NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hello, I am new to the whole NAS thing, but I have NL and have 8 1tb Western Digital Caviar Black HDDs set up in a raid 5 configuration. I am trying to transfer files around 9GB in size, and it is taking about an hour. I am using Windows 7 on the source computer and have the NAS and Windows 7 machine running through a linksys wrt54g router. I am also using the FTP service to transfer, is there a faster way to transfer those files. I also do a lot of video editing and will be regularly transferring files those size.

fastest transfer is via gigabit rated equipment - the router you specify is 10/100 so thats the first bottle neck - its also wireless G - so if you are using that then thats also slow

if you dont want to upgrade the network then you are not going to improve much

one other way is to transfer the files via a linux box - format the Naslite drives in Naslite and then move them to a linux box and do the transfer all within that box - you are then bypassing the network so it will be much quicker - have done it on single drives - not sure if it would work with raid - you also need to play with file permissions once the transfer is complete

however that would not help the transfer of files in the future - so going full circle - a solid wired gigabit system has to be the answer

Okay thats what I figured and upgrading is definiteley an option, I am trying a direct connect right now, but only getting 100, all but the router is 1000, switching the cable next to see if that helps.

The direct cable approach should work if your card is MDI/MDIX and you have cables that are 4 pair.

You may not get the speeds you think with the drives though in RAID5, most consumer RAID cards don't have the horse power to fill a pipe.

Just a bit to keep in mind.

Mike

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What do you mean by consumer card? I have a 3ware 9650se-24m8. Is that good enough? It still ends up transferring at 4MB/s It starts off at 35 then slowly dwindles down to 4...

Um yah, that is NOT a card that most consumers would have. The card you have there should be able to muster at least 70-80MB/sec on a properly configured server.

What kind of hardware are you running it on?

Mike

My Buddy built it for me, this is what I have as far as I know. I got the raid card on ebay for 385.00.
I am using an Intel DP965LT motherboard. 1GB DDR2 Mem, Intel Core Duo 1.8Ghz.

Frankly, that setup should rock. The NIC is based on an Intel chip and IS Gigabit. I would be looking at the network as my start.

You also may want to look at the NIC in or built into your client machine and make sure it is up to the task as well.

Mike

Yeah it must have something to do with the network.

My main computer has the following:
Asus
P6T6 WS Revolution
Core I7 running at 2.8Ghz
12GB Ram Corsair DDR3
256 Corsair SSD for Main Hard Drive
3 1TB WD Caviar Black HDDs

They are all plugged into a Dlink DGS 1016D Switch which is plugged into a WRT54G Router, then into the modem.

I am trying another computer to see how it transfers files, The main computer needs a good formatting so that actually may be the problem. As for the network, all settings are default, is there something I should check to see if there is a bottleneck in the networking somewhere?

I tried from another computer and still get the same thing. I have 3TB of stuff I need to transfer over and at 4MB/s it will take 125 hours...

Silly question but have you rebooted everything to make sure that the network comes up at 1Gb (router would need to be last I think so that that cant drag it down and it may well be worth trying with it off totally) also make sure on your windows machines that the nic is set for 1gig full duplex as I have known auto negotiation to fail in the past and also make sure that the drivers loaded for the nic support 1 gig (this is something else I have found recently in that Windows drivers dont always support the nic correctly in particular the Realtek 8111 series get the drivers from Realtek direct and they work).

Mike will probably chip in with cooments more advise and may even ridicule some of what I have said but he is more expert at this than I am and it is still a learning curve for all of us.

You will probably find that you will need more ram in the NAS before to long as well as I found out not long ago I have 12 x 1.5Tb drive in a raid 5 with 1 hot spare and when it came to NL doing its FSCK after 180days it failed with 2 gigs ram put it back up to 4 and it completed successfully.(my machine originally had 4 GB but i removed 2 to get another box running for a friend it ran fine until a power outage and the subsequent reboot caused it to fail the fsck almost imediately due to lack of memory, Fortunately my backup box had 8 gb in it so I just robbed 4 of that and all was then ok tho it took arrounf 4 hours to complete).

Hope some of this ramble makes sense and helps in the long run.

Yeah I have rebooted everything and when I go into the status page it shows my main computer connected at full duplex and the NAS is also connected at full duplex... Is there a limit to the memory that can be used on the 3ware card or NL, like there is on 32bit systems?

I just ran Intel NAS Performance Kit - Exerciser. And my read speeds are 60-70MB/s, but my write speeds are at 1.7 - 2.7 MB/s....

Ok it shows full duplex but is it definately at 1Gb (your next post suggests that it is)


There will be a limit but my 3 ware card has 256Mb cache and runs at arround 60-70 Mb sustained transfers in both directions so I wouldnt worry unduly about that And I believe that the 32 bit version of NL is probably limited to 4GB Ram (Not absolutly certain on that) but the 64 bit version certainly isn't and I have run with 8Gb Ram with no problems.

What stripe size have you got the array at and have you got Write cacheing turned on on the 3Ware card? (I have even without the BBU and I know that there are dangers in that but I mirror my critical data to another box periodically to protect it)

Again Hope some of this helps

Doug