Using NAS as local file use .. speed needed

[Breezy]

On the face of it this might seem to be simple request .. to open and edit files on a NAS with reasonable speed. Let me give you some background though ..

I bought a QNAP 119P+ for it's speed and after some testing and optimizing, etc I find it's actually SLOWER than a USB external drive!!!!!!!!! Much slower in fact. Many seconds slower.

QNAP says that my NAS is good and certainly the transfer rate for large files is quite quick. However if I open a file I have stored on the NAS via an app it loads OK but not fast. If I open a second file (these are about 4 mbs each) it's dog slow. In reading over the review of my NAS on smallnetworkbuilder they mentioned that small file sizes could be a problem and I questioned QNAS about that. They said they had revised the firmware to fix the problem.

So now I'm wondering .. can a typical USB external drive be faster than a good speed NAS on a gigabit network? I'm using WinXP on a straightforward gigabit wired network and accessing these files thru Microsoft network.

The USB drive is just a 3 or 4 year old Maxtor One Touch external drive.

Do I just have a bum NAS? I ordered a Synology 211 today to compare them and send the loser back but what if they are both slow?

I wanted a NAS that is fast enough to act as a local hard drive, or pretty close anyway. BTW, my current local drive is about 80 mb/sec. Any advice is appreciated.

 

[ntm1275]

I'm wondering if your problem with speeds is being caused by your use of XP as your OS, not your choice of NAS

I have a Synology DS1010+, which is capable of transfer speed of over 100MB/s, but if I use XP the transfer speeds are under 40MB/s for Reads, and under 50MB/s for Writes

I tested a number of Microsoft OS's with my i5 750 PC with 4 GB RAM and a Velociraptor drive, all Gigabit
I had set up several partition on the drive, and installed each OS on its own partition

Here is a link to my Read and Write speeds with all the OS's tested
http://ntm1275.f2s.com/nas_transfer_rates/os_read_ds1010.jpg
http://ntm1275.f2s.com/nas_transfer_rates/os_write_ds1010.jpg

You can see by my tests, that XP is woeful compared to W7

 

[thiggins]

Depends on the NAS and what you are doing with it. An attached USB 2.0 drive will max out around 25 MB/s.

Many NASes support speeds higher than that, if you are reading/writing a single large sequential file.

Once you start asking the NAS to do more than one thing at a time, the drive head(s) will have to seek as they move from file to file. This significantly reduces throughput. Just look at the difference between NASPT File Copy and Directory Copy tests.

In your case, since you are opening two files on the same machine, the drive heads on both your computer and the NAS are whacking away like mad. Not good for throughput.

The only difference between the attached drive and the NAS for this scenario is that you don't have the network file protocol overhead.

Did you try your experiment with the attached USB drive?

 

[teknojnky]

performance is defined not only in thoroughput but also latency.

direct attached storage (ie USB FIREWIRE ESATA) will have magnatudes better latency.

network attached storage (ie NAS or anything that goes over the network) will have much worse latency.

this is one reason why nas do not handle some database files (like sqlite etc) very well.

if available, you might try iscsi, which emulates a local drive on your pc and can give higher performance for certain applications.

otherwise, you probably need to look at a DAS device, perhaps like the drobo or some of the usb/firewire/esata raid arrays.

 

[Breezy]

Thanks for the replies guys ..

ntm1275 .. I bet the difference you're getting between Win7 and XP is in the drivers used. XP should be faster if anything, given the same situations .. it just has a little less overhead and doesn't virtualize the user data like Win 7 does. Just my opinion but you might look for an XP driver for your nic if you care about it.

thiggins .. I was not opening all these files at once. There were many seconds, if not minutes between openings. And I did the exact same testing with the external USB drive. It flys through the testing no matter how many files I open from it. It's damn impressive actually. Makes yo uwonder if I'm not going about this the wrong way .. imagine a small network entirely made up of esata connections instead of nics .. I wonder .. if I had esata ports on my notebook I would seriously look into this ..

teknojnky .. sounds like you have a pretty good handle on this. I'll look into ISCSI. I'm finding out that my nic, a built on board Marvell for laptops (88E8055) is a problematic product. A few reports say this card runs far better with generic Windows drivers rather than the mfr's ones. I'm researching that now and I'm also getting ready to run this same testing on a Win 7 box with a different nic card.

BTW here's a thread where we're trying to get to the bottom of this ..
http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=161&t=39972&p=176150#p176150

 

[ntm1275]

ntm1275 .. I bet the difference you're getting between Win7 and XP is in the drivers used. XP should be faster if anything, given the same situations .. it just has a little less overhead and doesn't virtualize the user data like Win 7 does. Just my opinion but you might look for an XP driver for your nic if you care about it.

