Hi Everyone,
I have a very strange and frustrating issue with my home network consisting of a Zyxel NSA325 NAS and Asus RT-AC66U wireless router.
I have one PC laptop with 1000BaseT interface, an iMac connected over house cabling with interface coming up at 100BaseT, another PC with a wireless interface, and an iPhone 5 over wireless.
Basically everything functions OK except I found video streaming from the NAS very poor on iMac and all wireless connections.
I tried troubleshooting the issue using the "LAN Speed Test" tool to test the transfer rate for a shared directories on the NAS to the different computers.
with a computer connected to the LAN at 1000BaseT, I saw a Write rate to a NAS share around 300Mbps and a Read rate of around 100Mbps.
With the iMac using 100BaseT I got around 56Mbps Write rate and only 16Mbps Read rate. The PC over wirelss gave similar figures to the iMac.
So one question is: Why is there such a difference between Read and Write rates?
I then connected a USB flash drive to the Router and shared it over the network, and I found that this was streaming video fine!
With the LAN Speed Test, the iMac showed a write rate of 28Mbps and a read rate of 60Mbps to the flash drive shared on the router.
With the PC connected on 1000BaseT the performance was of course even better but not as good as the NAS share.
So, if the network itself is fast enough for the iMac to get 60Mbps read rate to the shared drive on the router, and a similar write rate to a share on the NAS, and the disk performance of the NAS is obviously not the limiting factor, then why is there such a difference between the Read and Write speeds of both different shares? and why is the difference in opposite direction for the NAS and flash share on the router?
I moved the iMac and tested it using the same cable as the PC with 1000BaseT and found good performance to the NAS but it was also assymetrical (Write was quite a bit faster than Read).
So the NAS performed OK with iMac connected at 1000BaseT but over 100BaseT the performance degrades sharply and is much worse than the shared directory on the router. The various tests do not isolate any particular component as being the bottleneck.
Does anyone have any ideas how to get to the bottom of this mystery?
Thanks in advance.
-Larry
I have a very strange and frustrating issue with my home network consisting of a Zyxel NSA325 NAS and Asus RT-AC66U wireless router.
I have one PC laptop with 1000BaseT interface, an iMac connected over house cabling with interface coming up at 100BaseT, another PC with a wireless interface, and an iPhone 5 over wireless.
Basically everything functions OK except I found video streaming from the NAS very poor on iMac and all wireless connections.
I tried troubleshooting the issue using the "LAN Speed Test" tool to test the transfer rate for a shared directories on the NAS to the different computers.
with a computer connected to the LAN at 1000BaseT, I saw a Write rate to a NAS share around 300Mbps and a Read rate of around 100Mbps.
With the iMac using 100BaseT I got around 56Mbps Write rate and only 16Mbps Read rate. The PC over wirelss gave similar figures to the iMac.
So one question is: Why is there such a difference between Read and Write rates?
I then connected a USB flash drive to the Router and shared it over the network, and I found that this was streaming video fine!
With the LAN Speed Test, the iMac showed a write rate of 28Mbps and a read rate of 60Mbps to the flash drive shared on the router.
With the PC connected on 1000BaseT the performance was of course even better but not as good as the NAS share.
So, if the network itself is fast enough for the iMac to get 60Mbps read rate to the shared drive on the router, and a similar write rate to a share on the NAS, and the disk performance of the NAS is obviously not the limiting factor, then why is there such a difference between the Read and Write speeds of both different shares? and why is the difference in opposite direction for the NAS and flash share on the router?
I moved the iMac and tested it using the same cable as the PC with 1000BaseT and found good performance to the NAS but it was also assymetrical (Write was quite a bit faster than Read).
So the NAS performed OK with iMac connected at 1000BaseT but over 100BaseT the performance degrades sharply and is much worse than the shared directory on the router. The various tests do not isolate any particular component as being the bottleneck.
Does anyone have any ideas how to get to the bottom of this mystery?
Thanks in advance.
-Larry
