Is ~55MB/s "reasonable" over AC?

[TANWare]

I found sitting on top of the router on a 5GHz 867Mhz connection from my USB 3.0 drive on the router about 45 MBs data troughput. On the 1Gbps LAN about 75 MBs. throughput.

Oh, Cat5e on a 14' connection was causing issues, could be my USB 3.0 drive and cable, I went to CAT 6a and all is well with moving the drive away from the cables and router.

 

[sfx2000]

I found sitting on top of the router on a 5GHz 867Mhz connection from my USB 3.0 drive on the router about 45 MBs data troughput. On the 1Gbps LAN about 75 MBs. throughput.

Oh, Cat5e on a 14' connection was causing issues, could be my USB 3.0 drive and cable, I went to CAT 6a and all is well with moving the drive away from the cables and router.

The USB 3 interference tends to be near-field, so yes, moving the drive away from the Router may help, and only 2.4GHz is generally impacted...

Nice that you mention USB3 - the interference issues don't just affect AP's - it can affect the client as well if a USB 3 device is attached locally on the client - Bluetooth and WiFi 2.4GHz, I've seen that firsthand with some thumbdrives and cheap USB3 cables on external drives.

 

[Chrysalis]

I frequent about 400mbit/sec to and from my laptop which is using AC.
I find that pretty good considering wifi on 2.4ghz can barely manage 10% of that on my network.

If performance is very important, especially consistent performance then use gigabit ethernet.

 

[azazel1024]

I'm gathering your "big file" over AC to QNAP is roughly 350Mbit -- if you can share a rough Mbit for "a bunch of small files" that would be super helpful -- ideally one for read, one for write.

Regardless, thank you for trading note with me. -Scott

Small file transfer is going to make things very "YMMV" and unless you can exactly duplicate the client, the server, the transfer protocol, the medium and the file make-up the performance is going to be potentially very different.

Using large files is the best possible test of most things like medium.

Agree with you sfx2000.

Yes, 55MB/sec is reasonable. Depending on where you are, the router, the client, etc. I get 55-60MB/sec from my laptop with an Intel 7260ac (867Mbps) adapter from my Archer C8, about 48MB/sec the other direction, pretty close to it. Not going to get much better than that without a better adapter.

Things improve over time and devices are able to better leverage the medium. Draft 11n wireless adapters and routers would be lucky to hit 50% yield, or about 75Mbps per stream on a "150Mbps" stream. Now the newest 11ac gear running 11n can hit up around 75% yield on a 150Mbps stream (112Mbps). (Early 11ac isn't much different, the really early stuff was lucky to hit much more than 210Mbps on a "433Mbps" stream. It is steadily improving, but right now, with most clients, don't expect much better than 60% yield downhill with a tailwind. It'll probably hit closer to 70% in another couple of years.

Wired you can generally hit about 95% depending on file, protocol, etc., etc. Small files are going to go a lot slower than bigger files no matter what you have behind it and what is going on with the host OS. My server is pretty decent, my desktop rocks. Transferring a directory of 1+GB files I can easily hit 235MB/sec between machines (Windows 8.1 and SMB Multichannel so I can actually leverage 2 GbE connections at once). With a small file directory of 10MB TIFFs...well Windows virus scans those as they come in, even with 4 cores running at 4GHz each on my i5-3570, it slows down to about 45MB/sec average. If I switch to a directly of 10MB JPEGs, it jumps to 140-160MB/sec. Same size file, but different workload being exercised on there. If I move to a directory of ePubs and associated book art (40-100KB JPEGs and 200-800KB rich text files) it drops to 80MB/sec, but still faster than the bigger JPEG files.

 

[turnstyle]

sfx2000, very sorry if I seemed to be "moving the goalposts."

I understand it may seem that way, because I started off with the expectation that a NAS would significantly outperform my USB2 drives (with the client over AC wifi) -- but it turns out the improvement is more modest than I had expected.

I have learned that if I get 55MB/s sending a big file over AC from my PC's internal drive, that's about the same as I would get with a NAS -- and I get 35MB/s doing the same with a USB2 drive... So getting a NAS only appears to be about a 60% improvement. (Again, assuming AC client.)

It was also suggested that I should consider moving lots of small files -- so I unzipped an archived folder of about 7000 email files, totaling about 375MB.

