Home network connections are very slow. Please help

[rmd3003]

Hello everybody. Need a little help with home network. My PC with gigabit NIC(realtek) is connected directly to my router (Dlink DIR-655 which is also gigabit). I also have HP EX470 server which is also directly connected to router (should be gigabit too). Problem is that despite the fact that all three devices are Gigabit my transfer speeds between PC and server are in 40-60 mb/s which I think is very slow. All cables are CAT6.

On a PC i have norton 2008 firewall which I also tried disabling but it didn't help.

Any suggestions? It drives me crazy

 

[valentin]

40-60 mega bit or mega bytes? If it is megabytes - this is perfect.
If megabits - then this 100Mbit link speed.

If your router and network cards have separate lights for GBit link - check them. Check the net adapter properties, is the link set to Auto?

Also try using another cable.
________
Gm Ls Engine

 

[thiggins]

Our tests of the EX475 showed around 60 MBytes/s average for large filesize (32 MB to 1 GB) writes and 36 MB/s for reads with a gigabit LAN connection. So as valentin noted, you are just running into the throughput limitation of the EX470.

Just because something has a gigabit Ethernet connection doesn't mean that it can run at full gigabit speed. Same goes for computers. You need a PCIe gigabit NIC (vs a PCI NIC) to achieve full gigabit speed.

 

[rmd3003]

Yes, I'm running 40 megabytes/s. So I guess I'm OK.
My expectation was I will run in hundreds of mb/s

Thanks.

 

[scotty]

Yes, I'm running 40 megabytes/s. So I guess I'm OK.
My expectation was I will run in hundreds of mb/s

Thanks.

Keep in mind the bit vs. byte thing (8 bits to 1 byte). Network speeds are indicated in Megabits per second (i.e. 100Mbit/s, 1000Mbit/s, Gigabit ethernet. Thus, Gigabit ethernet has a limit of 125 megabytes per second. You'll never get 100.0% speed out of virtually any connection for a variety of reasons. Also remember a small 'b' refers to bits, big 'B' refers to bytes (Mbps - megabits per second, MBps - megabytes).

Also, when it comes to computers and NAS's, the hard drives often serve as the bottleneck. A fairly standard 7200rpm hard drive these days is going to average around 65-75MB/s. Even a WD Raptor hard drive (generally regarded as the fastest consumer drive) is only going to get you 75-85MB/s average read/write speeds. To break 100MB/s sustained speeds with hard drives you generally need fast drives combined with good, fast, dedicated RAID cards.

I'd highly recommend reading the 'How to build your own Fast NAS article series here on SNB. Lots of really good observations like this and conclusions about how to get speed out of a NAS. Tim's done some good work there.

But your 40-60MB/s doesn't seem too bad at all for a NAS.

 

[rmd3003]

Thanks a lot for all replies. Should've done more research in the first place. So 40 MB/s is actually about 320Mb/s which is in the gigabit range. By the way, I'm using 3 WD green drives in HP EX470 which are already kind of slow.

Woooo, I thought something is wrong with my setup.

Thanks again.