What transfer speeds do you get from your NAS?

DigitalRelish

DigitalRelish

Suspended / Banned
Messages
2,240
Name
Will
Edit My Images
Yes
Just wondering what sort of speeds others are getting from their NAS servers? I've got my Synology DS1515+ with WD Red drives connected to my Macs via a gigabit switch (using Adaptive Load Balancing to bond two ethernet connections between the switch and NAS) and I'm typically seeing around 80MB/s reading and writing large files, but this drops quite drastically when transferring lots of folders and/or smaller files.
 
My Asustor AS-5104T with 4 x 3TB WD Reds in RAID5 gives 85-90MB/s Write and 100MB/s Read on large files (no load balancing as my switch doesn't support it) but it does drop off considerably with small files. This is normal as there's a far greater overhead reading/writing the directory.
 
think thats about right. sustained transfer will always be faster than smaller fragments.

my N40L microserver gets about 80MB/s through gig LAN sustained. my DS1010+ was a bit faster.

both workable having RAW on them with Lightroom but best if you have a local SSD you can have your working set on then transfer off post edit.
 
The difference in transfer rates between big files and lots of small files is incredible. For example, copying a directory that had hundreds of subdirectories and thousands of files weighing in at 40GB from my old NAS to my new NAS was going to take over a day, but zipping it all up at the source (not compressed), transferring the one large file and then extracting at the destination took just a couple of hours.

It's a shame the File Station copy process isn't smart enough to do this automatically. I guess there must be a way to automate the process to some degree?
 
I have a QNAP 663 hooked up with Gigabit cabling and switch.
113 Mb/s write and read; though I think the bottleneck is the SSD on my laptop.
Copying a file within the laptop SSD gives only 80Mb/s.
Copying a file within the NAS gives 200Mb/s.
 
My NAS server runs win7 with simple sharing over Gig Lan. I get 120mb/s copy and 110mb/s read no fancy RAID. I think it's a lot to do with the drives you have and the network adapters / drivers
 
I think the theoretical limit for gig networks is about 125MB/s, so anything approaching that is very good.

With my DS114 I see about 70MB/s transfer rates to from a Windows PC.

I'm not sure Synology comes with Zip? but it does come with 'tar'. You can use that to (tape) archive your folder structures and transfer off in one hit:
>tar -zcvf photos.tar.bz2 /volume1/photos/
 
Between my Surface Pro 3 docking station, connected via Cat-6 cabling to a dLink managed gigabit switch, which has also got my Synology DS713+ with DX513 expansion unit connected I get the full Gigabit aka 125MB/s sustained. I've got 2 WD Red 3TB in the DS713+ and 5 WD Red 6TB in the DX513.
 
Well consider yourself lucky. My ageing Netgear ReadyNas NV2+ connected by gigabit Lan on a short (1m) CAT5 cable peaks out at around 25-30mb/s when transferring large video files (circa 5-10gb). That's with 4 WD Red 3TB drives in it.

I've been told the Netgear NAS units were never that quick but I now have over 6TB of movies and images on it and really can't be bothered (or know how) to change to a newer NAS unit.
 
Luck has nothing to do with it ;) it's by design in my case.
 
Your ageing Netgear is probably CPU bound, but to achieve 25mb/s you must be on CAT5e not CAT5 ;). Time for an upgrade??
 
cocjh1 said:
Your ageing Netgear is probably CPU bound, but to achieve 25mb/s you must be on CAT5e not CAT5 ;). Time for an upgrade??
Click to expand...
Good spot :)
 
OK, a few questions then for a networking novice.

What's the difference between CAT5 & CAT5e ? Can I tell from the cable externally ?

What the easiest upgrade route, bearing in mind that the 4 WD Red 3TB drives installed in my Readynas are all under 12 months old and so I'd like to re-use them rather than purchase new again (for the new NAS). As they currently hold my entire movie collection, how would I achieve this as I guess the new NAS would use a different RAID protocol (or software) than the Readynas does, so I couldn't just swap the drives to the new NAS without losing everything on them ?

Lastly, for home use, what's the best NAS make and model (4 bay) that I should be looking at please ?
 
Last edited:
Sootchucker said:
OK, a few questions then for a networking novice.

What's the difference between CAT5 & CAT5e ? Can I tell from the cable externally ?
Click to expand...

5e handles (or at least is certified for) gigabit. it should be printed on the cable sleeve.

What the easiest upgrade route, bearing in mind that the 4 WD Red 3TB drives installed in my Readynas are all under 12 months old and so I'd like to re-use them rather than purchase new again (for the new NAS). As they currently hold my entire movie collection, how would I achieve this as I guess the new NAS would use a different RAID protocol (or software) than the Readynas does, so I couldn't just swap the drives to the new NAS without losing everything on them ?
Click to expand...

you wont be able to swap them between devices. can you borrow some drive(s) to transfer?

Lastly, for home use, what's the best NAS make and model (4 bay) that I should be looking at please ?
Click to expand...

has to be the microserver, definately best bang for buck right now.
 
neil_g said:
oh and retested to/from the microserver (N40L but with NC364T adapter) and the SSD on the desktop (onboard ASUS adapter), over gig lan 113MB/s
Click to expand...
Same'ish for my n40l which I use as an esxi server. Or 115 to be exact, mine has 16GB RAM, esxi from a DOM and then 4x2TB WD RED.
 
Your theoretical maximum is 125MB/s. That's the limit of your network configuration rather than the disks (although the WD Red drives are low powered 5,400RPM drives).

By bonding/teaming more than one network adapter together you can increase this but that's only going to be of benefit if the NAS is being accessed by mutiple devices (you will have increased total throughput) or by accessing it from a PC that also has multiple network adapters that have also been bonded/teamed. In you're case whilst you have bonded/teamed multiple adapters on the NAS you're throughput is still limited to a theoretical 125MB/s maximum when accessing from your Mac with a single adapter.

The reason you're seeing a difference in transfer speeds between large single files and multiple small files is due to access time. Simply put, this is the time it takes to locate the data on the disk before the read/write operation can begin. Mechanical drives due to the nature of how they are built (spinning platters with a read/write head) have longer access times than solid state drives. With mechanical drives access times can vary due to the speed of the platters and the current location of the head when the request is made. When transfering lots of small files the head must find and locate data for each file before the read/write operation can begin. This data will be stored in different locations across the platters, forcing the head to have to move far more, resulting in more access time waiting. Large single files are more likely to have been written into data blocks close to each other and result in much shorter access times.
 
Last edited:
Uh huh.

If we're talking about teaming/bonding/link aggregation for the benefit of those who don't know its probably worth mentioning that not all network switches allow these teaming protocols.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top