NASLite Network Attached Storage

I recently installed a NetGear GA311 Gigabit PCI card. To my amazement, my speeds didn't increase as suspected, but dramatically slowed down NASLITE+. Anyone have an idea on why? I have tested a couple of times going back to my 100mb motherboard card and this netgear card. Each time when I time the copy of a large file, the netgear card takes 4 times longer. Totally opposite of what I figured.

Any thoughts here?

Thanks

These cards work fine, check your cable, make sure it's wired correctly for a cat6 configuration.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_6_cable

As a side note, these cards work great under linux/windows/OSX and have jumbo frame support, provided your switch supports jumbo frames. I currently have about 5 of these cards in various machines on the network here via a Dell 5324 switch.

Ralph,

I use the GA311 cards for my network. I was not aware that they support jumbo frames. Where did you get that info and how would you configure the card?

Thanks.

Don't worry, I found it.

I'm setting up my 2nd NASLite+ server for media and backup and decided to switch our home network over to gigabit at the same time. I know that the Netgear GA311 has been a popular gigabit NIC for NASLite users, so I bought two of them, one for the NASLite server and one for my SageTV DVR PC. They are coupled with Netgear Gb switches and Cat 5e cabling.

Sure enough, the GA311 gets enabled automatically in NASLite, so no problem there. It's the only NIC in the box (the MB doesn't have one), so there are no conflict issues.

Here's the problem I'm running into:

On two different computers, one running NASLite and one running WinXP (the media PC with SageTV), I'm seeing both of the GA311's showing great sensitivity to cabling. If the Cat 5e patch cord from the switch is any longer than about 10 feet, the NIC refuses to connect at 1Gb and drops back to 100Mb.

I'm NOT seeing the same problem with the Broadcom Gb NIC in my laptop, or the Marvell Yukon 88E8053 and NVidia nForce 4 Gb NIC's in my main computer. With those NIC's, I can connect through even a 50-foot Cat 5e patch cord at 1Gb with no problem.

I can get the GA311's to work with very short cabling, but there's clearly more sensitivity with them than there SHOULD be, and more than I'm seeing on the other Gb NIC's I have available.

Has anyone else seen this?

Sounds like a bad NIC.

I might try Cat6 cables and see if the problem persists and if it does then replace the NIC.

Mike

Thanks, I'll give Cat 6 a try. I didn't have any handy, so I'll need to go get one. But good quality Cat 5e should work fine for gigabit.

Also, I'm seeing this on two different GA311 NIC's running in two different PC's on two different OS's, it seems unlikely (but not impossible) that bad NIC's are the issue. On the other hand, Gb works fine with other NIC's on the same cabling, so something about these NIC's is different.

Sounds to me like a conflict or something of the sort between your switch and the 2 NICs. CAT5e is just fine for the Gigabit speeds, I use it all the time in fact on the servers I wire and install. I even have just CAT5e in my place for all the Gigabit links to my switch. Have you done a search to see if others might have had this problem with the same hardware combo. What is the chipset in the switch? This may help, it may be a bit old and cause problems for the 311 cards. If you can lay hands on a quality switch and give that a try this may help to narrow the problem or you could just try a Xover cable between the 2 machines that have the card and see if the link is still F-ed up.

Mike

If you try a X-over cable then be aware that Gigabit speed needs a X-over cable with an advcanced cabling. A X-over cable that works with 100MBit mustn't work as a GB-X-over cable.

Here's a diagram how to connect the cables to get a GB-X-over cable:
http://www.heise.de/ct/faq/result.xhtml?url=/ct/faq/hotline/01/26/11.shtml (text is in german but there's also a diagram)

I just recently tried to move to Gigabit setup as well (was asking questions on the NIC a few threads down).

I installed GA311, and I believe I'm getting the Gigabit connection. Here's what I see in my system info page (via http):

Network Interface

Identified chip type is 'RTL8169s/8110s'.
RTL8169 at 0xd0800000, 00:14:6c:33:48:b2, IRQ 11
Auto-negotiation Enabled.
1000Mbps Full-duplex operation.
Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:14:6C:33:48:B2
inet addr:192.168.1.110 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:26687110 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:13046810 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:493098227 (470.2 MiB) TX bytes:3192924819 (2.9 GiB)
Interrupt:11

However, I didn't notice any great speed increase. I have a switch that does support jumbo frames, and from what I understand when reading this thread, so does this NIC. However, I was under the impression that MTU should be 9000 rather than 1500 in order for the jumbo frames to be in effect. Is that true? Is there any way to set MTU to 9000 on GA311 through NASLite+?

Thanks,

-- Alex

Likely your speed won't increase due to the limits of your HDD. They just aren't fast enough to feed the pipe for the most part. What model of HDD do you have.

Mike

Mike,

That's what I was suspecting, i.e., that the harddrives cannot keep up. This was based on my observations of the LEDs on the switch. When I was using 100Mb set up, the lights wouldn't stop blinking until the file was fully transferred. With the 1Gb setup, there's a burst of activitiy, and then a short pause, another burst, and then pause, and the cycle continues. I also saw the same pattern in NetMeter.

My harddrives are both PATA Seagates 250MB with one being 7200.8 and another 7200.9. Here's the info on them:

Disk-1 Hardware

* ST3250824A, ATA DISK drive
* attached ide-disk driver.
* host protected area => 1
* 488397168 sectors (250059 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=30401/255/63, UDMA(33)

Disk-3 Hardware

* ST3250823A, ATA DISK drive
* attached ide-disk driver.
* host protected area => 1
* 488397168 sectors (250059 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=30401/255/63, UDMA(33)

Is there anything you see in my setup that might be modified to improve the transfer speed? For example, I see UDMA(33), can that be changed to UDMA(66) somehow?

Thanks,

-- Alex

I have a similar problem, my drives only run at UDMA(33) and it slows thinks way down... even on 100mb.

The problem is my outdated motherboard

I've been waiting for v2 to ether get a new board or just add on a controller card that supports UDMA(133)

Hope that helps

Yes, I do have an old Abit BX6 M/B running Celeron 300A overclocked to 450. I guess it's the M/B limiting the speeds.

The ATA bus speed is only part of the problem. The HDD likely still can't fill the pipe if the data being accessed is not in contiguos blocks. The transfer rates go WAAAAAYYY down in this case. Go look at the specs for your drives and see what I mean.

Mike