MoCA 2.0 Actiontech ECB6000

[stevech]

Thanks for the feedback Steve re: your experience with green drives. Mine are 5900rpm seagate and I have checked to see they are aligned so the speed is puzzling. I have ordered new 7200rpm drives and a new qnap NAS as it doesn't seem resolvable. 15MBs transfer rate is too slow!

You'll see the numbers like 15MB/s or so when transferring lots of small ( less than 10MB or so) files. It's due to all the fixed overhead per file.

Last drives I bought were on sale at local Fry's: WD Red, 3TB x 2 @ $89ea

 

[bds3151]

You'll see the numbers like 15MB/s or so when transferring lots of small ( less than 10MB or so) files. It's due to all the fixed overhead per file.

Last drives I bought were on sale at local Fry's: WD Red, 3TB x 2 @ $89ea

Ok, so after fiddling with the 212j NAS parameters, I went and connected via direct ethernet again and got 70MB/s! Not sure what actually fixed it. maybe the many reboots. Went back to my i3 mediacenter (the one connected via the moca 2.0 adapters) and am back to 15MB/s. So I haven't fixed the moca speed yet. I'm always using the same large mkv file . Main NAS changes were to downgrade to 5.1 and change the opportunistic locking parameter.

 

[bds3151]

Just opened a ticket with Actiontec as I now believe the Moca 2.0 adapters are defective. I ran a straight dedicated run of rg6 about 50' and the speed didn't improve.

 

[stevech]

Yeah, sounds reasonable. Any difference using say 6ft of RG6?

Just to stave off level 1 tech support, be sure you have open coax ports terminated (e.g., loop-through ports if any).

 

[bds3151]

No significant difference using any length coax. I think I got some bad hardware.

 

[pec]

I installed two Actiontec ECB6200's, MoCA 2.0 Bonded device, on the same ~80' of dedicated coax on which the ECB6000's were installed. Download performance on Speedtest.net to my local ISP is 820 to 835 Mbps.

-pc

 

[Googer]

Hmmmm.... sounding like buying some of these to run on the extra unused set of coax in this townhouse rental is in my near future...

 

[stevech]

I installed two Actiontec ECB6200's, MoCA 2.0 Bonded device, on the same ~80' of dedicated coax on which the ECB6000's were installed. Download performance on Speedtest.net to my local ISP is 820 to 835 Mbps.

-pc

Your ISP provides you over 835Mega bits per second at the IP layer (where Speetest.net runs)? Wow.

 

[pec]

Your ISP provides you over 835Mega bits per second at the IP layer (where Speetest.net runs)? Wow.

This is the local cable company's new 1 Gbps down and 50 Mbps up service using the new Hitron CDA3-35 (32x8) DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem, which bonds 32 channels together to get the 1 Gbps down. The cable company recently replaced their headend gear with ARRIS E6000's and killed off the analog TV channels, which gave then many more channels for data. Not sure how sustainable this will be, but the addition of DOCSIS 3.1 in the next year or two should help. My cynical view is that rolling this out with DOCSIS 3.0 is probably a PR move to counter a FTTH RFI that was released by the cities, county, and university in late 2013.

-pc

 

[Thucydides]

I installed two Actiontec ECB6200's, MoCA 2.0 Bonded device, on the same ~80' of dedicated coax on which the ECB6000's were installed. Download performance on Speedtest.net to my local ISP is 820 to 835 Mbps.

-pc

pec - Recognizing that I also asked this question about your ECB6000s, how is latency with the 6200s using bonded channels?

Thanks.

 

[pec]

Additional latency is about the same, ~3 msec. I get ping times of ~10 msec to the speedtest.net node in town for both MoCA 2.0 models, and about 7 msec on 802.11ac ( should probably measure this connected to router Ethernet, however). The MoCA 2.0 latency spec is the same for the un-bonded and bonded services. The max latency is spec'd at 5.1 msec.

 

[Pinotphile]

Just opened a ticket with Actiontec as I now believe the Moca 2.0 adapters are defective. I ran a straight dedicated run of rg6 about 50' and the speed didn't improve.

I had a similar experience with a pair of Actiontec MoCA 1.1 adapters, and I think at least one of them was likely defective. They tested out much slower (as in less than half the speed) compared to my old Motorola NIM100 (MoCA 1.0) adapters running the same test. I'm giving Actiontec another shot though (have a couple of ECB6200 adapters on order).

 

[azazel1024]

My DS212 (a wee bit faster than the 212j) on gigE to a fast PC - like all NASes, is limited by file system, SMB and TCP overhead. For certain jobs, it sometimes gets to 60-80MBps (x8 for mbps); but normally for big files it's 40+MBps (320Mbps). You should see at least 80% of these numbers on your DS212j, I think. It might be PC-limited.

