Network Transfer Speed Reality Check

[Syd]

Just to make sure I haven't got something awfully wrong. If I have a Synology Nas (2 x 2tb raid) connected to my X58 via o/b Realtek PCie adaptor via a netgear gigabit switch box. Is it right that I get 10mb/s transfer rate. I only ask as It takes forever to back up my 1TB photo drive !!!!

[shaithis]

That seems very slow indeed. I would ensure that the NAS is connecting at 1Gbps and not 100Mbps

[Syd]

That seems very slow indeed. I would ensure that the NAS is connecting at 1Gbps and not 100Mbps

Thanks for the confirmation - can you suggest the easiest way to check this please?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It is probably down to the fact that many NAS devices use extremely slow CPUs,and even at a the transfer rated the OP has mentioned it probably will be running at 100% utilisation.

[shaithis]

Thanks for the confirmation - can you suggest the easiest way to check this please?

I would expect it to be in the NAS firmware in a status readout somewhere. What model NAS is it?

[Butuz]

It would be ideal if you could tell us the exact model of NAS and the exact model of hard drives it contains.

Is your NAS configured in RAID1 (mirror)?

If so - this is probably the cause of the poor speed combined with possibly slowish hard drives in the NAS (i.e are they 5400rpm or "green" type drives as opposed to full on high end 7200rpm with 64mb cache drives?)

In raid 1 when writing to the disk everything has to be done at least twice, unless you use a high end hardware based raid controller with on board RAM cache to enable write caching then you are gonna be in for slow speeds. Combine this with as CAT says, a low end NAS device possibly using software raid control with a weak processor hardly any RAM and you have a recepie for waiting and waiting for data to be transferred.

Myself, I would expect more than 10MB/s but it is entirely possible that that can't be achieved on your devices.

Butuz

[Syd]

It would be ideal if you could tell us the exact model of NAS and the exact model of hard drives it contains.

Is your NAS configured in RAID1 (mirror)?

If so - this is probably the cause of the poor speed combined with possibly slowish hard drives in the NAS (i.e are they 5400rpm or "green" type drives as opposed to full on high end 7200rpm with 64mb cache drives?)

In raid 1 when writing to the disk everything has to be done at least twice, unless you use a high end hardware based raid controller with on board RAM cache to enable write caching then you are gonna be in for slow speeds. Combine this with as CAT says, a low end NAS device possibly using software raid control with a weak processor hardly any RAM and you have a recepie for waiting and waiting for data to be transferred.

Myself, I would expect more than 10MB/s but it is entirely possible that that can't be achieved on your devices.

Butuz

Synology DS211 NAS

Set up in Raid Mirror

2 x 2TB SAMSUNG HD204UI SATA3 HD's

Does this answer the question?

[dream234]

How long is "Forever"? 1Tb is a lot of data no matter how you transfer it, so I would expect it to take a fair few hours. It's also worth considering the speed of the source disk and how you're backing it up - are you just doing a straight transfer or is there some backup software in the middle that is doing encryption/compression/duplicate checking etc? These things can massively slow down the transfer.

[spoon_]

What's your switch like? If you have model name handy that would help.

Linux software RAID aka mdadm is plenty quick saturating 1Gbps easily. Hell, with right number of disks you can saturate 10GigE!

Both Samsung disks will do about 80MB/s in reads/writes so no bottlenecks there.

Mirror config has no overheads in terms of parity checks so even with single core Atom @ 1.6GHz and 256MB of RAM this box should push about 60-70MB/s both ways....

[Jay]

I think one side is running at 100Mbps as 10MBps is very close to the 100Mbps limit.