Help with FreeNAS transfer speeds?

[ibex333]

I built a simple FreeNAS machine... Nothing special. Older hardware, but very much meeting and exceeding the hardware requirements. Pentium G3220, 8GB Ram, etc...

I don't have money for "special" NAS hard drives, so I am using 7200RPM hard drives I accumulated over the years.

I got two 2x 2TB HDD's in RAID 0 for a total of 4TB, and 2x 3TB HDDs in RAID 0 for a total of 6TB.

No redundancy, I know, but my redundancy is basically holding the same stuff, plus a little extra on these two different volumes.

ANYWAY,


My problem is speed. It sucks. When I am offloading stuff from my main PC over my home network(wired) I get anything between 40MB/sec and 100MB/sec but never above 100MB/sec. Is that considered "good" speed?

Do I have a bottleneck somewhere? Should I be getting more? How can I?

Thanks a lot!

PS: Forgot some vital info. My router is this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA7GS4V72377&cm_re=wdr3600-_-33-704-144-_-Product

and the network card is built into the mobo. Mobo is Foxconn H87MX-D which is listed as supporting Gigabit speeds.

 

[ch33zw1z]

You're maxing the gigabit link at 100MBps, which is 800Mbps, 80% of the 1000Mbps link...the other 20% is network overhead

The 40MBps could be something to notice, but that may have more to do with what you're transferring.

 

[XavierMace]

Gigabit is closer to 120MBps. But I second the suggestion of it being the content that's being copied. A single large file will transfer far faster than a bunch of small ones.

 

[ibex333]

Interesting. Definitely learned something new today. Thanks!

By the way, how do people know about hard drive transfer speeds vs network transfer speeds? For example I know what my network speed is. But the hard drive speed is not listed on the product page. Only for SSDs. Not spinning disks.

EDIT: Never mind. Google to the rescue. For those who care:

"Hard drive transfer rates are measured in MegaBYTES per second - 8 bits in a Byte. So a slow 80 MB/sec 5400 RPM hard drive is six and a half times faster than a 100 Mbps internet connection. 80 x 8 = 640 Mbps. The 7200 rpm drive would gain you about 25% - 100 X 8 = 800 Mbps."

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Sounds normal to me.

I've also seem pretty big differences based on the NIC/driver/OS combination on my desktop PC, so it's not just the FreeNAS box that is the potential weak link.

 

[ch33zw1z]

That's true also. I remember a Realtek nic a few years ago that was giving me poor speeds through file copy and also iperf testing. updated driver to latest and got almost double the speeds

 

[dave_the_nerd]

That's true also. I remember a Realtek nic a few years ago that was giving me poor speeds through file copy and also iperf testing. updated driver to latest and got almost double the speeds

Yeah. I have a Realtek on my desktop - it gives me around ~50MB/sec in Windows 7 and ~70MB/sec in Linux or Windows 10, on average (w/ big sequential data transfers). (Just default installs of everything. No tinkering.)

The Intel i218 on my dad's box crushed it, though: hitting >100MB/sec sequential in either OS.

My FreeBSD box was more than happy to serve up data at that rate, which made me happy.

 

[XavierMace]

There's a reason most servers other than Dell use Intel NIC's.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

There's a reason most servers other than Dell use Intel NIC's.

All the Dell servers I have at work (R620s and R630s) have onboard Intel 10GbE NICs.

*shrug*

Maybe some older gear didn't? Dunno.

 

[XavierMace]

R610's were Broadcom's.