It was using a proper XP driver for the NIC
It is well known that the later the Microsoft OS the better it handles network connections - I read somewhere that it is something to do with a more up to day TCP/IP stack implemented by Microsoft

Perhaps someone else could explain what this means, as I haven't got a clue

 

[Breezy]

Yep on the stack info .. if you were to compare XP's TCP/IP before SP .. let's say about 2.5, then the XP management was not optimized for broadband. However all that was taken care of in a few updates that were released prior to SP3. XP should be able to be just as fast, if not faster than Win7, if that's what you're thinking. Is that how it checks out for you?

As for my problems with speed they've all been fixed and I'm quite pleased with my NAS' performance. It works great for office productivity apps now and it's what I was hoping to be able to do with my little network. The problem was a firmware bug that would somehow skew the file copying onto the NAS. It didn't corrupt the files but made it really hard for the NAS to read them. For more follow the link above.

 

[00Roush]

Glad you were able to solve your problem with the slow NAS. Since you guys were also discussing XP versus Windows 7 for TCP/IP and also file transfers I figured I might be able to provide a bit more insight. Hope you don't mind.

My understanding is for small LANs and network links with fairly low latency XP's TCP/IP performance is similar to Windows 7. In my home network I have also found this to be the case. The real differences in performance are when you move to larger higher latency networks. On these types of networks Windows 7 can provide better throughput than Windows XP SP3 due to changes in the TCP/IP stack. As for file copy performance... first read this. Basically the file copy engine in Vista SP1/7 has been redesigned to provide much higher file copy performance over network connections. In my experience XP as the client OS is only capable of around 60 MB/sec reads and 70-80 MB/sec writes for file copies. Vista SP1/7 are capable of at least 110+ MB/sec reads/writes on file copies. XP is capable of higher but is mostly limited by its older file copy engine. If your interested in how to see higher file copy speeds on XP see this thread and this thread.

00Roush

 

[Breezy]

Wow, 00Roush

I have to say I'm blown away by the work you've put into understanding what's going on behind the scenes . . after lots of reading I have a few questions regarding this copy of one of your posts from this thread which I also quoted below for reference ..

As I understand it we're strictly talking copy/paste performance here so if you are not using Win copy/paste this numbers do not apply, correct?

Is it true that all the work you did in improving the process was negated when XP sp3 changed the process, and that now there is little difference in performance because XP sp3 uses a very similar routine to Vista/Win7?

For small file read/write performance are there any optimizations that I can work on? It seems latency is the big factor. For instance opening a 4meg file never gets anywhere close to the max transfer rates. This is the performance parameter that I'm totally concerned about as I want to use my NAS as an app file server.

Lastly thanks for weighing in on this thread!


Your post quoted here ..
"First off I want to say that your Win XP Pro client will probably not be capable of 100MB/s transfer speeds over the network. From my testing of Win XP Pro as the client the best I have seen is around 65 MB/sec for reads and 75 MB/sec for writes.

Lately I have been testing with Vista Ultimate 64bit SP1 as a client. Using Win XP Pro SP2 on the server I see read and write speeds of ~90-100 MB/sec for large files. Using Ubuntu Server on the server I see read speeds around ~85 MB/sec and write speeds at ~100 MB/sec. These results are what Vista is reporting for copy speeds and are consistent with recorded network throughput.

To get the best performance out of Win XP Pro windows needs to be set to use a large system cache when used as a server. Here are the steps from the Microsoft website.

1. Click Start, click Run, type sysdm.cpl in the Open box, and then press ENTER.
2. Click the Advanced tab, and then under Performance click Settings.
3. Click the Advanced tab, and then under Memory usage use one of the following methods:
• Click Programs if you use your computer primarily as a workstation instead of as a server. This option allocates more memory to your programs.
• Click System cache if your computer is used primarily as a server or if you use programs that use a large system cache.
4. Click OK to save preferences and close the dialog box.


Based on my testing I would say Win XP Pro or maybe Windows Home Server would give the best performance for your mixed OS environment. Ubuntu would also work but I have found read/write speeds to be bit slower for Win XP clients. Win Server 2008 is probably overkill like you mentioned but could possibly offer better performance than any other OS. You might consider testing out a few different OSes to find what really works best for you.

Don't forget to make sure your hard drive setup on the server and client is fast enough to support the speeds you want. This means both the server and client need drives capable of 100+ MB/sec read and write."

 

[ntm1275]

@Breezy

I'm glad you got your problem sorted


@00Roush

I will reiterate what Breezy says - WOW

Thanks for explaining it in more detail, and for putting it in a way that I could understand

 

[00Roush]

Breezy,

Thanks.

Yes you are correct that I am strictly talking about the performance of the copy/paste (or drag and drop) function in Win XP. To clarify this actually applies to all versions of Windows (Win XP SP3 included) before Vista. To my knowledge they all use a similar method to copy files. Single threaded and synchronous, which works great on local disks but over a network latency starts to limit performance. Starting with Vista the file copy engine became more threaded and allowed for 4 reads/writes to be inflight at the same time. Keeping multiple reads/writes going at the same time ensure maximum performance even with the higher latency over a network. So basically with my program I tried to emulate how Vista copied files.

