Low write speeds to NAS drive

[BadWolf88]

First of all, I'm not sure if this should go under storage or networking, so sorry if I've put this under the wrong section.

I have a hard drive connected to my network through my router which I can access through either the internet or through my local network. I expected the read/write speeds to drop significantly when accessing it remotely, but did not think I would take that big of a performance hit while accessing it through my home network. My router is a Netgear Nighthawk ac1900 router and the hard drive is a WD 1TB USB 3.0 drive connected through the Netgear's USB 3.0 port. I am accessing it via my Alienware 17, which also uses 802.11 ac. I am seeing upload speeds / write speeds topping around 17 MB/s and averaging around 13.5 MB/s. The files are being copied from a pair of hard drives (on my laptop) in RAID 0. I was hoping to see much higher transfer speeds.

Is this normal or do I need to reconfigure something to max out my connection speeds?

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Is this small files, or a big one?

What do you get over ethernet?

 

[BadWolf88]

a group of large files. most between 2 and 15 GB. I've not tested over Ethernet yet. My router is not in a convenient place to plug in at the moment.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

I assume you're using SMB?

How far from the WAP are you, and how much stuff is in the way? What physical link speeds are you seeing?

 

[BadWolf88]

I assume you're using SMB?

How far from the WAP are you, and how much stuff is in the way? What physical link speeds are you seeing?

I am about 15 feet away from my router and have line of sight - no obstructions at all. I've not checked the speeds across a cable, I will try that later today and see what I get. I'm not sure what SMB is to be honest. Networking is somewhat new to me.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

SMB is the normal file sharing protocol built into Windows. If you access it through explorer, the same as any other drive, it's probably SMB. If you do it from a web browser, it's probably HTTP.

 

[BadWolf88]

SMB is the normal file sharing protocol built into Windows. If you access it through explorer, the same as any other drive, it's probably SMB. If you do it from a web browser, it's probably HTTP.

Then I'm probably using SMB. I have the drive mapped through explorer and access it just like any other hard drive when I am on my home network. I only use HTTP when I am away from home.

 

[BadWolf88]

Ok, so I just connected physically to the router and I'm getting much better speeds, right around 50 MB/s. So the bottleneck definitely seems to be the wireless. I thought I would be getting faster speeds still as I have hit 30 MB/s on multiple occasions through the internet, limited only by my ISP. Is there a better way to set up wireless mass storage that would result in higher speeds?