AC68 - Slow File Transfers via LAN (OSX)

[serious]

I know SMB is a little slower than AFP, but I don't know if that accounts from the painfully slow file transfer speed I'm getting on my local wireless network.

It takes 20+mins to drag n' drop a 2GB file from my laptop to the USB 2.0 drive connected to the AC68 router as a samba share, over wireless.

Granted there are a ton of factors involved, but does anyone have any idea what I can do to boost my file transfer speeds?

Using an AC wireless MacBook Pro running OSX Mavericks, and AC68 running Merlin 376.49.5.

It might be a separate issue, but I'll mention it anyway as it also relates to speed over my local wireless network: streaming movies via PLEX using this router is also painfully slow. I can't watch at the higher resolution requiring 3MB/s, which has to stop and buffer every 3mins. Instead, I have to watch everything at the lower-res 1MB/s speed to avoid buffering.

Feel like I must have something setup wrong, to have such a slow local network.

 

[L&LD]

The USB2.0 drive is the bottleneck, if I'm not mistaken.

For both use issues.

 

[serious]

I put a 4TB USB 3.0 drive in the USB 3.0 port and a 2TB USB 2.0 drive in the other port.

I drag n' dropped the same file to both drives, one at a time and it took the same amount of time to transfer. There wasn't a great speed difference, so I'm not sure using USB 3.0 is the fix.

I guess maybe this is the best speed one can expect from a drive plugged into a router. Maybe I should look into getting a proper NAS.

 

[L&LD]

Yes, I don't know why I put 2.0 after USB. Using USB at all with most routers is just about the worst possible performance we can get.

Use the NAS charts to find one that will perform as you expect.

 

[System Error Message]

The reason why its slow is because of usb2.0 + SMB. SMB was made by microsoft and they prevent others from using their features. If you want SMB performance you would need to make a windows server based NAS. ASUS routers are linux based so they do poorly with SMB not to mention the CPU is weak, If you use FTP and a native linux filesystem like ext2 or ext4 you will find it to be much much faster when using usb3.

The dualcore ARM A9 is as fast as your dual core ARM phone from 4 to 5 years ago. If you need SMB performance get a dedicated NAS or make a windows server based NAS.
Unlike some newer APs transferring data to wireless uses the CPU because of bridging so if you use SMB on the router from wifi it will be painfully slow especially if it has to do other things at the same time.

NTFS and SMB on non windows OS is more of a reverse engineer job so they do poorly with both.

 

[RMerlin]

The reason why its slow is because of usb2.0 + SMB. SMB was made by microsoft and they prevent others from using their features. If you want SMB performance you would need to make a windows server based NAS. ASUS routers are linux based so they do poorly with SMB not to mention the CPU is weak, If you use FTP and a native linux filesystem like ext2 or ext4 you will find it to be much much faster when using usb3.

NTFS and SMB on non windows OS is more of a reverse engineer job so they do poorly with both.

Actually this isn't really the case anymore. Microsoft does share some information now with the Samba development team, unlike long ago where they were seen as competitors, and the Samba folks had to work completely in the dark. They are even contributing some code to the project:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-contributes-open-source-code-to-samba/

I've seen QNAP NASes (based on Linux) hit 100 MB/s of throughput over SMB. Samba performance in itself can be very good, as long you have the CPU muscle to push it (and that NAS was an Atom-based model, if I recall correctly - nothing earth-shattering).