DS214 Performance Feedback

[MoInSTL]

I don't know why, but I posted this over at the Synology forum--it's dead there.

Single, simple gigabit LAN. Using Asus RT-N66U router. No switches, etc. All cables are Cat6 except for Cat5se the DS came with. Two 3TB WD Reds with SHR. No real services running. Just moving files over to have in a single location and haven't had the time to really load it up yet so I just have 100GB disk space used so far.

I had resource manager open and the best I saw was a spike to 447KB up and 143.9MB down when uploading a Windows 7 iso. It bounced around between 40-80MB mostly.

Finally got around to using LAN Speed Test with 100MB file chunk. Results are below. Am I ontrack? Basic PC specs: i7 2600K, 16GB RAM, Samsung EVO 250GB SSD, Intel 128GB SSD.

 

[stevech]

440KB/sec?

With a large file like an iso, read/write speeds, should be like 80-100MB or more reading NAS and writing to an SSD on a fast PC on a gigE LAN. Maybe 25% slower for writing NAS, reading on SSD on PC.

I use an 8 port gigE switch because I (unjustifiably) don't trust the built-in switch in a WiFi router.

I never got more than about 800Mbps on the gigE LAN between two fast PCs and doing memory to memory (no disk) transfers. I believe these speeds are limited by the use of SMB/SAMBA and in my case, Microsoft's TCP stack efficiency and TCP window-size management. Not saying there are better/faster stacks, but that's just how it is. It varies a lot between versions of Windows, too. Never measured Linuxs'.

 

[MoInSTL]

I think it's slow as well. Not sure what's throttling it. Thanks for taking a look. I just copied the iso to the faster, SATA III drive from the slower Intel SATA II and it made no difference. Didn't think it would.

I could try a switch I suppose, but the download looks about right.

 

[stevech]

I think it's slow as well. Not sure what's throttling it. Thanks for taking a look. I just copied the iso to the faster, SATA III drive from the slower Intel SATA II and it made no difference. Didn't think it would.

I could try a switch I suppose, but the download looks about right.

Does this slow to-NAS speed happen with tested with other sorts of PCs the source?

 

[MoInSTL]

Does this slow to-NAS speed happen with tested with other sorts of PCs the source?

Can you rephrase that? Maybe it's because it's too early and I just woke up, but I'm not sure what you are asking.

I only have one desktop and it's the only other device that has gigabit. Along with the PC and DS, I have an HP printer with a Jet Direct network card (off when not in use), and Ooma VOIP connected to the ports. Directv Cinema Connection, cheap Black Friday laptop and Nexus 10 tablet occasionally set for wireless. I will try turning off the wireless when I get home from work to eliminate that for testing.

I also have AT&T Uverse NVG589 gigabit gateway (combo modem/router) that's in IP pass through mode in front of the N66U router. It's not true bridge mode, but as close as it can be. I can even connect the PC and DS214 directly to the gateway, but it's a PITA to change all the settings. Only have Uverse Internet. No TV or phone with it. That would eliminate the router along with having wireless off. Cat6 cables from PC to N66U and N66U to gateway are new and DS cable is less than 2 months old.

Edit: Too much of a project for this evening. Plus, Cardinals home game is on in an hour. I actually did receive a reply to my post in the Synology forum.

Tested with same 100 megabyte size and both were almost the same and the read quite a bit higher. Ran it a few times.

Just ran an online calculator from here: http://www.matisse.net/bitcalc/ Writing (Upload) 755.9470320 megabits = 94.493379 megabytes
Reading (Download) 782.4096880 megabits = 97.801211 megabytes

If I plug in the numbers I got yesterday, 761.0695600 megabits and converts to 95.133695 megabytes.
537.4837680 converts to 67.185471 megabytes. Unless I am too beat from work and doing something wrong...No idea why subsequent tests just now the up and down are much closer to each other.

I should have mentioned I am using DSM 5.0-4458 Update 1.

 

[stevech]

You had reported a low few kilobytes/second in the from-PC direction.
That's why I suggested trying a different PC.

 

[MoInSTL]

Opened a ticket with Synology. Sent them the requested kernel log debug.dat file. Hopefully they can see something.

 

[stevech]

Seems like your second set of speeds are high and at the expected values.

 

[MoInSTL]

Thanks, but I suspect the LAN test may be a synthetic test as I certainly don't see that upload speed in Resource Monitor set to real time monitoring.

I'll wait to hear back from them and dig around for another test. Can anyone recommend one?

 

[stevech]

Are you comparing LAN tests where disk I/O is not done, with disk to disk speeds?

 

[SheridanPC]

The DS214 is my first NAS and I am just knowledgeable enough about networking to get through configuration wizards and the occasional tech issue with research on sites like this, so it's possible I have some basic settings configured incorrectly.

With that said, are these transfer times a sign of something wrong? I've got a DS214 connected to a newer Verizon Fios branded modem/router connected in turn to a desktop windows PC, all through ethernet cable and with WD 4TB Reds in both NAS and PC. Last night I attempted to copy through Windows explorer my FLAC music library which is about 225GB and 9,000 files. At first the transfer rate was around 90-100Mb/s (may be getting unit of measurement wrong) and showed an estimated 3.5 hours to finish the copy. I went to bed and woke up this morning to see that it was only 70% done and was showing fluctuating transfer rates as low as 1-2Mb/s. I know many small files takes far longer than a few large files, but I was still surprised at this. Is this normal?

