Can't Achieve Gigabit Speeds

[Helsbino]

Hi everyone. I'm aware this type of thread has been started before. I've looked through the existing material, protosd's FAQ and the freeNAS guide, and I still can't get my head around what to do.

I'm only getting 100Mbs (12MBs) speeds writing to my NAS. This is my setup.

Dual Core Celeron D 2.66Ghz
4GBs RAM
2 x 500GBs Seagate Barracudas in RAID 1 (mirroring)
D-Link Gigabit Ethernet PCI Adaptor.

I'm know more RAM is desirable. My motherboard can't access more. Other users seem to obtain faster speeds with the same amount.

I'm connecting from a current generation MacBook pro using AFP. Originally using gigabit ethernet to a D-Link 504G Router to the Gigabit Ethernet adaptor on the NAS. I suspect the D-Link Router isn't Gigabit capable. I'm now trying with a Cisco Linksys WAG320N3.

I understand that FreeNAS might not recognise my equipment as Gigabit Ethernet. I've tried creating an interface in the WebUI and adding 'media 1000baseTX mediaopt full-duplex' in the option field. Using the D-Link router, this would cause the UI to time out. With Cisco, it accepts the change, but my transfer speeds are unaffected. At all times with the Cisco router, the 1000Mbs light on the back of the NAS is green (unlike with the D-Link).

Do I need to tell FreeNAS to use the interface I created?

I haven't tried using the console. I'm not too confident, and I understand the changes won't be preserved on a reboot.

All my cables are Cat6e.

I'm very inexperienced with networking and FreeNAS, please don't assume anything.

I'd greatly appreciate some help.

 

[Helsbino]

Hi everyone

In case this helps anyone, I resolved my bottleneck.

I took the routers out of the equation and connected directly via ethernet after learning some basic networking. I've effectively doubled my write speed to around 20MBs (calculated informally by timing a transfer).

Clearly there's still gains to be made. I'll go away and see if I can find some other bottlenecks to overcome.

 

[ProtoSD]

I'm only getting 100Mbs (12MBs) speeds writing to my NAS.

Hi Helsbino,

This is the max speed of a 100Mb interface. It means that one or more of the network cards between your pc and freenas and/or your router is only capable of 100mb. You can only go as fast as your slowest connection.

I think I saw someone else say they had to reboot after setting the media type to 1000baseTX to get it to go. Something is stuck at 100Mb.

Looking at your second post it seems you've found the problem with your router. You should still be able to increase your speed.

I'm working on a tutorial that would probably help you, but with the release of 8.2 beta-3 and a handful of other projects, I'm not sure how soon I'll have it ready.

 

[Helsbino]

Hi protosd

Thanks for the post. Funnily enough, both routers seemed to limit me to 100Mb, despite the fact that one is definitely 1000Mb capable. This isn't an issue, I'd prefer connect directly via ethernet anyway.

Thanks for all the work your doing. I'll definitely read your tutorial when it's live. My current speeds are acceptable, so I'm not going to ruthlessly pursue a performance increase.

Regards
Josh

 

[Helsbino]

I've managed to improve my write speeds to around 29MBs over a transfer with some fiddling. I get reads of 46MBs.

I updated to the 64bit version of FreeNAS, manually set my disk to SATA3 (although in reality they are SATA1), and made some more RAM available by reducing the integrated graphics share in the BIOS. I don't know why, but these changes gave me roughly 50% write performance improvement. As far as I can gather from the reports, FreeNAS doesn't even seem to use all of my 3GBs of RAM.

Regards
Josh