Gigabit LAN, real world speeds

[watercooled]

Network switches and structure in general will effect transfer speed because of the load going through the network, granted in most home situations load is pretty low so shouldn't be much impact.

That's one thing I'll point out, no point getting gigabit if the other end (or the middle) is 100, so if your switch is only 100 then you're not going to get gigabit through it and any other devices talking to each other through the switch will also impact the speed.

Not sure if this is what you mean, but loading separate ports on most (even cheap) switches should have no impact on performance on ports used for the transfer. This is something I've tested and confirmed myself, as aside from MFR's claims, such tests seem hard to find on the net, and some people seem to think it can have a big impact. Obviously, using the same ports for other transfers simultaneously will take a share of the available bandwidth.

There really shouldn't be any issue maxing GBe with todays hardware, even a cheap NAS. ~120MB/s should be possible, assuming the network path isn't doing anything else.

You'd be surprised, some cheaper NASes barely manage 20MB/s, largely because of very dated SoCs.

[DanceswithUnix]

I tries FreeNAS is VM's in the past (>1 year ago) and found its network performance to be poor compared to other solutions such as Nexentastor, Openfiler or even just running a VM with windows on it.
Host was an HP microserver N36L with 8GB RAM rinning on ESXi 5.0

Well I must admit I haven't used any of those, my home install is a Centos 6 box running a raid 1 drive pair, so family machines can back up via Samba. If you just want a NAS that is a pretty bad setup, I only do that because I want the box to do kvm hosting with email etc as well as being a backup target for Windows clients.

Don't think you can rely on performance in a virtual machine to know how well a NAS will work though, it will be tuned for bare metal.

[Pob255]

Not sure if this is what you mean, but loading separate ports on most (even cheap) switches should have no impact on performance on ports used for the transfer. This is something I've tested and confirmed myself, as aside from MFR's claims, such tests seem hard to find on the net, and some people seem to think it can have a big impact. Obviously, using the same ports for other transfers simultaneously will take a share of the available bandwidth.

yes that's what I mean, if you've got two things trying to use the same port you'll not get full speed out of it, so if you're trying to upload something to the nas while someone else is accessing a file on it speeds will go down.
It's generally not that big a problem on a home network as you don't have that many devices or centralised servers servers that multiple clients are trying to connect to.

More likely is that the router/switch is likely to only be 10/100 not gigabit, so it's less likely that gigabit at the end will have any effect.

If your router/switch can do gigabit then I'd say go for it, if not then I'd not worry about it.

[shaithis]

Full duplex GBe connection gives 1Gbps in each direction, meaning in theory you can have an upload and download going simultaneously and mostly uncontested....the problem then becomes a limitation of the drive (and nas soc if there really are units out there that can't handle sata speeds internally!)

[watercooled]

They're not that hard to find:
http://www.legionhardware.com/articl...2ds112j,5.html

And they're not super-cheap units either; it can get a lot worse.

[shaithis]

some of those speeds are truly terrible

[Phage]

Just for interest I get 35Mbs from my Internal HDD (WD Black) to my NAS, but >100Mbs from a USB3.0 stick to the NAS from the same PC. So the slowdown would appear to be the HDD in the PC or something.
Also, when copying across at 35Mbs I started uploading some files to the WAN and saw my copying speeds drop to 20Mbs and sometimes even lower.

[DanceswithUnix]

some of those speeds are truly terrible

I think for most people it just has to be able to stream an HD video to be fast enough.

There is a reason why enterprise grade NAS boxes cost as much as a new luxury car.

[pp05]

They're not that hard to find:
http://www.legionhardware.com/articl...2ds112j,5.html

And they're not super-cheap units either; it can get a lot worse.

I'm looking into Synology having ruled out a microserver. They are not cheap but knowing what demands will be placed on the unit can help. The few reviews I read of the Synology products say 'slow to get stuff onto it but once on it is easier'.

[Phage]

I'm looking into Synology having ruled out a microserver. They are not cheap but knowing what demands will be placed on the unit can help. The few reviews I read of the Synology products say 'slow to get stuff onto it but once on it is easier'.

My speeds above are with an obsolete Synology DS211j using the Billion 7800n as a Gig switch.

[watercooled]

When using the USB drive, does the transfer seem to hang for a while at the end? Windows occasionally gets transfer speeds wrong for a number of reasons, and >100MB/s write speed seems unrealistic for a DS211j based on benchmarks I've seen.

[Phage]

When using the USB drive, does the transfer seem to hang for a while at the end? Windows occasionally gets transfer speeds wrong for a number of reasons, and >100MB/s write speed seems unrealistic for a DS211j based on benchmarks I've seen.

Actually no. It just zipped through - much much faster USB3 to NAS. I'd have to time it though.
(They were big M4V files) Can do if you're interested ?

[watercooled]

No it's no problem, I just wouldn't have expected that sort of transfer speed, I've never actually used one though. I'd say caching could be playing a part, but it's not like it can hold a great deal of files in RAM anyway.

[DR]

Here is mine copying to our storage box.....



It's across a Gigabit link....

[Phage]

Here is mine copying to our storage box.....


It's across a Gigabit link....

Is that Hdd to a NAS ? I assume that you would have enterprise level stuff rather than the older SoHo kit we have.

[DR]

Is that Hdd to a NAS ? I assume that you would have enterprise level stuff rather than the older SoHo kit we have.

The limitations are the network on the PC - which is Gigabit.

It isn't a SoHo NAS

You can have more than one person copy at a time at those speeds...