 

[SheridanPC]

And now for a single 30GB MKV file it is estimating 1.5 hours, with transfer rate mostly below 10Mb/s. Pretty disappointed and hoping there's some reasonable optimizing that I failed to do.

 

[mervincm]

I think your performance looks at least reasonable. If I were you I would test with a much larger file, say 9GB. you want to remove the effect of caching as much as possible. It also gives you longer to see transfer rates inside of windows task manager (another hint is to change update speed to high to get more samples per second)

When you are writing to the NAS seeing 500 Mb/sec Send and .5Mb/sec Receive is OK, it means you are writing at about 1/2 of the physical limitations of your Gigabit link.

Your screenshot shows 761 Mb/sec Send. You are getting about 3/4 of the physical limit of the Ethernet link. Thats pretty good, you may say you want closer to 100% of it, any maybe under some cases you might, but there is not very far from where you are to the best you can hope for.

When you are reading from the NAS seeing 500 Mb/sec Receive and .5Mb/sec Send is OK, it means you are writing at about 1/2 of the physical limitations of your Gigabit link.

Your screenshot shows 537 Mb/sec Send. You are getting about 1/2 of the physical limit of the Ethernet link. That's not great, but not terrible. Again, you may say you want closer to 100% of it, but the very most you can hope for is less that doubling what you are seeing.

A couple thinks to remember
-disks either stream well, or do random activity, they don't do both at the same time you can easily drop that 500mb/sec to 1/4 of that by mixing in a little bit of random activity.

-NAS is by its nature, a shared resource. It it tough to ensure that you have it's undivided attention! merely by mapping a drive to it, there are potentially lots of activity that may to going n that you are not aware of.


I think you must have made an error in this statement that is leading to confusion.

qouted
I had resource manager open and the best I saw was a spike to 447KB up and 143.9MB down when uploading a Windows 7 iso.

I suspect you got up and down reversed. I suspect you actually saw spikes of 447KB DOWN and 143.9MB UP
this is completely normal. the 143.9 figure is very high, more that the link can handle even. How? This must have been the affect of cache.
the 447KB figure is perfectly fine as well, since the data is moving in the other direction at the time and this small amount is just the TCP overhead, the traffic going back to the source that says "yup, I got that, send me a bit more"

damn.. you bumped an older thread and I didn't notice... yes, 10 Mb/sec is bad, you either have a bunch of other activity going on, or a problem.

 

[Deleted member 28741]

And now for a single 30GB MKV file it is estimating 1.5 hours, with transfer rate mostly below 10Mb/s. Pretty disappointed and hoping there's some reasonable optimizing that I failed to do.

Do you have other concurrent tasks running on the DS214? That could impact the performance by eating up RAM & CPU.


When I backed up my DS214Play to a DS213J It was writing at about 50MB/s … and for millions of small files thats not bad.

 

[SheridanPC]

Do you have other concurrent tasks running on the DS214? That could impact the performance by eating up RAM & CPU.


When I backed up my DS214Play to a DS213J It was writing at about 50MB/s … and for millions of small files thats not bad.

For part of the time of the single mkv transfer I may have had logitech media server running. But definitely not overnight on the earlier library transfer that took approx 8 hours.

The only thing I can think of at a hardware level is the ethernet cable or the modem/router is acting as a bottleneck? The day before I had a USB 3.0 drive connected directly to the NAS and transfer rates were easily 3-4 times faster. Also, my desktop system is brand new (built on an Asus Z97 mobo and 4770k CPU) with intel 6Gb sata controllers on all drives so no issue there.

Are there any software settings I should be looking at in either diskstation or Windows 8.1? Both transfers were through Windows explorer.

Also, tomorrow I'm adding in a Linksys WRT1900AC to take over router duties from the Verison modem/router so hopefully that eliminates one variable.

 

[stevech]

use a gigE switch. skip the router.

 

[SheridanPC]

use a gigE switch. skip the router.

I need the router so that two laptop users can access the NAS.

 

[stevech]

I need the router so that two laptop users can access the NAS.

Misunderstanding...
Get GigE switch. $25. Connect to router LAN port. Connect NAS to switch. Connect PCs that use wired to switch.
WiFi laptops/phones can still access NAS.

The LAN ports in routers are often not gigE and sometimes not truly high speed/switched.

 

[SheridanPC]

Misunderstanding...
Get GigE switch. $25. Connect to router LAN port. Connect NAS to switch. Connect PCs that use wired to switch.
WiFi laptops/phones can still access NAS.

The LAN ports in routers are often not gigE and sometimes not truly high speed/switched.

Got it, will definitely look into, starting first with whether the LAN port in the wrt1900ac fits that bill (after I install it). Thanks.

 

[mervincm]

Did you try the utility from the front end of this Post? it's a pretty simple tool. let us know the results. be really carefull with the units, including the case.
mbps is not the same as mBps.