LAN wired transfer speeds

[fidesachates]

Hi,

I was curious as to the LAN file transfer speeds on wire and I'm hoping someone can tell me if I should be expecting more from my speeds or if I'm getting what I should be.

Tests involves:
Dell desktop machine with unknown hard drive rpm speed. NTFS. Windows 8. 1 gig nic card.
Toshiba Satellite x205 laptop with SSD. NTFS. Windows 8. 1 gig nic card.
cat 5e cables on both machines.
Both machines indicate 1 gig link speed on their OS.
File transfer using standard drag and drop from Windows

In both directions I'm getting 18-25 MBps. Since the link speed on both machines are rated at 1 gig and I have a SSD on the laptop, I would have expected at least for the write to laptop to have attained far greater speeds. I accept that if my desktop has 5400 rpm drive, then 30 MPbps is my max for writing to the desktop.

Can someone tell me if I should run more tests, meeting the expected max (and explain why to me), or if there is a setting I should check. I should mention jumbo frames is disabled.

On a separate note but related question, when I read/write to the NTFS RAID attached to the router, I only get 5-9 MBps. Is this expected? I read multiple forums that suggest this is normal due to the router's weak cpu being used for Samba hence file transfers are limited by that as well as the paragon NTFS driver speed. I did read that one user posted he got 15 MBps so I'm just wondering if there's a setting I should play around with.

Thanks in advance.

 

[RMerlin]

Ethernet to Ethernet should always give you maximum speed regardless of the router, since you are transferring over the router's switch (i.e. the firmware doesn't even process any of that traffic).

Do make sure everything is on Cat 5e or Cat6 cables - this is required for gigabits.

You can use a program such as Lanspeed Test or iperf to test the actual network throughput without having the disk/SMB into the equation.

Performance of a disk plugged over USB will indeed always be low due to the CPU performance. That performance will vary a bit based on many factors (are you reading or writing, do you have anything running on the router at the same time such as Transmision, etc...).

 

[dazz87]

18-25 MBps is slow. I get about 50-65MBps and I think my speed is below average. My bottleneck i believe is my cpu on both pcs. One pc has a p4 and the other one is Intel Celeron E3300.

 

[fidesachates]

A - Dell Studio Desktop - Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller RTL 8168
B - Toshiba Laptop - Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller RTL 8168
C - Mac mini - Mid 2007 model

On all computers, the link speed is detected as 1 GBps. All cables are the same model of cat 5e cable.
All nic cards are gig nics. The following is my iperf tests.

Client - > Server

A -> C
945 Mbits /sec

C - > A
512 Mbits / sec

B- > C
895 Mbits / sec

C -> B
362 Mbits / sec

A -> B
382 Mbits / sec

B -> A
448 Mbits / sec

I notice that the numbers are consistent if you group the numbers by server. When
the server is on C, for instance, I always get the max throughput.

I played around with many options including manually setting the speed
and duplex, I found the best combination. After turning off flow control and priority & vlan on A and updating the driver, I
was able to see speeds:
C -> A
727 Mbits / sec
B -> A
811 Mbits / sec

Applying the same settings to B and driver update, I get:
A -> B
464 Mbits / sec
C -> B
480 Mbits / sec

As if all this wasn't head turning enough, I ran some file transfer tests. I won't post all the numbers, but the one that
was extremely odd was that B->A I get 100 MBps (almost the max of 125 MBps I believe). Comparing that
to the iperf result of 811 Mbits, it's a bit odd considering repeating this test I consistently get 100 MBps.
Repeating the same iperf test I get between 740-820 Mbps.

I would greatly if someone could point me in the next step for my question to achieve max throughput.

Please note that I did not play with jumbo frames; I'm not too familiar with it and am concerned about
if it will effect wireless clients.

 

[fidesachates]

As it happens, I hate being lazy so I did mess around with jumbo frames. There was indeed a slight improvement but only for computer B. Speeds jumped to 750MBps. However, I remember reading that jumbo frames should not be enabled if not all clients can support it and in fact I discovered that the PS3 (which is wired) can not. So I reverted it.