[RT-AC87U] Increase USB3.0 disk speed?

[blbeczech82]

Hi,
I'm getting around 30~40MB/s SMB read speed from my USB3 attached disks. Tested some SATA III disks 3,5" with SATA III powered adapter, some USB3 2.5" external disks, tested NTFS and ext2, 3 and 4 filesystems - no significant changes. Disks in PC getting expected speeds so no disks or adapter issue. Tested by simple SMB file copy and benchmark tools but same values. Both CPU running 100% when read/write. Htop shows usb-storage and smbd.conf high CPU usage, niceness change to lowest doesn't improve.
USB3.0 interference reduction option in advanced wifi settings is disabled.
In initial reviews of this router were many saying 70MB/s achievable. In some (maybe one year old) changelogs of FW I remember decrease of SMB priority to improve wireless performance.

My question is how to increase SMB speed and what are other users values.
Thank you...

 

[RMerlin]

Make sure you test over Ethernet. 30-40 MB/s is what you'd get out of a 2x2 802.11ac connection for instance.

 

[Jack Yaz]

What's the memory usage looking like?

 

[blbeczech82]

Make sure you test over Ethernet. 30-40 MB/s is what you'd get out of a 2x2 802.11ac connection for instance.

Thx for reply. I checked over ethernet. Cat5e, giving full speed. Quality is OK.

Odesláno z mého SM-G935F pomocí Tapatalk

 

[blbeczech82]

What's the memory usage looking like?

50% is normal, while transfering then almost 100%. Netdata shows approx 15% of buffered. But even I disabled entware and ab-solution, no improvement.

Odesláno z mého SM-G935F pomocí Tapatalk

 

[Jack Yaz]

50% is normal, while transfering then almost 100%. Netdata shows approx 15% of buffered. But even I disabled entware and ab-solution, no improvement.

Odesláno z mého SM-G935F pomocí Tapatalk

I'm not an expert, but I suspect the ram and CPU maxxing out is an issue. Might be worth creating swap on a USB and seeing if that helps?

 

[blbeczech82]

I'm not an expert, but I suspect the ram and CPU maxxing out is an issue. Might be worth creating swap on a USB and seeing if that helps?

I tested both with and w/o swap. No difference. CPU maxed out is usual I think. I checked with no devices wireless connected and no eth clients to make sure CPU is just handling 1 to 1 transfer and nothing else. But no improvement.

 

[Jack Yaz]

Try nfs or ftp? Samba is quite resource hungry

 

[blbeczech82]

SMB 31 / FTP 39 / NFS not tested. Anyway not getting close to 70MB/s.
Could you test your throughput? I see that you own this quantenna blackbox

 

[Jack Yaz]

I do, but only have a USB 2 drive. Can you quote the sources for the speeds? It would be useful if we can try to mimic the conditions of the tests.

 

[blbeczech82]

I do, but only have a USB 2 drive. Can you quote the sources for the speeds? It would be useful if we can try to mimic the conditions of the tests.

- 3 GB video file transfered from router USB3.0 attached disk (NTFS)
- SMB test: copy from Win10 mapped drive (router SMB share) to local SSD
- FTP test: copy from router to local SSD
(disk parameters should not be so important to achieve 70MB/s just not to use flash drive)

 

[FTC]

Hi,

Although I have an RT-AC3200 in this respect USB3 throughput should be very similar. I am currently getting around 57MB/s read and roughly 50MB/sec write speed with file copy commands to a router smb share, using a Merlin derivative (380.65 based). Some comments though :

- The more solid gain in perfomance is achieved through router overclocking so yes, the CPU resources in the router are bottlenecking USB3 speed. I am currently overclocked to 1200,800 so decrease my performance numbers accordingly if comparing w/an RT-AC87 w/o overclock.
- Merlin has stated several times that Merlin firmwares have a slight more slow samba implementation than official ones, due to the fact that he is using newer versions (so also decrease your expectations a bit re. official firmwares if using merlin)
- There are some parameters to check / alter in smb.conf but these provide at least marginal improvements in current firmwares.
- Beware on what you test, specially make sure that you use the same disk, filled up to the same % (in rotational hard disks access/read from inner tracks is aprox half speed related to outer tracks. Also be careful on your 'other' disk (the one that receives the the 'copy from' or that provides data to a 'copy to' the smb). and for last, always check that the connection is wired and done at 1Gb (max) - some times even using cat5e a 100mb connection is established... also make sure your PC (and network card) is not configured with 'energy saving' settings and both the router and the PC are as unloaded as possible for measuring.
- One interesting page to check is http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Features/Tune-Your-Hard-Disk-with-hdparm
just in case your disk is wrongly configured somehow.

