Improving LAN speeds from PC to NAS (and vice versa)

rbelusko

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Jun 12, 2014
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Hello,

I have searched the internet high and low and have tried absolutely everything I can think of, but still no luck. I am hoping someone can help me figure this out.

I am trying to:
A) improve the network speed of my LAN
B) understand why the speeds TO the NAS are different than FROM the NAS. (PC to NAS = 35 MB/s, NAS to PC = 50 MB/s)

I am hearing that people are achieving 70-80 MB/s - why am I not getting this??? What am I doing wrong???

Starting with the simplest connection, I have eliminated all the complexities with the most basic setup, and I still observe the same symptoms (slow data transfer speeds):

Dell E6430s laptop
gigabit ethernet interface
7200RPM hard drive
Windows 7 Professional 64 bit
All antivirus/malware protection disabled

connected via a cat-6 ethernet cable to:

a WD My Cloud NAS that supports SATA and USB3.0.
with a Western Digital hard drive (WD-WCAZAK830507) - supports up to SATA III
Raid mode = JBOD

(Jumbo frames are turned on from both sides - all the way to 9K)

Once I can achieve faster speeds here, I will introduce complexity and start introducing network equipment (switches..etc), but I need to start from the base and work up.

Can anyone suggest things to improve my transfer rates?

Thanks
Bob


 
Solution
Your bottleneck is not your network. If your running Gigabit, even without jumbo frames, it is way faster that your NAS will be. To saturate a Gigabit port you would be copying at 110MB/s or more. Your bottleneck is your NAS. Not all NAS devices are created equal. The numbers you are seeing are typical for your NAS. See here: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-charts/view . Copying data to your NAS will always be slower as writing to a drive is slower than reading from a drive.
Your NAS has a hard drive. Hard drives are faster on reading than on writing. NAS hard drives are usually slow (5900rpm, 5400rpm, even 4200rpm), while your laptop has decent 7200rpm hard disk. Your PC has more memory (available for caching) as well. All this explains why PC->NAS is slower than NAS->PC.

"You were hearing" - what was the setup used? Same NAS? Same PC? Same kind of files? Transferring one thousand 4MB files will be considerably slower than transferring single 4GB file.
 
Your bottleneck is not your network. If your running Gigabit, even without jumbo frames, it is way faster that your NAS will be. To saturate a Gigabit port you would be copying at 110MB/s or more. Your bottleneck is your NAS. Not all NAS devices are created equal. The numbers you are seeing are typical for your NAS. See here: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-charts/view . Copying data to your NAS will always be slower as writing to a drive is slower than reading from a drive.
 
Solution