As for trying to improve your performance further... It is hard to say. Generally with smaller files you never see peak performance because there just is not enough time (one second or less) to really ramp up the file transfer even on a local disk. The only things I could suggest would be to make sure the client has the most up to date network drivers and to disable any background programs. (ie firewall, antivirus, etc)

00Roush

 

[Breezy]

Roush
I did some testing copying/pasting a 1 gb file from Win 7 64 bit , and from XP sp3.

Win 7 was 52 mbsec read and 65 mbsec write .. about the speed of the NAS

WP was capped at read and write around 40 mbsec.

I checked cabling and also moved any 10/100 connections off my router which helped the Win 7 speed to be what it is but the XP speed did not change. I swapped out nic drivers and made sure all settings from both machine's nics were the same .. no flow control, small packets, 256 buffers in and out.

So does this software of yours replace the native Windows copy/paste or does it require a separate app interface? I'm thinking I might like to try it.

BTW I dled the Windows updates days ago but when I tried to install them (the ones that revised copy/paste) it said I didn't need them/already had them.

 

[00Roush]

Glad you got a chance to test Win 7 as well. The results look pretty good.

The little program I wrote is very basic and would not be able to replace the built in file copy functions of XP. It is just command line based and can only copy one file at a time. Mostly I worked on it just to see if it was possible to get similar file copy performance in XP SP2 that I was seeing in Vista SP1. So mostly it is a proof of concept and should probably only be used for testing. Feel free to try it out though. For the best performance make sure you change XP to use a Large System Cache using the steps you quoted above.

00Roush

 

[Breezy]

Changing the processor for background services made zero difference on XP.

I'm looking at my laptop hard drive speed (it's the pc with XP on it) but it's a pretty fast Fujitsu drive. It was not set to read ahead so I changed that and it made zero difference.

I enabled the memory for background processes to see if that makes a difference. It didn't change anything.

I feel like I'm running out of options here. maybe Win 7 is better but I would really like PCMCIA nic card to see if the built in card is limited. It's weird to me the read and write are the same rates.

 

[00Roush]

Changing the processor for background services made zero difference on XP.

I'm looking at my laptop hard drive speed (it's the pc with XP on it) but it's a pretty fast Fujitsu drive. It was not set to read ahead so I changed that and it made zero difference.

I enabled the memory for background processes to see if that makes a difference. It didn't change anything.

I feel like I'm running out of options here. maybe Win 7 is better but I would really like PCMCIA nic card to see if the built in card is limited. It's weird to me the read and write are the same rates.

Just to let you know I have not really seen any difference on XP when changing the processor scheduling. Only when I change the Memory usage to System cache do I ever see a difference. Not all computers benefit from this setting change though. Yet I have found that for some reason my copy program does need this setting changed to System cache to get good performance.

Have you gotten a chance to test out your hard drive speed with a program like CrystalDiskMark or HD tune? How old is the laptop? If you are concerned about the NIC being a bottleneck you could test it out with iperf. That is assuming you have another computer you can use as an iperf server. Do you happen to know what NIC you have built in? You could try out a PCMCIA NIC card but so far I have not really seen anyone get close to full gigabit on a PCMCIA card. Then again I think it does depend on how old the laptop is.

If your NIC is a bottleneck there might not be much you can do as PCMCIA might not be much better. If that is the case Windows 7 probably wouldn't make much difference either. I wouldn't get too discouraged though... 40 MB/sec read/write over the network on a laptop is pretty good in my opinion.

00Roush

 

[Breezy]

Roush
I think you're correct, this is as good as it's gonna get. I believe it has to do with the laptop hardware .. probably the bus speed for the built in nic. It makes sense because the read and write bandwidth is the same at 39-41 mb sec. Given that the giga speed is still about 3 times what you would ever get from a 100 mb they probably worked to save some power by dialing the bus speed down.

This is a Fujitsu T4220, which is pretty popular as mid high end corporate laptop which specializes in being a tablet/laptop hybrid. It has a power adjusting bus speed and try as I might I could not find a way to force it to a particular speed, either in the bios, the services, or devices. Maybe there's a reg hack somewhere but good luck on finding that.

The hard drive is fast at around the same speeds as my Win 7 x64 box .. around 75 mbsec, which is exceptional for a laptop drive. Fujitsu drives are great but uncommon. They have moved pretty much into the high end server drive market and they don't do a lot of consumer drives anymore.

So now I know that any new laptop gets a nic speed test for me. I looked into the PCMCIA nics but word has it that they are slower than max output as well so I'm not going to chase that .. besides the port is probably built on the same bus speed.

Thanks for all your help. I have learned a lot with this exercise. I have been and planned to continue to use my laptop for my workstation but now I'll have to seriously consider moving on to the win 7 box, except that I'll have to install about 50 gigs of software to make the transition which takes about a week of work. Plus Win 7 is just so damn locked down it frustrates the hell out of me .. thanks again.