Question Stupid NAS tricks

mikeford

Diamond Member
Jan 27, 2001
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I noticed last night the second Lenovo PX4 I bought was still in its box and the 30 day warranty maybe passed, so I grabbed some handy drives and got it going. Works fine, but can't have 10TB just sitting there empty, so picked some likely folders to back up and dragged and dropped, then as the count climbed and climbed instantly regretted. Worse the transfer rate was hitting a hard limit about 10MB/s, time to complete was more than one day.

What have I done? Turns out learned something useful.

Left it alone to eat some breakfast, couple hours later still crawling, so I started looking around. My switch did not have the same colors on all ports, wonder what that means. It means 4 of the 8 ports, including the one to my new NAS, were using low quality CAT5 or worse cables and NOT running at 1000BT, in some cases maybe not even 100BT. Paused xfer, swapped in a new cable, resumed and now much better more or less depending on file sizes speeds of 50 to 100MB/s.
 

mindless1

Diamond Member
Aug 11, 2001
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Yeah, some of those ancient cables might just fail from old age, the ones that have the unsealed insulation displacement connector style can have the copper oxidize over years. Sometimes all it takes to get them working *temporarily* is pull them out and replug.

You must have some very old cables though, CAT5e was a standard 20 years ago and I've had no performance issues with it on GbE runs of 100ft or less, except as mentioned above, if the connector-wire contact degraded.
 

mikeford

Diamond Member
Jan 27, 2001
5,671
160
106
Maybe 10% of my cables were bought in a bag, most are various surplus sources, and most of those are top grade, but most are LONG, or really short like for a patch bay 3ft. This specific cable is OLD and skinny, plain CAT5, but I think I may have some CAT 3 or 4 around, and some of the cables have had one end replaced.

Tomorrow will have some serious tracing and replacing of cables.
 
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