Could firmware improve USB stability/reliability?

[3_50]

Could a firmware update improve the stability of the USB port, or get it to read and write fast enough to make full use of a 1200Mbps wifi connection?

I have an Asus RT-AX86U (just flashed with Merlin 388.9_2), bought to host an external drive (Acasis NVMe enclosure, 4TB Corsair stick, NTFS) - got sick of having to unmount when moving the laptop from its TV dock every day.

Currently over wifi I get 40MB/s write, 77MB/s read. 1GbE wired I get 90MB write/110MB read. Any idea why the wifi is so much slower? At 3ft from the router, by all accounts it should have a faster connection than the wired. Any settings to tweak? I don't really understand 90% of the options on here.

All threads I could find advise against this and suggest a proper NAS box, but the options I've explored will cost me £50 per year in electricity just to idle (~20W), and aren't portable. The router & drive is ~9W under load and I have that running 24/7 anyway. All I need is easy access extended storage for my laptop (for replaceable data, nothing imporant, no backups etc).

Could custom firmware fix the problems people are cautioning about? I'd pay good money for something like that, since alternative options are £hundreds for extra hardware, electricity etc...

 

[ColinTaylor]

You mention read and write speeds but what are the stability and reliability problems you state in your title?

 

[3_50]

I've not seen any yet, just regurgitating the warnings given in other threads. Granted I couldn't find threads with people complaining of data loss/corruption, only others warning that it might happen...

 

[mlord]

> Any idea why the wifi is so much slower [than ethernet]?

Much higher latency over WiFi than over the GigE connection. So the I/O transactions don't happen as quickly, which then slows down throughput.

 

[bbunge]

Set the 5 GHz to 80 MHz on Auto channel. Formatting the drive to EXT4 may help a bit. Using Merlin firmware with Samba set to SMB2 might help. Otherwise your speed results are not far off the mark for USB 3.

 

[degrub]

> Any idea why the wifi is so much slower [than ethernet]?

Much higher latency over WiFi than over the GigE connection. So the I/O transactions don't happen as quickly, which then slows down throughput.

And wifi is inherently half duplex. Bit rate / 2

 

[ColinTaylor]

And wifi is inherently half duplex.

True.

Bit rate / 2

Not necessarily true. The volume of data in one direction is not usually the same as the volume of data in the other direction.

 

[bbunge]

And wifi is inherently half duplex. Bit rate / 2

Remember what Ethernet was like before switches? With the old hubs Ethernet was always detecting packet collisions and stopping transmission until the collisions cleared.
WIFI is worse in some ways. It is built in to avoid collisions but not detect them. It is like every member of your family talking at once. Some conversations get through and some have to wait and start over. Well, it is not really that bad as it happens so fast and modern WIFI us sure better than "B" or "G" even though I still feel the old WRT54G was one heck of a router!

 

[Tech9]

Otherwise your speed results are not far off the mark for USB 3.

On this router, limited by the hardware. My home network storage is on USB drives, they do 180MB/s connected to mini PC.

 

[FTC]

I have been living with a USB RAID1 enclosure w/2x4TB drives NTFS formatted and router attached as my family 'NAS' since 7 years ago. Now running on a RT-AX88U. No major problems. The throughput I get is slightly better than yours over wifi, so I tend to think that your results are more or less OK, specially if your wifi environment is as noisy as mine. Note that I can't use 5Ghz 80Mhz channel width efficiently (too many neighbour wifis), and also as per other comments in this thread, wifi is inherently slower than cable at the same rate.. not only due to the full duplex/half duplex thing, but also being a shared medium with all surrounding neighbours and with a much more overheaded protocol in terms of redundancy and handshaking.
My best suggestion would be to try to optimize wifi performance through settings (specially channel selection and witdth), make your measurements when there is minimum surrounding noise (i.e at nights) and with a max performance energy profile, and live with what you get, since it will not improve much further.

