jumbo frame setting you just have to go into the "hardware device settings" dialog, right click on you lan card select "property" then select the "advance" menu, click on the jumbo frame option and finally select your wanted speed.

[SoMoney]

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:14:FD:10:432
inet addr:192.168.1.100 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.254.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:4000 Metric:1
RX packets:772957 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:3622611 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:49508297 (47.2 MiB) TX bytes:2467540627 (2.2 GiB)
Interrupt:27

NASBOX:~# uptime
09:21:22 up 11 min, load average: 0.71, 0.60, 0.33



Okay I swapped the cables with one that says cat5e, I set the JumboPacket down to 4000, and while I had it down I upgraded the memory to 512MB.

Mem: 497700K used, 19008K free, 0K shrd, 35184K buff, 422148K cached
Load average: 0.00, 0.02, 0.00 (State: S=sleeping R=running, W=waiting)

Still only seeing 6-7MB/sec transfers. :-(

PS: Wouldn't an indicator of poor cabling show errors in an ifconfig -a ?

[arthurleung]

Originally Posted by SoMoney

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:14:FD:10:432
inet addr:192.168.1.100 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.254.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:4000 Metric:1
RX packets:772957 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:3622611 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:49508297 (47.2 MiB) TX bytes:2467540627 (2.2 GiB)
Interrupt:27

NASBOX:~# uptime
09:21:22 up 11 min, load average: 0.71, 0.60, 0.33



Okay I swapped the cables with one that says cat5e, I set the JumboPacket down to 4000, and while I had it down I upgraded the memory to 512MB.

Mem: 497700K used, 19008K free, 0K shrd, 35184K buff, 422148K cached
Load average: 0.00, 0.02, 0.00 (State: S=sleeping R=running, W=waiting)

Still only seeing 6-7MB/sec transfers. :-(

PS: Wouldn't an indicator of poor cabling show errors in an ifconfig -a ?

400GB * 75% in 8 hours equate to 10.4MB/s, which looks quite good to me. My N299 tops at 7MB/s at 100% CPU (Average is like 4~5MB/s). The N2100 is quite a bit faster than a N299.

[spiken]

Your n2100 should have more than ten megabytes per sec.

SmallNetBuilder - Small Network Help - Thecus YES Box N2100 Retest

[SoMoney]

The SmallNetBuilder thread is what started me on this roller coaster.

Hes figures show 30MB/s peek. However since this is a Video server my file sizes are generally 400MB to 4GB each.

His figures show in my environment I should be getting 12-15MB/s and Im half that...

[spiken]

My lan isn't in GigE with JB support yet but my lan rate is better than yours .
Under xp, using CIFS protocol with a 4 GB file, I ve 8.5 MB reading and 7~7.5 MB writting speed.

My n2100 have 512MB of memory and with raid 1.

[arthurleung]

The thing about SmallNetBuilder is, for all NAS I've used, I can't even achieve half of what they tested in practical usage.

When you look at their test methodology, it states:

Many readers found our 3D iozone plots confusing (see Figure 1) and uninformative, since caching effects from the computer doing the reading and writing tended to dominate the plot. So after some experimentation and consultation with iozone's creator, Don Capps, we've decided to continue using iozone, but change the way we present the data.

The plot shows 11MB/s with jumbo frame on, which is what you are indeed getting. When looking at storage reviews, always look at the LOWEST value. All value faster than that is just caching by windows.