This may help some others with 320L/320LW speed problems
Out of the box my DNS-320LW gave around 10.92mb/sec writing, 11.55 reading - measured using nastester 17 (400mb file)
I now get 34mb/sec writing, and 69 mb/sec reading. In the real world, the NAS has just finished syncing some of my videos using Alway Sync – this is the report on completion -
Files processed: 5,442; Files copied: 871; Bytes processed: 2,650,950,710,002; Bytes copied: 288,445,469,446. Job started 16.08hrs, finished 19.34hrs
The setup
The NAS was set up as Raid 0, striped and was populated with 2 3Tb drives of different manufacture, but identical size, each with 64Mb cache
Broadband is vi a BT Home hub 3 - 4 ethernet ports, but only one is a megabit port. I had the PC on that port, so the NAS was on one of the other 10/100 ports. Connecting the NAS to the Gigabit port directly should have brought an improvement, but didn’t.
Decided to add 4 Gigabit ports by adding a switch (D-Link DGS 1005D 5 Port 10/100/1000 Green Ethernet Gigabit Desktop Switch).
Setup was just plug in the power unit, then connect the RJ45’s. Neither position nor order matter
Setting the NAS to use Gigabit speed
Opening the browser to the NAS box address, navigating management>network management>Link Speed Settings and the link speed setting (on auto) now had 2 other options (100 or 1000) I set it to 1000, rather than just auto and leaving the NAS to negotiate. Then saved the settings, and restarted the NAS via system management>system settings>restart
Launched AIDA32, and there, under network>windows network, the connection speed was 100. The DGS 1005D has an led for each Ethernet connection, green when the speed is 1000, orange for slower speeds. A look at the switch showed one orange – the PC. The Asus site confirmed the on-board Ethernet was gigabit.
So how was the PC limping on 100 speed?
Check the drivers – OK. Check the cables – swapped out, but no difference
Checking the speed
On the Asus board’s support page (http://www.asus.com/uk/Motherboards/P8Z77V_LX/HelpDesk_Download/) in addition to the drivers was a file Realtek Ethernet Utility V2.0.2.6 for Windows Win8.1 32bit & Win8.1 64bit.
No explanation of what it might do. Downloaded, unpacked and installed, it proved to be a simple but very useful Realtec PCIe Family controller diagnostic Utility, so not just for Asus boards
The tiny program consisted of a 4 item list – General, Driver, Cable, and About
Under “General” the speed was shown as 100. Clicked on “Cable”, and this once again showed the link speed as 100.
Alongside was a Refresh button, on clicking it, the speed was reported as 1000, without any other action at all. The switch is now showing all green LED’s The utility incidentally also shows the status of the cables - normal, broken or disconnected, or short, but all these were fine
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Topic: DNS-320LW slow Speed - and a solution (Read 4254 times)