Tests I've done in the past show a remarkable difference in LAN throughput (no disks used in the tests) between fast and lesser CPUs, for Windows. The fastest I have is a quad core I5. I think it's huge overhead in Microsoft's IP stack and moreso NTFS and SMB.

That said, it's rare that I do Gigabyte file transfers. Most common are my drive imaging (Acronis) of several PCs), yielding a 40GB file for each. In that case, the backup utility is the constraint - as it works to eliminate empty blocks and so on.

But still, I'm quite satisfied with the cost/benefit of GigE LAN and the NAS. And $20 Acronis 2015 is finally improved in ease of use. A staple for me is Centered Systems' SecondCopy and versioning for my (professional) work in process so I can easily fall back if need be.

The CPU overhead is pretty tiny. My z3740 based tablet can easily haul full gigabit over a USB3 GbE adapter. Only storage limited (so if I use the eMMC storage, I get ~110MB/sec read from the tablet and 40MB/sec writes from the tablet to my server. If I attach a USB3 500GB HDD using a hub so I can use the GbE adapter at the same time, I get about 108MB/sec reads and writes, which is the limitation of the 2.5" disk in the enclosure).

The issue is the NAS CPUs are generally very, very, very low performance. Just like router CPUs are. Until recently most routers were using processors about the equivalent to 25-40% of an iPhone 4's single core Cortex A9 running at 800MHz. Even these days most routers are only maybe a Cortex A9 dual core processor at around 800-1000MHz or some non-ARM based processor of roughly similar computational capacity. They are highly non-optimized for storage based on their system buses (IE they often don't have dedicated XHCI controllers, or SATA controllers, but use bridge chips to the native, and slow, system bus).

NAS are sometimes in a bit better shape because they tend to have better system buses, but they are still often pretty slow. A few years older ones, like the 212, IIRC use a Kirkwood dual core 800MHz process (I think in the 212j and the 212 uses a 1000MHz variety, I think). These are about the equivalent to maybe 20% of the processing power of my tablet, or maybe as fast as an iPhone 4s on a good day, with a tail wind.

This is partly to say the appliance processors are advancing rapidly, but even most NAS still use processors that aren't even fast as a current smart phone, let alone a tablet, let alone even remotely close to a laptop or desktop. Oh, sure, some higher end NAS do. One of the issues of course is that there haven't been a lot of low power, but powerful processors until recently.

Of course they also want to shave money where they can. Hard to justify a $40 processor in a $100-200 product.

 

[azazel1024]

Thanks for the feedback Steve re: your experience with green drives. Mine are 5900rpm seagate and I have checked to see they are aligned so the speed is puzzling. I have ordered new 7200rpm drives and a new qnap NAS as it doesn't seem resolvable. 15MBs transfer rate is too slow!

It certainly isn't the drives unless they are 15+ years old. I had 40GB drives from circa 2001 that could do more than 15MB/sec reads and writes.

 

[stevech]

Dear OP: I think you said that you realize that 15MBytes/s or less is common when transferring lots of small files (small means < 10's of MB).

 

[stansoltz]

I have 4 actiontec moca 1.1s. Are these new ecb6000 and 6200 compatible? I.e. If I installed two of these they would be faster but the others would still work slower but all on same network?

 

[bds3151]

Dear OP: I think you said that you realize that 15MBytes/s or less is common when transferring lots of small files (small means < 10's of MB).

Well, I've determined that the ecb6000's ARE working at 300mbps +! Looks like I had two issues, one was the NAS configuration and the second is the Win 7 i3 computer. The Win 7 computer is limiting the transfers to ~12mbps. I hooked up my i5 Win 8.1 laptop and got 40MB/s. Now to fix the Win 7 computer. So it was never an issue with the actiontec's.

 

[stevech]

mbps = megabits/sec. Just double checking. Too often too much confusion about MB vs. Mb.

 

[bds3151]

You've asked this multiple times. No confusion here. I ran the Network planning dept's for the largest retailer and later for the largest mutual fund company in the US. Built WAN and LAN networks worldwide. Not bragging, just giving some references so you have some confidence in my comments since you have asked this so much.

 

[bds3151]

It certainly isn't the drives unless they are 15+ years old. I had 40GB drives from circa 2001 that could do more than 15MB/sec reads and writes.

Yeah I ordered the drives to expand storage and get an upgraded NAS with dual ethernet. The actual NAS issue was resolution was posted earlier. I downgraded the firmware to Synology ver 5.1 from 5.2 and turned off opportunistic locking. Got 70 ~90 MB/s after those changes. Not sure which one it was or if both were necessary.