FreeNAS box not utilizing gigabit NIC

[Poppymcshotgun]

Hey everyone, first time user of FreeNAS and first time poster here.

I think I've identified why my transfer speeds are acting like I only have a 10/100Mb network. I set up the new NAS box and when I go to transfer my media collection, I only get about 11-16Mb/s.

I had a neighbor who knows about Linux commands (I know absolutely nothing), and he said the system was defaulting to 100BaseTX Full Duplex, not gigabit. However, he didn't know how to change it, and I don't either.

I even tried a separate PCI-E gigabit adapter. Still defaulted to 100BaseTX. The onboard gigabit NIC details can be found here: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P5K/#specifications

The issue is not the router or PC. I get transfer rates around 80Mb/s from one Win7 box to another one on the network.

Hopefully this is an easy fix. Is there an easy way to enable the gigabit capabilities on my NAS box?

Router: D-Link DIR-655

HTPC:
Intel Core i5 2500-5
ASUS P8P67
8GB G.SKILL DDR3 1600 (2x4GB)
1TB WD Caviar Black HDD 7200RPM
LG Blu-Ray Player
Radeon HD 5770
750w PSU
HTPC Case
Windows 7 Home Premium

NAS BOX:
Inter Core2Duo 6750
ASUS P5K
5GB DDR 2 800 (2x2GB + 2x512MB)
2x 2TB Toshiba 7200 RPM drives (Raid 0 ZFS formatted)
some old PCI-e video card
400w PSU
old gaming case
FreeNAS OS loaded on 8GB flash drive


So, like I said, I don't believe it's my hardware, or my existing network. My neighbor who knows a little bit of Linux command lines (or whatever you call them) showed me where the FreeNAS box auto-selected 100BaseTX for the network card. I just need to know why, since it's a gigabit NIC.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[cyberjock]

FreeNAS isn't Linux.. so that guys is only somewhat helpful. Many commands in Linux are similar to FreeBSD. But many internal things are radically different.

I'm really not buying that its an issue with FreeNAS. It could be that the network cards you are using aren't well supported in FreeBSD. But I think its more likely to be a bad network cable or something like that. Your link is so vague(that's one reason I quit buying ASUS products). Calling your NIC a "PCIe Gigabit LAN controller featuring AI NET2" by ASUS is horrible. That's so nondescript its disgusting.

You didn't mention what brand PCIe card you are trying to use either... "separate PCI-E gigabit adapter" isn't too precise.

If I were a betting man I'd bet big money against your network cable or the network hardware. The default setting is autosense:

Code:

# ifconfig
em0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
		options=4019b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4,VLAN_HWTSO>
		ether 00:15:17:14:96:ae
		inet 192.168.2.100 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.2.255
		media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
		status: active
em1: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
		options=4019b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4,VLAN_HWTSO>
		ether 00:15:17:14:96:af
		media: Ethernet autoselect
		status: no carrier

Notice em0 is set to "Ethernet autoselect" and is 1000baseT. That tells you that the NIC is on autosense and is working at 1Gb speed. If you have it set to autoselect(which is the default) and its not negotiating than you almost certainly have a network hardware issue. Something is broken somewhere. I say almost only because there's a very very very slim chance there's a bug in the driver or something, but without knowing your exact model I can't even begin to see if its an isolated issue or not. Autosense is controlled by the hardware, so if its not working then you have a hardware issue somewhere. I'd try different ports on whatever router or switch its connected to, try different cables, etc. Something somewhere is responsible for you not being able to connect at 1Gb speeds.

em1 is my other NIC and is also set to autoselect, but says no carrier because there is no cable connected.

If all else fails, Intel NICs are the best. They are the most supported, just work, and provide the best performance. They're also inexpensive at $25-35 on ebay.

Other than that, I have no advice. Every situation where I've seen autosense not work at the fastest speed when it should have it was also a fact that if you manually forced the speed it wouldn't be able to connect to the network anyway.

