what is the network throughput on a Thecus 8800PRO NAS supposed to be?

[SoftDux-Rudi]

Hi all,

I recently got a Thecus 8800PRO (our supplier doesn't stock the 8800SAS versions) but I'm a bit disappointed in the network throughput I get from it.

Using SMB I get about 40MB/s transfer, using rsync and only about 9Mb/s using NFS on average.

Is this normal from a SATA based NAS, setup in RAID10?


The Thecus 8800PRO is connected via single 1GB NIC to a GB switch, and then I have an HP Prolaint DL360 with 2x 146GB SCSI HDD's setup in RAID1 configuration. From there I mounted an NFS & SMB share on the HP server and did the following tests:

NFS mount options:

192.168.2.200:/raid1/data/raid-share on /thecus/raid-share type nfs (rw,rsize=32768,wsize=32768=timeo=14,intr,addr=192.168.2.200)

NFS transfers:

[root@HP-DL360 ~]# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/thecus/raid-share/largefile.iso bs=1K count=1M


real 0m1.066s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s
[root@HP-DL360 ~]# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/thecus/raid-share/nfs.iso bs=1K count=1M
1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 51.0509 seconds, 21.0 MB/s

real 0m51.122s
user 0m1.560s
sys 0m7.920s

Using SMB was a bit faster, but not too much:

[root@HP-DL360 ~]# mount.cifs //192.168.2.200/raid-share /mnt/raid-share/
Password:
[root@HP-DL360 ~]# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/raid-share/smb.iso bs=1K count=1M
1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 28.0072 seconds, 38.3 MB/s

real 0m28.015s
user 0m2.104s
sys 0m11.565s

Creating a file to local disk:

[root@HP-DL360 ~]# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/smb.iso bs=1K count=1M
1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 23.9846 seconds, 44.8 MB/s

real 0m24.005s
user 0m2.324s
sys 0m12.529s

Creating a folder in NFS:

[root@HP-DL360 /]# time mkdir /thecus/raid-share/test2

real 0m0.036s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s

Creating a folder in SMB:

[root@HP-DL360 /]# time mkdir /mnt/raid-share/test1

real 0m0.019s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s

rsync to SMB:

[root@HP-DL360 /]# rsync -avz --progress /*.iso /mnt/raid-share/
building file list ...
4 files to consider
100MB.iso
104857600 100% 32.96MB/s 0:00:03 (xfer#1, to-check=3/4)
10MB.iso
10485760 100% 28.57MB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#2, to-check=2/4)
1GB.iso
1048576000 100% 31.12MB/s 0:00:32 (xfer#3, to-check=1/4)
1MB.iso
1048576 100% 996.11kB/s 0:00:01 (xfer#4, to-check=0/4)

FTP upload to the Thecus:

ftp> put ftp.iso
local: ftp.iso remote: ftp.iso
227 Entering Passive Mode (192,168,2,200,124,115)
150 Accepted data connection
226-File successfully transferred
226 14.233 seconds (measured here), 70.26 Mbytes per second
1048576000 bytes sent in 14 seconds (7.2e+04 Kbytes/s)

FTP download from:

ftp> get ubuntu-9.10-server-amd64.iso
local: ubuntu-9.10-server-amd64.iso remote: ubuntu-9.10-server-amd64.iso
227 Entering Passive Mode (192,168,2,200,120,240)
150-Accepted data connection
150 670220.0 kbytes to download
226-File successfully transferred
226 16.610 seconds (measured here), 39.41 Mbytes per second
686305280 bytes received in 17 seconds (4e+04 Kbytes/s)

Why would FTP download be so much slower? I thought RAID10's read performance would be better than that?

[SoftDux-Rudi]

Doesn't anyone use a NAS?

[SoftDux-Rudi]

Here's an interesting thing:

Mounting the NAS (well, SAN in this case) directly via iSCSI and formatting the partition with ext3 yields the following results:

[root@HP-DL360 ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/iscsi/file1  bs=1M count=2048
2048+0 records in
2048+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 18.4433 seconds, 116 MB/s
[root@HP-DL360 ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/iscsi/file2  bs=1G count=2
2+0 records in
2+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 18.936 seconds, 113 MB/s

Reading back is a bit slower:

[root@HP-DL360 ~]# dd if=/iscsi/file of=/dev/null bs=1M
file1  file2
[root@HP-DL360 ~]# dd if=/iscsi/file1 of=/dev/null bs=1M
2048+0 records in
2048+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 26.2147 seconds, 81.9 MB/s
[root@HP-DL360 ~]# dd if=/iscsi/file1 of=/dev/null bs=1G
2+0 records in
2+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 27.2585 seconds, 78.8 MB/s

So using iSCSI does improve things a bit, but I would still expect better throughput. And I would prefer not to use iSCSI

[Funkstar]

70-80MB/sec is what I would expect from a real world gigabit connection. That is what i get when transfering from my desktop to my home build RAID-5 file server. I've never had anywhere near that from any NAS I've used, but then none of them came close to what the 8800Pro offers

Sorry, I can't be any more helpful than that, although It might be better to ask all this on the Thecus forums instead of here. You are much more likely to find someone with related experience over there.

[SoftDux-Rudi]

70-80MB/sec is what I would expect from a real world gigabit connection. That is what i get when transfering from my desktop to my home build RAID-5 file server. I've never had anywhere near that from any NAS I've used, but then none of them came close to what the 8800Pro offers

Sorry, I can't be any more helpful than that, although It might be better to ask all this on the Thecus forums instead of here. You are much more likely to find someone with related experience over there.

Thanx

I'm actually trying to find out if this is what these types of NAS's should perform like, or if I should be able to get better speeds out of it.