Lan Speeds

[admiral2145]

is there any setting that I can change to help with lan transfer speeds? I have a x79 rampage 4 mobo with intel gigabit on board nic and a freenas box with 12tb storage with a intel pro gigabit nic... im only seeing about 500mbit a second read and write... I have 16 gigs of ram each machine and the nas has 6 x 2tb raidz1 with seagate drives that are 1tb per platter... I should be getting 110 megabytes a sec I would think... TIA

oh yeah cat 7 to each box from the router

 

[RMerlin]

is there any setting that I can change to help with lan transfer speeds? I have a x79 rampage 4 mobo with intel gigabit on board nic and a freenas box with 12tb storage with a intel pro gigabit nic... im only seeing about 500mbit a second read and write... I have 16 gigs of ram each machine and the nas has 6 x 2tb raidz1 with seagate drives that are 1tb per platter... I should be getting 110 megabytes a sec I would think... TIA

oh yeah cat 7 to each box from the router

Gigabit speed is a max theoretical limit. I have never seem any gigabit-wired network hit anywhere close to a full gigabit of throughput - the average I usually see is around 250-350 Mbits. Performance gets affected by distance, packet overhead, protocol overhead for the file transfer protocol you use, disk speed, the NICs used in computers, etc...

 

[admiral2145]

tweaks

I've done some tweaks to my windows 7 from what I read on the freenas forums and now im up to 650mbit both ways.... the cifs/samba only runs in single core mode so I guess thats about it... I might oc my processor to 4.5 or so...

 

[trekker99]

250-350 Mbits is actually very low for a properly set-up gigabit network.

My setup can typically hit at least 70 MB/s between my NAS (WHS 2011) and desktop (Win 8) via a DLink switch. I have used iperf at home and at work to ensure that pc to pc connections hit at least 700 Mbits per connection and close to 1000 Mbits for 2-3 simultaneous connections. I have seen when transferring huge files at work to hit 100+ MB/s consistently. The PCs involved used Intel NICs and SSDs.

Bottlenecks are typically in

1) poor quality cables. Buying reputable brands is a must here. I have seen fake cat 6 cables before. Good quality Cat 5e or 6 (for longer distances) cables should be fine.
2) slow drives.
2) slow servers. If you are using software RAID, you need a powerful CPU to ensure it can do the RAID computations fast enough.
3) OS and protocol choice. Linux can be pretty lousy with samba/cifs. The default way (via Nautilus or Dolphin) of accessing samba clients in recent versions of Ubuntu is dead slow (I am guessing it uses fuse?). The old-school way of accessing samba clients (using mount) seems fine.
4) NIC brand. I have found Intel to be the most reliable. Broadcom and Realtek can be at hit or miss. My PCs at home use Realtek while at work it is typically Intel.
5) The files you are transferring. a 700 MB file is faster than 700 1 MB files. The overhead to create the files on the file systems kills the performance.

*edit*
6) Of course it you are using rotational drives and they are busy doing something else, expect performance to suffer too. Avoid serving data off the OS drives is a good start.