 

[Poppymcshotgun]

FreeNAS isn't Linux.. so that guys is only somewhat helpful. Many commands in Linux are similar to FreeBSD. But many internal things are radically different. You look almost ignorant the way you said it, but I'll forgive you. :)

Given that the definition of ignorant is "not knowing", then yes, I'm completely ignorant when it comes to all things Linux/FreeBSD (or all things other than Windows). I fully admit it! That's why I came here for help. I had a guy come to my house who seemed to know what he was doing, and he couldn't figure it out.

I'm really not buying that its an issue with FreeNAS. It could be that the network cards you are using aren't well supported in FreeBSD. But I think its more likely to be a bad network cable or something like that.

If I were a betting man I'd bet big money against your network cable or the network hardware.

Boom, this was it. If you bet money on this, you would have been right. It was a cable.

I didn't think it was the cable, because I had already tried 2 (pulled from a bin with old network cables I had collected over the past decade).

But, I decided to try that again just to make sure. I opened up a brand new cable from it's packaging, plugged it into a separate LAN slot on my router, rebooted the NAS box, and "BOOM!" it defaulted to 1000baseTX. I'm not getting 60-80MB/s transfer speeds.

Thanks for your thorough and quick response to my initial post! I'm really liking FreeNAS!

 

[cyberjock]

Congrats on figuring it out. At least the fix was cheap!

I apologize if you took offense to my comment about being ignorant. It wasn't meant to be offensive but we get a lot of people in here that believe Linux=FreeBSD and it's more correct to say FreeBSD=Unix. Linux commands are often similar or identical to FreeBSD but not always. However if you know Linux pretty well it isn't difficult to figure FreeBSD out. Less than 18 months ago I didn't know that FreeBSD wasn't a Linux variant. We all start somewhere.

You might have better luck with your on-board NIC now. You might want to give it a try again. Some cheap NICs have trouble with autonegotiation if a cable is iffy at the highest speed.

 

[Poppymcshotgun]

No offense taken, it's the truth!

I did switch to the on board nic. Thats the one I'm using now.

 

[cyberjock]

Outstanding! Enjoy your FreeNAS server!

 

[RichR]

the moral of this story (somewhat).... throw out the box of old cables.... chances are some of them are not even "official" Cat5, therefore probably won't give you 1000baseT speeds.... this is a good read ...http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gigabit-ethernet-bandwidth,2321.html

 

[cyberjock]

And now you see the problem when someone starts a new thread and complains that their network performance is slow. There are so many opportunities for things to go wrong that diagnosing over a forum is pretty hard(and a PITA if the user doesn't know FreeBSD). Usually if you have 3-5 drives on a zpool you can easily saturate a Gb link. But if you have a low powered CPU or not enough RAM for your zpool's cache to function effectively, then you have problems. And nobody really believes that "12GB of RAM should be plenty" they have a 20TB+ zpool.

I have Intel SSDs in all of my machines and my server has all of my platter based media. So copying data to/from my server always goes over 100MB/sec.

And if I ever even think that the cable is a problem, I just throw it out. When you can buy 25 foot cables for $4 on monoprice and 100 foot cables for $13 how much is your time worth?

 

[bernardc]

MARGE: I'm not sure I agree with you a hunnert percent on your policework, there, Lou.

That line from the movie, Fargo, came to mind when I read this thread. I was running into the same problem as the OP using FreeNAS 8.3.0 on a Supermicro X9SRA mobo and its twin Intel gigabit LAN ports. Both ports are connected to a TP-Link TL-SG1016D gigabit switch, and both use the default settings which include autosense. One port was connected with a 25' cable labeled CAT5e that I scrounged from my boneyard. The other was a brandnew, 25', premium CAT7. I don't quite know the exact sequence, but simply plugging and unplugging resulted in the port with the CAT7 running at 100 and the CAT5e at 1000. The speed of download from the FreeNAS share to a fast Windows box went from 10 MB/s to around 100 MB/s.

