Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[jocala]

I just set up my DNS-321 and I must say, I'm very disappointed with gigabit transfer speeds. I'm used to seeing 12 MB/s transfers from my current homebrew server. The DNS-321 is crawling at 5-6 MB/s.  I've tried all the settings offered, I get my best speed with 1000 checked jumbo frames disabled.

I'm using 1.03b9 firmware. Any suggestions?

[jocala]

Well, just as an fyi...

I've read most of the posts here (and elsewhere) regarding the speed or lack thereof of the DNS-321. It seems that there's no pattern, just that some folks gigabit speed sucks and others don't. Mine sucks.

I did straight connects from the DNS-321 to three different boxes, one laptop with a Realtech gigabit chipset, a homebrew tower with two Broadcom gig cards (tested both) and an Intel Mac Mini. I failed to get much above 5.6 MB/s for transfers using NFS,CIFS,FTP and Rsync.

I also ran FTP tests with each firmware available. No changes.

[mig]

As you can see from this chart, that puts it near the bottom, with offerings by other vendors running two, three, and even more than four times that fast. 

Is it really fair to compare the $100, DNS-321 running 11 MBytes/sec to a $1,700, Qnap TS-809 pro running 84 Mbytes/sec?

No, it is not doing gigabit speed.  It is not doing even a tenth of that speed.

Perhaps your expectation of 125MBytes/sec (the theoretical maximum for 1000BASE-T Ethernet) is a bit unrealistic.   If you use a Cat3 (100BASE-T) cable to connect your DNS-321 to your network, does your DNS-321's performance decrease?

The limiting factor should be the drive throughput,...

Not According to Bill Meade, from this article at smallnetbuilder (4/18/2007) http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/29936/79/1/4/

[jocala]

Well, after working with the DNS-321 all weekend, mine is RMA'd and headed back to Newegg. I have 1.7TB of data to load and doing it at 5 MB/s and under isn't feasible. I'm sorry it didn't work out, it's an extremely good looking and solid piece of kit, but just not for me.

[mig]

Want to compare it to something?  How about the $199 1TB single-drive Western Digital My Book World Edition NAS, which turns in a performance that's almost three times as fast as the DNS-321?

Not to argue with you, the WD My Book World Edition "white bar" NAS does have very good performance. (I guess, if that is the performance you wanted, you should have bought that product).  But, I hope you should be able to recognize there are definitive reasons for the increased performance on the WD 'white bar' as compared to the DNS-321.  First the WD 'white bar' is at least 6 months (maybe more) newer that the DNS-321.  The WD 'white bar' uses a different processor and, most significant (IMHO), has 128Mbytes of DDR2 SDRAM, twice the capacity of the 64MBytes DDR SDRAM on the DNS-321. 

It annoys me when you repeatedly try to make me look like stupid by attributing things to me that I never wrote.  My expectation was that the gigabit ethernet speed would not be a bottleneck, not that the DNS-321 would magically suck data off of the drives faster than their maximum throughput and spew it out, saturating the gigabit ethernet port. 

Perhaps you could define exactly (in MBytes/sec) what you expect for a device "doing gigabit speed".  Then we would be clear in your expectation.  You only stated that "It [DNS-321] is not doing even a tenth of that speed".

"The most interesting finding in this test was that although the D-Link DNS-323 supposedly is set up to take advantage of both SATA 3 Gb/s drives and NCQ, neither appeared to affect performance."

The interesting conclusion I got out of the article, and the reason I posted it as a response to your post of "The limiting factor should be the drive throughput" was the following statements:

"The best place to put your money to optimize NAS performance is to beef up the RAM on a NAS and each networked client. "

The DNS-321 is what it is (hardware wise) and you will only get so much performance from that hardware.  None of our posting or speculation about the contributing factors, will change the performance of the DNS-321.  As you said there are "offerings by other vendors running two, three, and even more than four times that fast".  If you need/want more performance you only need to look to those other vendors.

[jocala]

I rma'd my DNS-321 and purchased a ReadyNAS Duo. It has its problems as well,(very slow NTFS USB reads from an external drive) but the network transfer speeds are blazing compared to the DNS-321:  12-15 MB/s for Netgear, 5-7 MB/s for D-Link.

[madwood]

I'm also a bit disappointed with the network transfer speeds. I'm using firmware 1.03b9 on a DNS-321.