 

[blbeczech82]

Hi,

Although I have an RT-AC3200 in this respect USB3 throughput should be very similar. I am currently getting around 57MB/s read and roughly 50MB/sec write speed with file copy commands to a router smb share, using a Merlin derivative (380.65 based). Some comments though :

Thanks for hints. I checked with hdparm:
Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 308 MB in 3.01 seconds = 102.46 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 242 MB in 3.00 seconds = 80.54 MB/sec
Not so great but it's over SATA III adapter connected. So there should be no disk issue.
Anyway even you (on overclocked router) cannot achieve over 60MBps.
Q1: Did you ever try to tune throughput more than current values?
Q2: If yes what exactly you did? What was througput before tuning?
Q3: what disk do you have?

Thx

 

[FTC]

Hi,
Yes, I have tried to improve throughput many times and this is the main reason why my router is overclocked. I did achieve about 63MB/sec READ and 55MB/sec WRITE with some version of merlin about 1 year ago, but I had other problems with that versions, plus it was with another hdd (TOSHIBA canvio II 3TB, 2.5"). In general performance has degraded a little bit in the last months (I think mostly as my HDD has been filling up) and specially when I switched to the HDD I am using now : a RAID1 USB3 enclosure with 2 seagate 2.5" 4TB disks.

 

[Gatsu]

Is your HDD/enclosure properly detected as USB 3.0 ??

nvram show | grep _speed

480 means USB2, 5000 means USB3
I lost my USB3 speed on every firmware after 378.56_2 on AC68U

 

[paulbates]

Also verify if "Reducing USB3 Interference" is not checked. Having it unchecked can increase throughput but at the same time impact your 2.4ghz devices negatively.

I've run my ac88 with SMB
2=on and USB3 interference = off. I get comparable performance on an SSD. Here is a link to my test.

https://www.snbforums.com/threads/hard-drive-or-nas-suggestion.37471/#post-310156


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[blbeczech82]

Is your HDD/enclosure properly detected as USB 3.0 ??

nvram show | grep _speed

480 means USB2, 5000 means USB3
I lost my USB3 speed on every firmware after 378.56_2 on AC68U

usb_path2_speed=480
usb_path1_speed=5000

It's OK. Thanks for tip anyway. Btw what do you mean that you lost speed. USB3 disk was not properly detected?

 

[blbeczech82]

Also verify if "Reducing USB3 Interference" is not checked. Having it unchecked can increase throughput but at the same time impact your 2.4ghz devices negatively.

I've run my ac88 with SMB
2=on and USB3 interference = off. I get comparable performance on an SSD. Here is a link to my test.

https://www.snbforums.com/threads/hard-drive-or-nas-suggestion.37471/#post-310156


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

If I understand well, SMBv2 is slowing down? As I mentioned previously USB3 interference setting is off so should have no impact.

 

[paulbates]

If I understand well, SMBv2 is slowing down? As I mentioned previously USB3 interference setting is off so should have no impact.

It's processor heavy on the asus... but it's designed to increase throughput in some cases.

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com...ith-the-smb2-protocol-in-windows-server-2008/



Paul



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[namtih]

You could also check the mount options in your fstab file. Especially noatime and async.
I have an AC56U with overclocked 1200/800 specs and I also get about 52MB/s performance (Samba). Tried some other settings with fstab and smb.conf, but wasn't able to get any better values.

Here is an example of one of my fstab entries:

UUID=4C842GG84D964CC /tmp/mnt/asus3  tntfs rw,noauto,nodev,noexec,noatime,hidden=show,dotfile=show,async,nls=utf8,nouser_xattr 0 0