 

[3_50]

Thanks for all the input everyone. Forced Samba to SMB2, 5GHz to 80Mhz, but I think it had auto-selected those anyway. No changes. I was going to avoid EXT4 to keep compatibility. I don't know anyone who runs Linux...

Wifi is pretty uncongested where I am. I live in an estate of mostly old people. Router can see 4 other 5Ghz networks, very low signal, all on different channels.

On this router, limited by the hardware. My home network storage is on USB drives, they do 180MB/s connected to mini PC.

What sort of mini-pc, out of interest? That's over Wifi?

 

[FTC]

Thanks for all the input everyone. Forced Samba to SMB2, 5GHz to 80Mhz, but I think it had auto-selected those anyway. No changes. I was going to avoid EXT4 to keep compatibility. I don't know anyone who runs Linux...

Wifi is pretty uncongested where I am. I live in an estate of mostly old people. Router can see 4 other 5Ghz networks, very low signal, all on different channels.


What sort of mini-pc, out of interest? That's over Wifi?

Did you have a look at your client side wifi configuration ? What wifi card are you using ? what is the max. throughput of that wifi card ? is it correctly configured for performance (i.e no energy savings, mimo, jumbo frames, 80mhz width,...) ?
It may help to check the link negotiated speed at the router administration network map.

 

[3_50]

Did you have a look at your client side wifi configuration ? What wifi card are you using ? what is the max. throughput of that wifi card ? is it correctly configured for performance (i.e no energy savings, mimo, jumbo frames, 80mhz width,...) ?

I did, pretty sure it's running on all cylinders.

"alt-click" wifi connection info:

16" M1 max spec from Apple;

802.11 standard, name, frequency	Maximum PHY data rate	Maximum channel bandwidth	Maximum MCS index	Maximum spatial streams / Type
ax@5GHz	1200 Mbps	80MHz	11 (HE)	2/MIMO

If anyone fancies doing a quick speedtest on their fastest external drive on their router/USB, I'd be interested to see what other models are capable of over wifi (I've been using Blackmagic's test). As far as I can tell, it's never tested. Wired is occasionally, but not wifi.

 

[FTC]

I did, pretty sure it's running on all cylinders.

"alt-click" wifi connection info:

View attachment 65987

16" M1 max spec from Apple;

802.11 standard, name, frequency	Maximum PHY data rate	Maximum channel bandwidth	Maximum MCS index	Maximum spatial streams / Type
ax@5GHz	1200 Mbps	80MHz	11 (HE)	2/MIMO

If anyone fancies doing a quick speedtest on their fastest external drive on their router/USB, I'd be interested to see what other models are capable of over wifi (I've been using Blackmagic's test). As far as I can tell, it's never tested. Wired is occasionally, but not wifi.

Well, right now I am getting 73MB/s Read, 42MB/s Write, so almost like your case, but 1 hour ago I was getting 80MB/s read (did not measure write speed at that time). RT-AX88U in a quite wifi congested enviroment, although the link speed is also 1200 Mbps.

 

[degrub]

MBytes/sec or Mbits/s ?

 

[FTC]

MBytes/sec or Mbits/s ?

As far as I can see, all figures in this thread are correctly named : MB (for MBytes) and Mb (for Mbit). If you are asking in what unit to provide your results, it does not matter as far as using the same convention... although usually disk throughput is given in MBytes/sec and communications speed (and link speed) is given usually in Mbits/sec.

 

[Tech9]

What sort of mini-pc, out of interest?

It's an older model HP EliteDesk Mini with i5 CPU, does NAS duties and other things for years. The USB 3 port speed is not the limitation on home routers. It's the RPi-like hardware inside.

That's over Wifi?

I have a different wireless setup. My aggregate wireless throughput from 4x APs may exceed the Gigabit NIC speed of the PC. So getting up to Gigabit read/write at the PC or 60-100MB/s from a single AX 2-stream client at 80MHz wide non-DFS channel. It depends on what else is using the same AP/channel. Available channel bandwidth is shared between all the clients.