Reading that from the internal drive over AC transferred at about 7MB/s and writing them back to the internal was 1.1MB/s -- so I was hoping to confirm whether that would be about the same for a QNAP TS-131 or a Synology DS115. (And, fwiw, this small file transfer was about 100% faster as compared to using USB2.)

So, to sum up: if my client is over AC, and if my current file server is a wired PC with USB2 drives -- then my understanding now is that upgrading to a NAS would only get me about 60% improvement (for big files) and 100% for small files (not the over 3-4x boost I had wrongly expected).

And this is all only true for AC -- I'm sure the benefit of the NAS is clear if the client is on the wire -- but my clients are all going to be on wifi.

-Scott

 

[azazel1024]

At least in my experience even with wireless I've got a whole lot more throughput than that, but then again I am not using a basic NAS, I am using a full fledged file server. A directory similar to what you are describing from my server to my laptop and the other direction is about 20MB/sec over 11ac, about 30MB/sec wired. I suspect there is virus scanning overhead there (using outlook mail files) mixed in there. Using small, but somewhat larger files, the ePub folders example, it is about 30MB/sec over 11ac and about 80MB/sec wired.

A bit slower on the wireless side if I am writing to the server from the laptop for those small file directories.

At least personally the transfers with files that tiny aren't very common. I am generally either transferring decent sized archives, JPEG/RAW file folders or MP4 files. Occasionally I am transferring a small file directory, but it is exceedingly rare.

A NAS is probably going to see much reduced file performance compared to my setup, but at the same time, likely a fair amount faster than a drive attached by USB2. USB is notoriously horrible for small file performance because of the way the protocol works, so I would expect an easy 2-3x speed up by hosting the files through an SATA/eSATA/PCIe interface.

 

[turnstyle]

Thanks, wow, so that's a really significant difference.

When I copy my big folder of small files from the PC (on ethernet, using the internal SSD) over 11ac to my Mac, it transfers at about 7MB/s -- and copying it from my Mac over 11ac to that same PC (again, ethernet, using the internal SSD), I'm down at 1.1MB/s.

Whereas you are seeing at least 20MB/s for a roughly similar folder of files, also over 11ac? That's a HUGE difference!

I'm not running antivirus software on the Mac, the PC is running Microsoft Security Essentials -- so you think I should retry with Microsoft Security Essentials disabled? (The USB2 bottleneck should be eliminated, now with my test share on the PC's internal SSD.)

Just curious, are you using a Mac as your client? I had read some docs saying Macs were unexpectedly slow with NAS -- I wonder if this could possibly be the issue.

Thanks for sticking with me, -Scott

 

[turnstyle]

Had a chance to try again with Microsoft Security Essentials off on the PC.

Interestingly, the read test went from roughly 7MB/s to 10MB/s, but the write only went from about 1.1MB/s to 1.3MB/s -- I did the read test first, and thought that was a decent change -- so then I expected to see an even bigger improvement for writing, but that didn't prove to be the case.

Anyhow, with MSE off, I'm still nowhere near your 20MB/s -- but wanted to post back that MSE clearly does have some impact, thanks for the suggestion.

-Scott

 

[azazel1024]

No and yes, Macs tend to be slow. Their implementation of SMB is pretty crappy with no excuse for it. Only the last couple of versions of OSX have implemented SMB2.0, until pretty recently they only ran with SMB1.1, which was terrible and archaic and has tons of overhead, which is going to significantly impact small file performance.

As in no, I am not using a Mac as a client. I have an iPhone and my wife and iPad and iPhone, but no Macs in this household . Also yes, it could be that the Mac is impacting the performance, which I'd kind of expect is part of what you are seeing there with the terrible write performance, probably also impacting read performance.

Leveraging an SSD, the overhead for more modern versions of SMB (and proper implementations of those modern versions) even with wireless in the mix should result in much better small file performance than what you are seeing. At least so long as there isn't any virus scanning going on.

 

[turnstyle]

Thanks so much -- so now I gather I still have to hope for data from somebody with a Mac and a NAS who can copy a big folder of small files over AC -- meaning, to have a sense of whether I should expect to do much better than the roughly 10MB/s read, 1MB/s write performance I'm getting with my wired PC.

And if you don't mind my asking -- the client for which you do see 20MB/s over AC with lots of small files -- is that on Windows?

Thank you again for the info, I'm sorry my question became a bit frustrating for sfx2000, as I appreciate his input as well.

-Scott