NASLite Network Attached Storage

I just replaced the Intel PRO 100 S NIC in my M2 NAS with an Intel PRO 1000 MT NIC. As the switch in my ADSL router is only rated ar 100 Mb/sec I decided to buy a Netgear GS605 (version 3) Gigabit switch. The Netgear switch is connected to the ADSL router and the indicator on the front panel of the switch light glows amber (100 Mb/sec), as expected. The Intel NIC in the M2 NAS glows orange (1Gb/sec) as does the on-board NIC on my Windows 7 PC mother board (Realtek 8211B chipset).

To me, this indicates that the PC and the M2 NAS should be communicating at 1Gb/sec. Now, that's 125 MB/sec and even being realistic about overheads etc., I'm getting nothing like that rate of transfer. In fact I'm getting ~3.5 MB/sec whether I connect both machines through the gigabit switch or through the slower switch in the ADSL router.

Clearly I'm not getting the expected 10-fold boost because there is something that i have not taken into account. Could it be that the Netgear GS605 (version 3) Gigabit switch sufferes from the same bug that afflicts the Netgear GS105 (version 3) Gigabit switch with respect to the way that it fails to talk correctly with the Intel PRO 1000 MT NIC? The colour of the indicator lights suggest that everything is okay.

Any ideas will be gratefully received. I'll borrow a 3Com gigabit switch from work tomorrow to do a comparison.

Many thanks.

check the cables or try different ones - gigabit uses all 8 wires rather than just 4 for 100

try card in different slots

i take it both the windows 7 mc and the naslite mc are connected to the new gigabit switch - daft question but you do not say

does naslite see the intel pro card as gigabit - that will have changed when you swopped the card - maybe worth saving the config in naslite

Check that both Windows and ML are showing that they are connected to GigE.

Also make sure that the windows machine is forced to full duplex and 1Gb/sec.

Mike

Thanks to Tony and Mike for the suggestions. Things are now working fine and I'm getting ~45 MB/sec transfers.

However, I'm thoroughly confused. I brought a pair of CAT 5e patch cables and a 3Com gigabit switch home from work to try some alternative configurations. The easiest first option was to swap the patch cables over and throughput rose to ~38 MB/sec. That immediately ruled out the Netgear switch as the problem. The patch cables that I had been using previously were Belkin Premium CAT 5e so I swapped back to these original cables again and then got the ~45 MB/sec transfer. I'm entirely happy with that, but mystified why it would not work like this yesterday evening.

I guess that I can now modify my signature to boast about the transfer speed.

Did you shut down all the devices and then do the upgrade or just pull and plug in the new switch?

Mike

I cannot now remember the sequence of events on the first evening when transfer speeds were low. All of the indicator lights suggested that the two devices should have been communicating at gigabit speed. However, yesterday evening I made all of the connections before starting up the PC and the NAS. I did not shut either down to change the cables over. Perhaps this suggests that the indicator lights are not necessarily a reliable indicator of the connection speed unless all of the connections are made first.

Thanks,

Raymond

If the PC booted and saw a 100Mb connection then regardless of the new speed of the underlying Ethernet physical layer it would still push at 100Mb until a reboot. Not sure about the NL server but....

Mike

Running Net Meter whilst (aka 'while' in Yank) backing up with Acronis True Image, I get a transfer of 76.5Mb/s to the Naslite mounted in an old Compaq with 100mb NIC. The old switch is 100mb/s and the source PC has a Belkin 1Gb/s NIC. I'm changing the switch next week for a new 1Gb Netgear as they are so cheap, primarily to benefit from 8-ports, but not expecting too much performance difference. Overall, as always, I remain entirely satisfied by NL!

Incidentally, is it best practice to put all the lan connections into the 8-port 1Gb switch plus just the single Zyxel gateway input, ignoring its other 4 ports. Turn on lan Switch then reboot Gateway and finally the pcs, printers etc?