N3200Pro Speed

[pookeyhead]

After returning my woefully rubbish N2200 for a refund, I decided to give the N3200Pro a go.. based on several great reviews I read.

It's up and running, and everything looks OK. RAID is built and healthy using Caviar Green 1.5TB drives.

All seems well.... except it's crawling along at 5MB/sec and will take 5 hours to shift a 54GB folder.!!




This is the second Thecus product I've had now, that crawls along at the same speed as a $3.00 USB pendrive. What's going on?

I'm on a wired gigabit network, and I can write data across it to my wife's computer at 45MB/sec, and read data from her machine at 65MB/sec. Why is this heap so slow?

I planned on mirroring my back up files to this NAS, but to be honest, seeing as it will take 5 hours to copy a mere 54 GB of data... (see above screenie)... then mirroring my 600GB back up to this thing will not be finished by teh time the NEXT scheduled back up is due to take place.

Seriously... are you all just putting up with these stupidly low speeds, or have I managed to get TWO problematic NAS boxes?

The NAS is on a wired gigabit network, and is statically set for IP.

Any ideas?

[EDIT]

This is not a network issue because I've just copied a large HD video file (4GB) from one folder to another within the NAS box... still around 5MB/S. So that's 5MB/Sec for a RAID 5 array. Just how crap IS the AMD Geode?

I've just spent a lot of cash on hard drives and this... thing... please tell me it's not meant to be like this.


What is everyone else getting? I need a MUCH faster write speed than this, as I wish to mirror my back up files to this NAS, and they're in the order of 450GB.

Is that an unrealistic prospect? If so... what the hell is a NAS box for? Why would anyone pay £240 for an unpopulated NAS, then another £250 on hard drives to get 5MB/Sec write speeds over teh network? Surely it makes more sense to just build a server?.... which I'm starting to wish I had done.

[Samsonic]

I don't know if this applies to you but if you encrypt your partition your transfer speed will decrease.

In my case, I can transfer files to the RAID-6 encrypted partition on my N7700 at a maximum of about 22 MBps. According to Windows, that is about half the speed of a 1 Gigabit connection.

My speed varies greatly depending on the size of the files transferred. Large files of 50 MB or more transfer at close to maximum speed while small files can transfer at less than 1MBps.

My numbers are for an encrypted RAID-6 on a N7700 loaded with 7 Seagate 1.5TB 7200rpm.

I hope this helps.

[GoNz0]

unless you installed a 3rd party mod the folder to folder copy will go back through the network via your pc, its still a poor speed as i get about 45mb/sec on my 5200

[pookeyhead]

unless you installed a 3rd party mod the folder to folder copy will go back through the network via your pc, its still a poor speed as i get about 45mb/sec on my 5200

Whether it is or not, I can transfer files to my wife's computer over the same network at over 60MB/Sec for large files. So if it's reading low, as you suggest (I think), then it's still proportionately as crap when compared to my existing equipment.

I don't know if this applies to you but if you encrypt your partition your transfer speed will decrease.

In my case, I can transfer files to the RAID-6 encrypted partition on my N7700 at a maximum of about 22 MBps. According to Windows, that is about half the speed of a 1 Gigabit connection.

My speed varies greatly depending on the size of the files transferred. Large files of 50 MB or more transfer at close to maximum speed while small files can transfer at less than 1MBps.

My numbers are for an encrypted RAID-6 on a N7700 loaded with 7 Seagate 1.5TB 7200rpm.

I hope this helps.

Encrypt? What do you mean by encrypt? I see no setting for this in the N3200 front end. How can adding an extra layer of encryption/encoding/processing of any sort make the transfer faster? Surely you're mistaken.


As for half the speed of a gigabit connection, I'm not sure where you get that figure from, as the theoretical max of gigabit connection is 125MB/sec
.. so half the max speed of a gigabit connection is surely just over 60MB/sec.

Anyway, you have a 7700.. not a 3200.

Hmm.. even motherboard chipset controllers such as ICH9R can achieve over 100MB/sec in RAID5 if set up correctly.

Surely my N3200Pro is faulty... it can't possible be this rubbish.

Also... Thecus never reply to my tickets! They never reply in these forums.

Hello?? Customer here... customer requiring some help... Hello? LOL

Meh... they have my cash now.. (shrug)


I've had enough. My N2200 was crap.. I returned it. This is crap, I shall return it. I'll build a server instead.

