Gigabit LAN, real world speeds

[iftiq]

This is for anyone with a NAS setup. I'm looking at building at getting a NAS (WD Duo 4TB is on the shortlist at the moment) and wondering what sort of real world transfer speeds I can expect? For example how long would it take to transfer 2-3 GB folder assuming a wired connection between my PC to the router to the NAS? Would it be quicker if it was a 2-3 GB zipped file? How about a 4-5 GB movie?

Also- my PC has a SATA III WD Caviar Black Drive - if that helps.

Just curious to know whether the NAS setup would work for me.

[Funkstar]

The last time I used an off the shelf NAS, they weren't able to saturate a gigabit connection. At the very most you are likely to get about 60MB/sec out of a gigabit connection (I have no idea what the WD Duo will give you), which means about 17 seconds per gigabyte.

Transferring a single zipped file will be much faster than hundreds and hundreds of small files and folders. he kind of file will have no difference on transfer times, so a movie file will take the same time as a zip of the same file size.

[Phage]

Windows 8 on my gigabit network tells me that I get approx 35mbs. Don't know if that's true but it is noticeably faster for backups and file transfers.

[Flibb]

Out of interest thought I would try this test.

Folder containing a 1.82GB AVI file, takes 58 sec to copy from my ageing ReadyNas Duo to the SSD on my Win7 64 desktop PC.

But to copy back takes 8 minutes. Havent a clue why, then again havent had a coffee yet either.

Network is a netgear 8 port prosafe (PC and redynas plugged into this) with a Billion BiPAC 7700N wireless router / adsl2 modem thing handling the internet.

Right time for a coffee, instant or do I warm the espresso machine up and fire up the grinder ?

[DanceswithUnix]

If you want low cost and ease of use, then an off the shelf NAS should be great.

If performance is really important to you, then you might want to look into FreeNAS running on a low end PC. That WD NAS has a PowerPC 800MHz CPU in it, which isn't bad (and a nice change from the ARM chips that most of them have). It also has 256MB of ram, which can't cache much. Compare that to a low end PC, a cheap Socket FM2 A4000 is dual core 3GHz, enough to saturate a single gigabit connection. You can stick plenty of ram in it to keep all the directory structures etc cached for extra speed. Much more work, specially if you want the machine really quiet, but the cheapest way I can think of to get performance.

[badass]

If you want low cost and ease of use, then an off the shelf NAS should be great.

If performance is really important to you, then you might want to look into FreeNAS running on a low end PC. That WD NAS has a PowerPC 800MHz CPU in it, which isn't bad (and a nice change from the ARM chips that most of them have). It also has 256MB of ram, which can't cache much. Compare that to a low end PC, a cheap Socket FM2 A4000 is dual core 3GHz, enough to saturate a single gigabit connection. You can stick plenty of ram in it to keep all the directory structures etc cached for extra speed. Much more work, specially if you want the machine really quiet, but the cheapest way I can think of to get performance.

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

[spoon_]

No issues with GbE speed and off the shelf NAS box here although it could be bit faster:

[iftiq]

Wow- that seems much faster than what I have seen / read elsewhere. Which model NAS are you using? Router?

Thanks!

[Dareos]

Out of interest thought I would try this test.

Folder containing a 1.82GB AVI file, takes 58 sec to copy from my ageing ReadyNas Duo to the SSD on my Win7 64 desktop PC.

But to copy back takes 8 minutes. Havent a clue why, then again havent had a coffee yet either.

Network is a netgear 8 port prosafe (PC and redynas plugged into this) with a Billion BiPAC 7700N wireless router / adsl2 modem thing handling the internet.

Right time for a coffee, instant or do I warm the espresso machine up and fire up the grinder ?

could this be down to the read speeds on the NAS and write speeds on teh SSD being high and the read speeds on the SSD being high but the write speeds on the NAS being comparatively low?

just a thought, without a closer examination cant make anything more than an educated guess

[DDY]

My HP Microserver running server 2008 r2 can average 100MB/s transferring large files over my gigabit network.

[pp05]

For a NAS I would have thought anything over SATA II was overkill because then you add noise and heat into equation. A faster processor and plenty of RAM go long way but they also add to the cost.

[watercooled]

The performance of the NAS (combination of CPU performance and, by extension, efficiency of the software implementation) is often the bottleneck for consumer NAS boxes. One explanation for for Flibb's results could be fragmentation on the NAS HDD, especially if it's relatively full?

My HP Microserver running Debian essentially saturates GigE, with sequential transfers at least. Network switches (including the LAN side of a router, which is basically just a switch) etc shouldn't have any impact on transfer speed unless they're faulty.

[jimborae]

On my HP N40l I get anywhere between 30Mb/s and 130Mb/s (depending on file type & size it would seem). Also this is using a proper hardware raid card (HP 410/512)

[Pob255]

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.

[shaithis]

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.

[DanceswithUnix]

Out of interest thought I would try this test.

Folder containing a 1.82GB AVI file, takes 58 sec to copy from my ageing ReadyNas Duo to the SSD on my Win7 64 desktop PC.

But to copy back takes 8 minutes. Havent a clue why, then again havent had a coffee yet either.

Network is a netgear 8 port prosafe (PC and redynas plugged into this) with a Billion BiPAC 7700N wireless router / adsl2 modem thing handling the internet.

Right time for a coffee, instant or do I warm the espresso machine up and fire up the grinder ?

The NAS shouldn't acknowledge it has seen data until it is safely stored in the raid array. At that point it sends the acknowledgement to the client which can send more data. On a cheap NAS that can really hurt performance because latency is everything and the low end CPU just can't keep up. More expensive units can ack once the data is safely in battery backed RAM.