Seagate BlackArmor 220 is killing me, please help.

[bmf614]

Hello all,

I was off work this week so on Monday I decided I would run out and buy a Sonos S5 wireless music system. I quickly realized how cool it would be to have a NAS to stream music to my Sonos S5. I then realized how cool it would be to have a DLNA server to stream video to all of my connected devices.. (you can see where I am going with this).

I went to Micro Center to look at their selection and for whatever reason they kept telling me the Seagate black armor 220 was pretty good. I figured gigabit, etc should be able to get some decent performance out of it. So I bought one.

Needless to say it was a mistake.

I am having several problems with this device:

#1 The performance is terrible. The highest I have ever seen in write is 7MB/sec which equates to about ~56Mbps.

#2 If I am writing data to the NAS in Windows 7 via CIFS and someone tries to stream data (video, whatever) from the NAS at the same time it literally disconnects my data transfer with something stupid like "invalid file handle". if by some miracle the video will play while I am writing to the NAS it is not watchable at the frame rate it is getting sent at.

I only have two more days off (plus memorial day) and so far I am really disappointed. I am going to try and take this Black Armor 220 back to micro center but then it occured to me I have no idea what else to buy.

From everything I read on SNB the LS-WV2.0TL/R1 by Buffalo should be easily two times as fast as the Black Armor 220 but then again in your benchmarks you gave the Black Armor 220 4x more performance than I can get out of it. I read horror stories about how if you connect the BA 220 to a dlink switch that it will only copy at 1MB/sec (lol) so I just ran a cross over cable directly into the darn thing to avoid any kind of wacky networking issues that may be present and it didn't really help.

Does anyone have any advice for me? The main reason I bought the BA 220 was because of the price and because I was a dumbass and didn't read your wonderful benchmarks.

Please assist!!

 

[bmf614]

In the interest of doing Seagates job to try and find out why this thing is so damn slow I have actually made a lot of progress:

Version:
2000.1211
Built on Fri, 11 Feb 2011

With 'media service' disabled(regardless of whether or not the media service is attached to any shares..):

File: 3.6GB HD video

RAID-1 write: 12 - 15MB/sec
RAID-1 READ: 16-18MB/sec

Within 60 seconds of 'media service' being enabled but without media service being enabled on any shares:

RAID-1 write: ~12MB/sec
RAID-1 read: 17MB/sec

Immediately after enabling 'media service' on two shares:

There is a huge amount of disk activity with nothing even streaming and no file copying operations taking place.
(I assume the NAS is indexing the content?)

Keep in mind there is nothing actually streaming from the NAS at this time.

RAID-1 write: struggles to average at 6MB/sec
RAID-1 read: 14MB/sec

Because the READ is higher than I expected I re-ran the write and as I expected it was roughly 12MB/sec.

My theory:

The script or process that is indexing/updating the media service when it is applied to a share or "every hour" is either:

1) Not terminating properly and running forever.
and/or
2) exhausting the tiny amount of RAM that this system has, which causes the SMB/CIFS disconnects under heavy loading.

Since it doesn't say anything on the packaging about 1/2 throughput when used for DLNA/streaming, this is a very serious problem that seagate needs to address.

I am going to retest again after 24 hours to prove my theory that the 'indexing' is never ending and that is why throughput appears to be lousy all the time. i.e. multiple index/updating processes stack up on top of each other (this is very common with poorly written shell scripts called by cron).

 

[thiggins]

I'm afraid you made a poor choice. I'd take it back if you can. DLNA indexing (or any other) background process that whacks the drive head around will definitely kill throughput.

 

[bmf614]

I'm afraid you made a poor choice. I'd take it back if you can. DLNA indexing (or any other) background process that whacks the drive head around will definitely kill throughput.

Can you offer advice on what wouldn't be a poor choice how about the buffalo pro duo?

 

[bmf614]

Can you offer advice on what wouldn't be a poor choice how about the buffalo pro duo?

Kudos to Micro Center for letting me return the pile of crap without a restocking fee.

 

[thiggins]

Can you offer advice on what wouldn't be a poor choice how about the buffalo pro duo?

Buffalo, NETGEAR, QNAP, Synology should all be fine.