Slower than dirt NAS

[mahler81280]

Hey Guys,

I've been trying to make a decent home NAS for the past year with little to no progress. The transfer speeds over the wifi are so slow it's pretty much unusable. Any help would be appreciated.

Here is my current set up.

Modem -> Router (Asus RT-N56U) <- 5 Port Gigabit Switch <- Zyxel NSA 320 NAS <- 2 Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s hard drives set-up in RAID 1

Here are the links to the various products in that chain if you want more specs.

Asus Router
http://www.asus.com/Networks/Wireless_Routers/RTN56U/

Zyxel NSA 320
http://www.zyxel.com/products_services/nsa320.shtml?t=p

Seagate Hard Drives
http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/desktop-hard-drives/barracuda/?sku=ST1000DM003

On all accounts this should be a kick butt network. The problem I am having is that I get a maximum of 2.5 mb/s transfer speed. I keep reading of people who have 25 or 30 mb/s and I'm getting no where near that.

What I have tried

1. Put the gigabit switch between the NAS and the Router. Saw about .5 mb/s improvement.

2. Changed the cables going from the NAS to the gigabit switch and the switch to the router from CAT 5E to CAT 6. Saw little to no improvement.

3. Enabled jumbo packs to 9K. Saw .5 mb/s improvement.

I know that transfering data to an NAS over WIFI is not going to be as fast as going wired. However, 2.5 mb/s?????

I'm about to toss this thing.

My previous "NAS" was a 1 TB external hard drive plugged in to one of the routers USB 2 ports. The performance was virtually the same.

Should I have gone with a higher priced NAS? Maybe the Zyxel NSA 325 or the Synology DS712+

If I go wired will I see a big improvement? I wanted to keep everything wireless to reduce the clutter and wires going through the house.

 

[Nerre]

What speed do you get over wired connection?

I know that file transfers over samba/cifs kan become very slow due to bad default settings. There are instructions available on how to tune the smbd settings to get better performance-

 

[thiggins]

+1 to Nerre's question: What speed to you get using all wired connections?

If you are quoting MBytes/sec, 2.5 MB/s is ~20 Mbps. This isn't unreasonable depending on the strength of your wireless connection. What are you using for a client to test the connection speed.

By the way, disable jumbo frames. They don't really help for current-generation Gigabit adapters and certainly don't help for wireless.

 

[mahler81280]

Hey Guys,

Thank you so much for replying to my post. In the original post. All transfer rates are megabytes MB/s. Sorry for the confusion. I hooked the Zyxel NSA 320 to my computer to do the initial file transfer. It's averaging around 25 MB/s.

Do you have any suggestions? Would a higher end NAS or home built one perform better? I know a higher end one would transfer faster over a wired connection. However, I really want to make everything wireless.

What is the best NAS or configuration for wireless transfer rates since I already have a top end router? Thank you for your suggestions.

 

[stevech]

Wireless (WiFi?) is always very speed limited.

25MB/s (bytes/sec) on wired is rather slow for a NAS.
On most WiFi, it's typical.

About all you can do is try to use 802.11n in 5.8GHz, 40MHz mode, with short distances and both the router and the client device must support that 5.6GHz band and the 40MHz mode. There are very few products that do this. Trying to do 40MHz mode in 2.4GHz works if you are in a rural area.

Want fastest NAS transfers? Don't use WiFi.

 

[tipstir]

With my setup here and the NSA325 everything running smooth. Wireless clients now save all Windows 7 downloads to their own folder based on computer name on NSA325. I use dual SATA III TB WD Blue 32mb cache. Have you updated your firmware for the NSA320? I know since I've owned the NSA325 there has been 3x firmware updates which the device automatically downloads, installs, updates in one process.

 

[mahler81280]

Fixed the issue

I bought a Netgear AC6300 router with a Netgear AC USB adapter and that fixed everything. Now I'm transferring files to and from my NAS wirelessly between 8 and 10 MB/s. That is much more usable. I guess the wireless N networks just aren't made for transferring large files like HD movies. I could be wrong though.

 

[stevech]

8-10MB/s is good for WiFi. Lots of big files are best done, of course, with wired ethernet or a USB drive.

 

[mahler81280]

I transferred a 3 gigabyte file this morning and got a stable 15 MB/s. I'm very happy with the new wifi speeds.

 

[Goat]

Oh nuts, I was hoping you would find an underlying problem with the Zyxel NSA. I have a Zyxel NSA325 with the latest firmware (NSA325_4.50(AAAJ.1)) and 2x Hitachi Ultrastar HUA722020ALA330 2TB drives in RAID 1. This is connected to a BT Homehub 3.0 on 1GbE. The HomeHub then connects to a DeVolo 500 homeplug via 100Mbit link and my desktop plugs into another DeVolo 500 homeplug via a 100Mbit link and I still also only hit about 3MB/s tops for large copies.
The link between the DeVolo homeplugs is over 100Mbit as reported by its dashboard and so I had hoped to see around 8 -10MB/s.
I must confess I haven't tried the direct connection yet. If anyone has any further ideas I would love to hear them.

Thanks in advance.

 

[tupinamba]

NSA320 : slow transfer from one folder to another

Hi everybody,

I just set the Zyxel NSA320 up with two 2TB HDD in RAID1 and I find very few information about its settings online...

I transfered files from an external USB drive through the upload option on the front panel and now all my files are in the "Public" folder. I wanted to simply move then to the right places, for instance the "Music" forder and that it would take seconds just like when you move files from a folder to another folder on a partition, but it seems it doesn't work that way and the files are transfered at about 7MB/sec.

Does anybody know why it does work that way? Is there a way to do this faster?

Thanks in advance.