[Samsonic]

My RAID partition is encrypted. It is an option when creating partitions on the N7700. Encryption does slow down transfer speeds and I wanted to bring attention to it in case you also run encrypted partitions.

In my experience and that of others (h*tp://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=346) it seems that the best SUSTAINED speed over 1Gbps is between 45-50 MBps, nowhere near the theoretical 125 MBps.

You may also want to rule out your hard drives as the source of your problems.

Good luck.

[pookeyhead]

My RAID partition is encrypted. It is an option when creating partitions on the N7700. Encryption does slow down transfer speeds and I wanted to bring attention to it in case you also run encrypted partitions.

In my experience and that of others (h*tp://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=346) it seems that the best SUSTAINED speed over 1Gbps is between 45-50 MBps, nowhere near the theoretical 125 MBps.

You may also want to rule out your hard drives as the source of your problems.

Good luck.

OK.. thanks for that. I can't see that option in the Web Admin page. I don't think the 3200 has it.

I'm currently getting way more than that. I can read information off my wife's computer at around 70MB/sec if it's a large sustained read of a contiguous file like a Norton Ghost image file, or a 1080p video file.

Not sure why the hard drives would be the problem. They're on the approved list. While I've not tested them all (I bought 6x 1.5TB drives and 2x N2300Pro boxes) I've tested one of them on my ICH10R controller and a single drive can write at over 100MB/Sec which is almost as fast as my Samsung F3s. I've also been swapping drives around and rebuilding RAIDs for days now. I think I've probably rotated them all by now No change... still an absolute max of 15MB/sec from the NAS boxes... even when copying internally.

It's clear that's about the MAX the little Geode processor can deliver in RAID 5.

I'm keeping one of these 3200Pros as a back up NAS. I'm returning one of them today, and replacing it with a RAID5 server (proper hardware RAID card with onboard XOR processing and RAM). My main back up will be to the server, for speed, and then the server can trickle it to the NAS box overnight. I want two back up sites you see... one in the house... and one external should there be a fire or theft.

These little NAS boxes are great for having easy central storage and streaming media around the house, but as a central back-up server they just don't cut it. I don't know what I was expecting... just wasn't expecting 10-15MB/sec write speeds.


Thanks for your help anyway... you've been more helpful than Thecus have!

[poolshark]

I looked into this a little bit, and all I can say is that the performance bottleneck appears to be the network stack of the embedded linux distro, even though things like TCP r/w buffers appear normal. It's not a RAID issue, or the Geode cpu being overpowered.

hdparm reports speeds of 75MB/s on each disk, which is very good, and about 80MB/s for the RAID which is ok (the theoretical maximum in my case being about 150). Still, it's a lot higher than the transfer speeds we're seeing. If i copy a large file from from a raid directory to another, I get transfer speeds of about 25 MB/s which is consistent (doing the copy directly over SSH).

Yet both read and write transfers over the network never exceed 10 MB/s for me (over 1G ethernet). I do transfers to the NAS using rsync on Linux (by running an rsync daemon on the NAS, not by using rsync over shell), which is much faster than NFS for small files transfer, but for large files it always run about 8 or 9 MB/s, same as NFS. Next, I'll try some network benchmarking with netperf or iperf...

[XT-Matz]

Hi,
I have a N3200PRO with 2x 1TB WD10EADS.
I have only 100 MBit network and I reach a transferrate of nearly 80 MBit/sec for read and write(!).
On write the N3200PRO shows a CPU usage of 31%.
Matz

[poolshark]

Hi,
I have a N3200PRO with 2x 1TB WD10EADS.
I have only 100 MBit network and I reach a transferrate of nearly 80 MBit/sec for read and write(!).
On write the N3200PRO shows a CPU usage of 31%.
Matz

Hi XT-Matz,

I my previous post, I used MBytes/sec as unit (B=byte, b=bit). So if you're seeing 10MBytes/s, it's consistent with what other users are seeing.

[pookeyhead]

Hi,
I have a N3200PRO with 2x 1TB WD10EADS.
I have only 100 MBit network and I reach a transferrate of nearly 80 MBit/sec for read and write(!).
On write the N3200PRO shows a CPU usage of 31%.
Matz

As poolshark said, that will be 80mBITS/sec, not BYTES. On a 100mbit LAN the theoretical max is 12.5MB/sec, so you'll not be exceeding that, and your 80Mb(its)/sec is actually around 7.5MB(ytes)/sec.