Help needed to identify my bottleneck

[SteveCo]

Hi all,

I'm hoping someone with a little more experience than myself can give me some ideas as to why I might be experiencing slow read/write speeds. I have tried copying various files to the NAS but seem to be limited to about 10MB/s. Given that I'm running what is an all gigabit setup, I don't know why this is.

My setup is as follows:

Synology 1512+ with 2 3TB WD Red hard drives configured in SHR.
Early 2011 Macbook Pro

Both of these are connected to a gigabit D-Link switch, which is in turn connected to a LinkSys EA6500 router. The router is connected to a 10/100 modem.

The system is showing a gigabit link at all points apart from the modem which is 10/100. I tried removing the modem from the setup to see if that was somehow causing my problems, but the read/write speeds have been consistent.

Any ideas greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Steve

 

[TonyH]

Hi,
Your hard drive in the Mac and quality of ethernet cables can be factor. You can run hard drive performance checking utility and if you need replace the drive, you can use quality CAT6 cables. You did not mention what kind of r/w speed you get.

 

[SteveCo]

Hi Tony,

Many thanks for taking the time to reply. Re speeds, I'm seeing in the order of 10-12 MB/s read/write speeds.

The Macbook Pro has been retrofitted with a Crucial M4 SSD. Running a speed test using Blackmagic Disk Speed Test I'm seeing write speeds of 250MB/s and read speeds of 500MB/s.

In trying to isolate the problem, I've tried a couple of different things. First of all I ran a Cat 5E from my iMac (standard 1TB 7200 HD) to the switch to see if it was a problem with the Macbook Pro. I achieved similar speeds.

Next I ran the cable directly to the router, bypassing the switch. No change.

I was under the impression that with Cat5E I would achieve better speeds that what I'm seeing, but like I said my knowledge in this area is limited and I'm happy to try Cat6 cables.

Any further tips appreciated.

Steve

 

[Jesse B]

Cat6 won't be any faster than Cat5e.

What method/protocol are you using to transfer between the two units? Also, does the Synology offer any way to run performance benchmarks on the disks locally?

 

[TonyH]

Hi,
Not for the speed but your NAS memory may be upgradable. My DS713+ has 4GB memory now from 1GB. It improved overall performance. My R/W speed is ~8 times average than yours. My ASUS ROG laptop has SSD as well as 7200rpm HDD. Router is ASUS RT-AC66U. actually all my cables are CAT7 came from orient.

 

[SteveCo]

Thanks for the replies.

Jesse, the network is configured using IPv4 and DHCP. So far I've been unable to find a method of benchmarking the NAS hard drives.

Tony, I believe my NAS also has a slot for extra RAM so I will get some and see what effect that has.

Cheers,

Steve

 

[SteveCo]

After spending a couple of hours this evening with a network tech, I've established that the most likely source of the problem is in the Synology unit itself.

I've connected to the NAS both directly and through 2 different switches from 3 different computers using Cat6 cables (1 mac, 1 windows) and the write speeds did not exceed 12MB/s.

Time to contact Synology and see what they have to say.

Thanks for the help.

Steve