I can get ~400Mbs (~50MB/s) using iperf on a  'DNS-321 <=> gigabit switch <=> desktop' configuration.

However, I only get ~7-8MB/s when either writing to or reading from the DNS-321 using rsync over NFS.

Both my HDs (the one in DNS-321 and desktop) can withstand over 100MB/s  on my desktop -- compliments of hdparm -t. On the other hand, hdparm -t on the DNS-321 box (within a chroot'd lenny) yields at most 12MB/s on the same drive type. This data corroborates with other reports concluding that the bottleneck is indeed the drive controller -- the link actually talks about a DNS-323.

I guess there's not much one can do (re: firmware upgrades) to increase speed on this hardware.

[madwood]

Update: I've disabled itunes server as I noticed that 'mt-daapd' was constantly among the top CPU leechers. I also made sure nothing else was taking the CPU during the tests.

-) Reading FROM the DNS-321: I get up to 14MB/s with an average about 9-11MB/s.
-) Writing TO DNS-321: I did not see any improvement over my previous claims. About 7-8MB/s.
-) hdparm -t /dev/sda reports about ~18-24MB/s now.

The same setup (rsync over NFS) as earlier -- where I forgot to mention that the 4k jumbo frame support was on.

[mig]

I guess there's not much one can do (re: firmware upgrades) to increase speed on this hardware.

That is the honest truth!  The performance (or performance limitation) is in the hardware.
You want better performance, get better hardware. 

Take the Buffalo Linkstation Pro XHL for example (tested 50Mbytes/sec in smallnetbuilder's NAS charts). 
It runs with a Marvell "Kirkwood" 88F6281 processor clocked at 1.2 GHz. and 256 MB RAM,
this will surely out perform the DNS-321 (tested 11.8 MBytes/sec) with it's Marvell 88F5182-A2 C400 (clocked at 400 MHz), and 64MB RAM.

[Hayes]

Datapoint: 

My DNS-321 running RAID1 with 2 WD "black" 1TB drive is getting ~9-11 MBps rates over my gigabit network (Jumbo 9K frames) when I'm copying files from the DNS to my laptop.  I'm talking megaBYTES per second, so I guess that's 70-90 mbps. 

[gunrunnerjohn]

I get 8.2mbytes/sec reading and 7.0 writing on a 100mbit link.  Using it on a gigabit link, I got 11.8mbyte/sec reading and 12mbyte/sec writing.  It has a pair of Seagate 1.5Tb drives in RAID 1 format.

It's currently on a 100mbit link because it's in the basement to protect it in case of a fire.  Until I run another wire down there, I only have four wires so gigabit isn't possible.

FWIW, on the DNS-323 I get 15mbytes/sec reading and writing to a pair of Samsung 1.5Tb drives, also in RAID 1 configuration.

The processor in the DNS-321 is about 25% slower than in the DNS-323, which probably accounts for the difference in speed.

[djtecha]

I was wondering if anyone was having slow transfers between drives? Like 2-4 MBps! Also, I did realize that I get great speeds transferring from the 2nd drive to a computer (about 12-17) but only around 5-7 from the main disk, is this happening for anyone else?

  ~DantE

[gunrunnerjohn]

Are you talking about between two NAS units?  I'm in the process of wiring my gigabyte to the basement to get both of them on gigabit connections, but right now doing a transfer between a DNS-323 running gigabit and a DNS-321 running 100mbit connections, I'm hitting just about 10mbytes/sec transfer rate.  The machine in the middle is my Q9550 quad-core with 8gigs RAM running Windows 7 Ultimate.

I expect that to increase when I finish getting the extra two Ethernet lines strung down there to stop splitting the one line.

[jeepindon]

I was having the same problem getting 6 to 8 MB/s all the time, I experimented a bit and found if I turned on jumbo frames i got about double the speed.

1. Make sure your switch supports jumbo frames if so enable it. Mine is a managed switch Netgear GS108T I had to turn jumbo packets on in the config page of the switch. If your switch is unmanaged it will not have a config page and Jumbo frames are most likely already enabled.

2. Enable jumbo frames on your computers network card I chose 9000. some network cards show the fames as 9012 the dlink will only show 9000 but it is the same.

3. Enable jumbo frames on your DNS-321 set it to Auto detect and the frames to 9000.

This increased my speeds from 6-8 to 12-15 MB/s

Hope this helps