GoFlex Net & GoFlex Home

[funnyboy08]

Does anybody know what read/write speeds you get when communicating with the NAS via a powerline network?

[ntpntpntp]

Very much depends what speed your powerline network is running at, and what speed are the ethernet ports on your computers (the GF Home has a gigabit ethernet port)?  Powerline comes in various speeds, eg. 14Mbps,  "turbo" 85Mbps, "Homeplug AV" 200Mbps, 500Mbps, "Gigabit".

I've got a mixture of older 85Mbps and so-called "Gigabit" powerline plugs running on our house mains.   The gigabit powerline don't get up to true gigabit ethernet speed by any means, but it is easily good enough for HD video streaming (which the 85Mbps plugs cannot manage).  Have to admit I've not tried any raw measurement of the read/write speed.

On a true gigabit wired ethernet link I get write speeds of around 33MByte/s and read speeds of around 62MByte/s.

On 10/100 ethernet I get around 12MByte/s read and write speed which is the maximum I'd expect.

[kenji57]

It also depends very much on the condition of electrical wiring in your house.

I have 500Mbs powerline adaptors on a gigabit network and get varying speeds depending on which power outlet I plug  in to.

I get between 6-18MB/sec which, as ntpntpntp says, is fine for streaming video.

[funnyboy09]

Thanks for all the info, I went out and bought the D-Link 200MB/s AV homeplug starter pack its all set up and their talking to each other at around 150MB/s.

But when I run a speed test from my laptop to the NAS it comes out at read 2MB/s and write 4MB/s that slower than over wireless.

Also why is my read speed slower than my write speed?

Any advice you could give me would be much appreciated.

[kenji57]

It is probably the same as wireless. The main advantage of powerline adapters is not the speed, it is when the end device can't receive wireless but has an ethernet port (like a smart TV) or when the wireless transmission is poor (like between floors of a building) or there's a lot of interference from other wireless signals.

There is a lot more to read and write speeds than the speed between the two switches (how do you measure that btw?) .That's why lots of people are disappointed when they don't get 600MB/sec from USB3.

You didn't say how your network is connected or what your laptop network card's speed is. Is it gigabit or 10/100? Do you have a router or just connect the GFH and your laptop directly to the powerline switches? But if that's the case then why didn't you just connect the GFH directly to your laptop? If you have a router is it gigabit or 10/100? The read speed slower than write seems odd but you didn't say how you measured it. Apparently there can be conflicts where devics have differing duplexing mods set. I don't know how the D-Link adapters or the GFH work, but you can try changing your laptop network card setting under device properties to see if it makes any difference.

[funnyboy09]

My network is set up as follows:

GFH is connected to my Gigabit Wireless N router via a cat 5e cable.  The powerline adapter is then plugged into a standard 10/100 port.

The powerline config page says that the 2 adapters are communicating at 150MB/s.

I calculate the read write speeds by plugging my laptop into various ports and running the LAN Speed Test program created by Totusoft.

The speeds that comes up are all over the place and the read is consistently below the write speeds.  I am well and truly confused.com

These are the speeds I'm getting (all MB/s):

	Wireless G	Wireless N	Powerline	10/100
Read	2.09	4.72	1.81	9.08
Write	2.11	5.90	5.01	10.25

[kenji57]

Wow the D-Link adapters are more complicated than my Netcomm ones. I didn't need to install any software. 

Did you try changing the duplex mode on your NIC? Did you change the adapter config? Try resetting to factory settings (should be safe to test - even if you are in an apartment block the chances of someone finding and accessing your powerline network are probably pretty low)

[kenji57]

OK, I downloaded and installed the utility from Netcomm. The nearest power outlet is showing 165Mbps transmit and 133 receive (500Mbps adapters on a gigabit system - shows the influence of home electrical wiring).

Installed LAN Speed test and 100MB write gives 59Mbps (7.5MB/sec) and Read 35Mbps (4.4 MB/sec).

Compared with 31.5Mbps write and 32.4Mbps read over Wireless N 

So read is slower than write over powerline, at least according to LANspeedtest.exe. I don't know if that helps you at all except to confirm that there's a problem, maybe with security config/ encryption on your powerline adapters or maybe network settings.

[funnyboy09]

Curiouser and curiouser.

My first avenue of attack was, as you suggested, to factory reset everything but the speeds remained the same.  So I decided to swap the port my GFH was plugged into from a 10/100/1000 to a 10/100 and strangely it appears to have fixed the powerline issue but has generally slowed my network.

Here are my new speeds:

	Wireless G	Wireless N	Powerline	10/100
Read	1.98	2.90	4.21	10.52
Write	1.96	2.62	4.40	10.10

This is very much a bitter sweet moment as now my bluray player can stream movies via the powerline adapters but my wireless N PS3 can not.

What do you think is the problem is?

What I really don't understand is if their was a issue with the powerline adapters, be it the duplex setting or old wiring, surely both the read and write speeds should suffer?

[kenji57]

well that is strange, I can't see how swapping the ports on the GFH should have that effect, either speeding up the powerline or slowing the wifi, since it was well under 100Mbs anyway.

Duplex issues could affect read and not write (or vice versa) since it is directional with one device trying to send more packets than the other one can handle, but in the opposite diretion it isn't a problem.

But we can can rule out the electrical wiring. 

Try rebooting the router with everything connected so it can reassign addresses fresh and see if that helps.