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[gunrunnerjohn]

Open the configuration menu, SETUP and select LAN on the left.  Jumbo frames are at the bottom of the page.

[The_Tango]

I am assuming "MTU"

Thanks

[gunrunnerjohn]

Yep, that's the frame size.

[Darryl_Gittins]

I bought the DLink DNS-321 based on following advertized "FEATURES & BENEFITS" on their spec sheet at ftp://ftp10.dlink.com/pdfs/products/DNS-321/DNS-321_ds.pdf :

1 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet Port
High-speed Gigabit Ethernet Connectivity
Utilizing SATA hard drives and gigabit connectivity, the 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure (DNS-321) is a high performance, cost-effective solution for your home or small office data storage needs.

However, the device does not actually provide Gigabit Ethernet Connectivity. A search on the forums shows that typical data transfer speeds are in the range of 10 Mbps. 

Other devices on my gigbit network transfer in the range of 100-140 MB/sec. However, I've never seen anything faster than 10MBps transfer speeds to or from the 321. That is not "Gigabit Ethernet Connectivity". Therefore, either the product is not working correctly, or DLink is lying in their specifications for the product. I've made several calls to Dlink support, and they have been unable to provide answers to this issue. They cannot explain why the device does not actually provide Gigabit Ethernet Connectivity.

DLink should not be claiming specs that is cannot substantiate. DLink should not be claiming specs that is cannot substantiate. That's false advertizing, and is against the law.

[gunrunnerjohn]

What devices do you have on your network that are able to transfer at 140mbytes/sec on a gigabit link?  Since the theoretical limit is 125mbytes/sec assuming no protocol framing overhead, that would be a pretty neat trick!

[Darryl_Gittins]

I have a screenshot showing a transfer between two computers at 105 MB/Second. That is typical but I'm sure I've seen much faster. Regardless, there's a huge difference between 100 and the 10 that the DNS provides.
 

[Darryl_Gittins]

Let me correct my previous statement - "Other devices on my gigbit network transfer in the range of 100-120 MB/sec (not 140)"

Sorry for the typo. Regardless, Dlink is advertizing "High-speed Gigabit Ethernet Connectivity" an "high performance" that it apparantly does not deliver.

I've never seen anything faster than 10MBps from the device. Therefore, either the product is not working correctly, or DLink is lying in their specifications for the product.

[eharbison]

I've owned the DNS321 for a little over a year now and I get between 6 MB/s -14 MB/s. I did extensive testing to try to figure out what was causing such slow speeds. I thinking it comes down to having a slow processor in the unit. I have Jumbo Frames set to 7000 for all of my computers and my Enterprise HP Switch supports Jumbo Frames and Gigabit Connection. I can get 115 MB/s file transfers from PC to PC since all of my computers have raid 0 configured. Essentially if you plan on owning or currently own a DNS321 don't expect to get higher transfer rates then 6 - 14 MB/s. Now with that said, I like the device very much I have it set to be hot swappable in case one of the Hard Drives fail. This device has saved me at least twice since I store all my important data on it. One time a hard drive failed and all I had to do was pop it out and push in a new one...it did all the formatting and file recovery to the second drive from the first one. Neat little device....but slow as heck!

Just one more comment to the previous guy. For a NAS it's actually a decent speed for the price. It may be misleading because I wouldn't call it FAST! But if you look around, other NAS devices cost several hundread dollars more and only give speeds up to ~40 MB/s. Netgears NAS that my buddy has tops out a ~20 MB/s and cost several hundred dollars.

[yunlin12]

I saw same issue with slow speed, and have switched back to 1.01 firmware.

Write speed is ~14-15 MB/s in 1.01, I didn't test thoroughly in 1.03. Read speed is 17-18 MB/s for 1.01 vs 6MB/s in 1.03. I just can't live with 6MB/s. No way, no how.

[gunrunnerjohn]

I noticed that the speed dropped with the newer firmware, both with this unit and the DNS-323.

I finally gave up on speed, formatted the disks EXT3, and I use these two units as unattended backup servers.  I picked up a Synology DS209 as my primary NAS, and it cooks along at 40-50 mbytes/sec, I can live with that.

[aasoror]

I have done extensive testing and found that Jumbo frames of size 9k on both DNS-321 and my Win 7 x64 machine performs better than any other Jumbo frames setting (I have also tried the jumbo frame size mismatch suggested earlier).

My read speeds are around 10MB/s and writes are 7.75MB/s, notice that this is standard non RAID setup, so I would expect the read speed to double for RAID setups.

Disabling jumbo frames reduces read speeds by about 10% and did only have slight effect on the writes.
Its worthy nothing that the 4K, 5K, 6K matching frame sizes produced worse numbers than disabling jumbo frames all together.

DNS-321 (FW 1.0.3) WD EARS 1.5TB

[singhjpx]

I ran some tests and noticed write and read speeds of 5.27 MBytes and 2.78 MBytes. It is really confusing to see slower read than write. Still not sure what is the purpose of giving gigabit port if it can not go beyond 100mbps.

[mjzglr]

The CPU in this box is very slow. There is also a bug in the 1.03 firmware in the samba version they used.

Downgrade to 1.01.

Due to the slow CPU expect no more than 15MB/s over gigabit. That's all it can do. The new boxes from D-Link have better CPUs. For us that bought this one, we're stuck with a sad performing device.

[salemgman]

I wanted to add that I also experience this problem & that I'm very disappointed in D-Link.

After installing a telnet daemon, I logged in and observed the CPU usages (smbd and total), and while sending a file over a gigibit link with a MTU of 7000, I get 10-14MB/sec. CPU usage is only about 20-40% at worst and I'm getting no retransmitted packets (ie. client machine and all switches involved are handling the MTU ok).

It got me interested... If samba wasn't the bottle neck, what was? So I put a large file on /mnt/HD_a4 and then cp'd it to /dev/null (this should be pretty fast). Again, the CPU usage was about the same as samba, and worse yet, the read speed was about the same as samba.

So I thought, maybe it's quota checking... So I put a 280MB file on /mnt/HD_a2 (which has no quota checking enabled), then cp'd it to /dev/null... The results (don't hold your breath here) are the same.

This really feels like D-Link as put a speed governor into the kernel, a lot like Intuit does to their consumer grade Quickbooks products.

Perhaps they compiled the kernel as a tick based timing system (see /etc/rc.sh : adjtimex -t 10000), and the kernel thusly just doesn't have enough ticks available to service the IO requests (my gigabit cards can produce over 30k interrupts when doing a 80MB/sec transfer). But, on this one I'm probably just showing my ignorance, because they could simply be setting the resolution of the RTC (real time clock).

I would assume that they cheaped out and are doing Port IO (PIO) mode access of the HD's, except that the IO time doesn't jump up, and over all CPU usage remains under 40%.

I suppose you get what you pay for... Thought I was getting a good deal, but I can see now I was really getting cripple-ware.

Unless D-Link invests a little time and effort and fixes the horrible read/write speeds of the HD's (my laptop 486/90mhz had better speeds, and certainly ultra cheap SATA devices should be reading at more than 30MB/s), I'm going to have to seriously consider never touching another D-Link product again, and since I'm a computer consultant, I can honestly tell my clients my experiences with D-Link products and that will likely discourage them from throwing away good $$ on crippled products.