NASLite Network Attached Storage

I am looking for help with why my receive and transmit rates are so different. Since I am new to networking I am not sure if its problem or not. I have an iMac connected to a netgear GS605 gigabit switch. The NASLite-2 CDD server is an old Gateway PIII, 384 MB ram, ATA66, two WD drives (160 GB and 120 GB) and a netgear gigabit GS-311 adapter.

My Receive Rates are:

Ave 23.8 MB\s , Peak 26.1 MB\s, file size 13.9 GB in 9:58 min

Transmit Rates are:

Ave 10.6 MB\s, Peak 21.2 MB\s, file size 1.2 GB in 2:00 min

These numbers were taken using Net Monitor with the same file, however I got tired of the poor Transmit numbers so I stop.

The Transmit graph looks like an EKG heart beat, constant up and down while the Receive graph is mostly constant. I use the server to back up files, and home movies. I was hoping to get better Transmit rates. Is this what I should expect? Any suggestions on what i can do to help my network?

My system is also exhibiting a large variance in network transfer rate - looks like a rectified sine wave (sort of, with spiky bits). Bobbles along at 20 - 25MB/s then down to virtually 0, then back up (repeat).

I ran diskwriggler and got reasonable numbers, but using the Netgear utility on my PC I first noticed the transfer variability. The NASLite-2 box is not using all of the RAM available to it at that time.

I also have the same type of symptoms. See my thread (Problems with new NASLite2 and Large SATA HD)

Mine seems to be related to using SATA HD vice IDE drives. I get the up and down TX xfer rates to the NAS box with SATA drives. Smooth consistenet xfers with IDE drives installed and SATA disconnected.

I've just reconfigured my drives - 3 x 250 & 3 x 300 as 6 x 250 in RAID5 and 3 x 50 in RAID5. In the process of doing so, I checked all the SATA configurations (all the drives are SATA300) and they were all set to SATA-300. Changed them to SATA150 and started the Build / Verify process of each array. The 100GB array is "Optimal" now and the 1250GB array is at 90% complete (after about 9 hours). The Build / Verify process seems to be far faster than the last time I set up a 2 x 250 in RAID1 - took *ages* to complete.

Now, I realise that this may have something to do with SATA speed and my Adaptec card, however I feel that it merely emphasises the point that drive(s) should be set to the correct speed for the chosen interface. This is a point made recently by Tony and my findings seem to confirm it.

Now, got to find the time to copy all that data / media back onto the NAS.......

Copying data back to the NAS as I type - transfer speed vs time graph in Windows Task Manager / Networking looks like the Alps...... with lots of time at about 0.01% to 0.05%. It seems to transfer about 0.8GB in fits and starts and then it stops doing anything much for about 15 to 30 seconds (and repeat).

It may be no coincidence that I have 1GB RAM installed - NASLite uses 896MB max, less O/S and RamDrives and that's down to about 780MB - 800MB, I would guess. So, is RAM just filling up and then stalling network transfer while it dumps all the data to the drive(s)?

I have done some more investigation with may transfer rate issue. I tried using SMB/CIFS vs NFS protocols. It appears that using NFS the transfers are more constant than using SMB/CIFS. However NFS has a slightly slower average rate. I have read that NFS may be a better protocol when moving files between UNIX/Linux type systems.

This afternoon, I swapped out the RAM in my NAS box - from 1GB to 256MB. The change in network throughput has been pretty dramatic. Instead of surging along at about 27MB/s for a while then stopping for a while, it seems to have evened out a bit and is giving a fairly constant 17MB/s - 22MB/s. Lends credence to my RAM size theory - however I would appreciate corroboration if possible.......

That sound like something I will try tonight. I too have very erratic xfer speeds and have a 2.6gig Ht machine with dual channel 2 gig memory. maybe try downsizing the spces to see if that make it more stable. Right now it start up and say 896meg RAM in use so it ignores the other part of memory.

srodgers:

While you're doing that testing, also give HT-disabled a try in BIOS. (Not sure how Linux/NASLite makes use of it anyway ... I know it does not take advantage of dual CPU Mobos. Because of the low h/w requirements the HT won't add benefit anyway.)

This has nothing to do with NASLite, but my son once had a 3.0 HT Northwood P4 (Socket 478) which gave a bunch of strange very intermittent problems ... we tried everything (RAM, Video Card, WinXP reinstalls, modem, etc etc) for months. The only thing that consistently made the problem disappear was turning off HT. I would not believe the CPU could be the cause ... and so the problem lingered, but what finally solved everything was a replacement CPU. Unbelievable that the CPU worked so well except for the rare and intermittent issues ...

Georg

I noticed the same thing here. My IDE drive transfers are very consistent, however the SATA drives (set to 150) seem to burst and then stop. I noe have 3 SATA drives in RAID5 and notice the same thing. I have 512RAM. Will try some different things to help sort this out.