QNAP 639 Performance

[dikkiedirk]

I have a QNAP TS-639 on my Gigabit LAN and it has been running fine the last couple of years, mainly serving videofiles( full bluray rips, mkvs etc. to my Dune Base 3.0 mediaplayer and laptop. My laptop is connected through a moca 1.1 adapter to the network. Lately I experience trouble playing high bitrate movies from the TS-639. Playback is choppy, sound breaking up. This happens on many movies, mainly bluray backups.

The TS-639 has 6 Hitachi 7k2000 disks in a RAID6 Volume which is 98% full.
Network link is at 1000Mbps, MTU 1500. Cabling is all Cat. 6.
The same sort of files play fine from an unrad server.

How can I test read and write speed from and to the NAS? What would be the best way to find the problem? Maybe there is something wrong on the network?

 

[stevech]

First, do playback with laptop connected by ethernet cable to your switch/router LAN port, to eliminate possibility of MoCA problems. My MoCA setup has 2+ years on it, no issues.

Then move laptop back to MoCA connection. Do file copy of a file that's hundreds of megabytes in size, to/from laptop and NAS.

 

[dikkiedirk]

Connecting the laptop wirelessly to the network yiels a transfer speed of a 1 GB file of about 8 MB/s. On Moca I get about 18-20 MB/s.

I saw on the NAS the rpc.rquotad process taking 98% CPU usage. Can this cause the flaky playback? How can I disable rpc.rquotad? Just to see if it helps.

 

[stevech]

. On Moca I get about 18-20 MB/s..

Confirming: 20MegaBytes/sec on MoCA?

 

[dikkiedirk]

yes, 18-20 MBytes/s. Copying a 10 GB file took a bit more than 9 minutes.


I have a Thecus N5500 and a home-built unraid server on my network (on the same switch as the TS-639) I play blutay rips of both without a stutter. Only of the TS-639 it's like a slide-show, 3 sec OK, 1 sec Pause on-going.
Maybe there are some settings causing this behavior?

 

[stevech]

what brand of MoCA... that's really good throughput!
20MBps ~ 160Mbps.

 

[dikkiedirk]

what brand of MoCA... that's really good throughput!
20MBps ~ 160Mbps.

I use Hirschmann MOKA 16. From what I hear they use the Entorpic chipset and are advertised as max. 175 Mbps.

My setup is very basic. One unit is connected to a Coax wall outlet, plasma TV and my router upstairs. The other to the same coax downstairs. No splitters or other fancy stuff are involved.

Should be a nice setup for playing high bitrate mkvs and bluray rips without stuttering and hiccups. And it does work playing these served from a Thecus N5500 and unraid server. Not so when served from the Qnap TS-639 where even the trailers and menus from bluray rips cause a lot of stuttering.

Maybe the SMB protocol on the TS-639 is broken and a firmware downgrade could fix it. Haven't tried NFS yet because mounting NFS share seems impossible in Windows 7 resulting in Network Error 53.