Write from Windows stalls @ 32MB

[michalma]

AC68U on 3.0.0.4.374.38 with 2 USB drives attached:
USB 2.0 port: generic SATA>USB enclosure with 750GB Samsung formatted ext3
USB 3.0 port: Seagate Backup+ 4TB formatted NTFS

Copying files from Windows 7 64bit to SMB share on either drive stalls after around 32MB (sometimes after 8MB, 16MB, or 28MB). It only happens on write to the USB drives. Reading works fine.

I have no issues writing from my Mac to either drive over SMB. Writing over FTP is fine, too (both from Windows and from Mac). Writing to either drive directly on the router (for example copying files from one drive to another) is also fine.

Windows reports unexpected network issue. Sometimes in Windows logs I would see that delayed write to the network resource failed. Whenever I do try to write - it seems that router gets disconnected, Windows starts refreshing the folder on the network, and sometimes reports the destination is not available.

I tried pinging the router from Windows when that happens - and I saw no dropped packets.

Started looking into Wireshark, but so far it seems it is my Windows dropping the connection for whatever reason.

Any guesses?


PS. Reducing USB 3.0 interference = Enable. With this disabled the USB transfer to Seagate Backup+ was much slower than with enabled.

 

[RMerlin]

I just copied a 1.2 GB file from my Win 7 laptop onto a USB3 HDD without any problem.

My guess would be you're having network stability issues if you actually lose network access to the share. Check your network cable if wired, otherwise adjust your wifi settings - your connection might be going down when transferring a large amount of data.

 

[michalma]

Tried on a plain-vanilla Windows 8.1 and that one worked fine. So something limited to this one Win7 box. Will keep poking around. So far reproduces on WiFi, on the wire, all with USB3 filtering either on or off.

I suspect it may be Norton Internet Security causing it - I had issues with NIS and NASes before. I don't think Symantec ever resolved them.

Thanks anyways.

 

[TeMpL]

Try disconencting ext3 formated drive for a test.
For me ext3 does not work at all (Formated with MiniTool partition wizard). Ext4 works.

 

[michalma]

Nothing really helped so far. The only thing that seems to make it slightly better was removing the "max connections" limit in /etc/smb.conf (set it to 0).

At least I was able to copy a single file over. But if I kept browsing the NAS-attached drive it still eventually stalled/got stuck.

 

[michalma]

To wrap this topic up: after making a bunch of changes to my Windows box writing seems to be working as expected.

Some of the changes:
- forced downgrade to SMB1 (disabled SMB2 and up)
- disabled SMB signing
- disabled tcp offloading

 

[RMerlin]

I really wish the Samba devs would spend some time in providing a manageable build of Samba that wouldn't require 20 MB of dedicated flash space just for Samba itself... Embedded device manufacturers are currently forced to stick with age-old versions of Samba because the newer ones are way, way too large.

This will only lead to increasingly more compatibility issues between embedded devices and recent Windows machines.