Legacy Network Products

[runningonair]

I've just got a shared storage II 1TB drive, which I have connected to my gigabit network but I have been surprised by how slow coppying files is.  It does not seem to be able to go over 100Mb even though it is a gigabit interface.  Most of the time it is coppying files at about 20-30Mb.  Predicted time to copy 40GB, 3 hours, when it should be about 20mins.

I didn't bother installing any of the software that came with it, so I will give that a go and see if it improves matters.

Has anyone else had a similar probelm? or can report higher throuput?

[runningonair]

I tried installing the software client but it didn't make any difference.  It seems to be a configuration tool only, although it didn't do a very good job as it seemed to think my shared folders were user accounts!? I'll be uninstalling it tonight.

I did find that I got a performance improvement by disableing Jumbo frames.  My Pcs network card does not support this feature and I recieved a 10% degrdation in performance.  I'm still only getting 101-103Mb which is much lower than you would expect.  I can't say I'm very happy with this level of performance.  Considering SATA 300 allows 300Mbytes per second which equats to 2.4Gbps the performance is pitifull.  I certainly won't be recommending this product in a hurry unless I can get this sorted out.

I've got a new netowrk card on order and will conduct some more tests using Jumbo frames to see if this can be improved.

ANy feedback on your devices would be appriciated.

[rafa]

I'm having the same problem.
3 hours to copy less than 2GB, over a 100MB network.

I can't belive this was the intended behaviour, so I hope someone on Maxtor/Seagate to give us a solution.

[AlanM]

Hi:

Thanks for your participation in the our forums so far. Please remember that this is an online community where many of the responses come from other users, such as yourself. The forum is not a replacement for Customer Service. Seagate representative do from time to time come to lend a hand answering posts but not necessarily on a continual or frequent basis. If you have immediate needs, your best bet is to contact Customer Service directly whether by phone, email, or chat.
Thanks.

-AlanM
Admin

[Piglet]

Same problem here as well. On my 100 Megabit net, which should be able to transfer ~9 Megabyte/s, I get only around 3.6Megabyte/s.

This was measured with Jumboframe enabled and using smbfs under Linux. The network was not under load from any other computer at the time of the measurement.

[Piglet]

Hi again,

I finally managed to increase the transfer speed to and from my MSS II. This was done by changing from smbfs to cifs.

Write 8MB/s
Read 5MB/s

8 MB is not far from the theoretical 9MB/s

[Tristan]

hi, Piglet

How did you do that? I'm having the same problem. the movies in the sharefolder are barely watchable as the read speed is soooooo sloooooooow

your help is greatly appreciated!

Tristan

[Piglet]

I am using linux so I just changed /etc/fstab

  mount -t smbfs -> mount -t cifs ( and maybe some of the options, don't remember exactly)

However, this only worked for a while. I don't know if the problem is in the NAS or with my computer but after a while I was not able to write to the drive due to ownership issues. The strange thing is that it worked at first. It seems as if the cifs was able to mount the drives including the the actual uid and gid used in the Linux os on the NAS. And since the uid and gid were not the same as on my computer, I didn't have the permission to write to the NAS. So finally I changed back to smbfs which works, only slower.

Thank you, and sorry.

Yours,

  Piglet


Message Edited by Piglet on 02-04-2008 03:39 PM

[Piglet]

Hello again,

Since my last posting I have updated my computer from Debian Etch to Debian Lenny. This also included an update to the cifs.ko kernel module which seems to have fixed the problem I mentioned in my previous post. My kernel version is 2.6.22 and 'cat /proc/fs/cifs/DebugData' reports  CIFS Version 1.49.

I'm now using the following configuration in fstab to mount my drive:

//192.168.11.4/Public    /mnt/mount-point    cifs    noauto,username=xxxxxxx,password=xxxxxxx,user,users,rw    0    0

This gives me speeds of approximately:

read ~6.3 Megabyte/s
write ~8.3 Megabyte/s

So far so good. I'll report back here if I notice that something is not working when I have had more time to test it.

I hope this helps someone.

[runningonair]

Piglet,

Thanks for the info.  Is there any chance that you can test using a Gigabit Interface?  I'd like to see if you gat past 105Mbps, my best so far.

I need to do some further testing using my new Intel card and I'll report back when I get more.  One area I'm looking at is to disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP.  It certainly doesn't stop communication with the NAS and I want to find out if it cuts overhead.

I have found one way of speeding up transfer of small files, use the window backup function.  I can get a reasonable transfer speed on large files (100Mbps), buy using the backup feature, windows stuffs all of the files into one big file therefore TCP does not have to ramp up it's speed every time a file is transferred.

It's not convenient for everything, but fine for backups.