So this is where Marge Gunderson's "alternative hypothesis" comes in: It's possible that the OP's solution was caused by re-negotiation of the link or reassignment of the share access path rather than a cable change-out.

 

[cyberjock]

MARGE: I'm not sure I agree with you a hunnert percent on your policework, there, Lou.

That line from the movie, Fargo, came to mind when I read this thread. I was running into the same problem as the OP using FreeNAS 8.3.0 on a Supermicro X9SRA mobo and its twin Intel gigabit LAN ports. Both ports are connected to a TP-Link TL-SG1016D gigabit switch, and both use the default settings which include autosense. One port was connected with a 25' cable labeled CAT5e that I scrounged from my boneyard. The other was a brandnew, 25', premium CAT7. I don't quite know the exact sequence, but simply plugging and unplugging resulted in the port with the CAT7 running at 100 and the CAT5e at 1000. The speed of download from the FreeNAS share to a fast Windows box went from 10 MB/s to around 100 MB/s.

So this is where Marge Gunderson's "alternative hypothesis" comes in: It's possible that the OP's solution was caused by re-negotiation of the link or reassignment of the share access path rather than a cable change-out.

Absolutely! It really sucks, but that's the reality of it. There's no doubt in my mind that with unlimited time, money, and man power we could fully understand the exact cause for the problem via Oscilloscope, Huntron Tracker, signal propagation, and a whole boatload of other electrical theory as it applies to the applicable hardware. But is it really worth the time, money, and manpower? Naa. You just throw out the crappy network cable and life goes on.

The crappy part is that when stuff is broken most people come up with a list of "most likely" to "least likely". Generally that cat7 cable you've been using for a while isn't on the "most likely" list, so you spend lots of time troubleshooting the "most likely" until you find the cable is bad. Or you start playing around and you unplug the network cable to reroute it because your keyboard isn't easily accessible. Then when you plug it back in the darn thing just starts working. Then, if you're really unlucky, a few weeks later it happens again and you have no idea why it did it again.

 

[toolforger]

It's now 2017, and this is *still* true.
I had really crappy 10 MBit/s performance with no apparent reason. Unplugging and replugging the network cable, and suddenly the autoconfigured speed went from 10 to 1000 MBit/s.

Man I hate unreliable autoconfiguration.

 

[lbartosek]

Hi all,

I must admit, your were right about the cable in my case. I've been struggling with this for couple of days. I already have new NIC in my eBay's Cart, however, thanks to this thread, I am 99% sure my built-in NIC won't require a replacement. It's the bloody cable that doesn't allow the Ethernet auto-select to set 1000baseTX. Well, this thread and that article here made me touch the cables :D. The ifconfig result was obvious immediately after I tried my newest LAN cable but unfortunately, I cannot test the data transfer speed between my WS and the FreeNAS server now, this is because of all my other cables aren't capable of 1000 MBit/s. I only have 1 available LAN cable that is fast enough :(

Before : Ifconfig media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>)
After: Ifconfig media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseTX <full-duplex>).

According to the article above I mentioned, I kidna new, it's either the nic or the cable because trying setting up the Ethernet autoselect to 1000baseTX manually made my connection just freeze.

I'll test the transfer speed between my WS and FreeNAS server tomorrow as I am bring new LAN cables home from work.

Thank you so much for helping me figure this out that quickly

 

[lbartosek]

Thanks again,

New LAN cable did the magic. I got 10 times faster transfer speed now. Now, I am on the mission to achieve better speed on my laptop over 5GHz Wifi connection with 866Mbps link speed. 60MB/s would be adequate instead of 22 MB/s that I am currently getting. Any idea how to improve speed rate over wifi?

Cheers

 

[Yorick]

WiFi is its own beast. Channel width comes into it, how far you are from the AP, how many antennas your laptop has, what type of WiFi you are using - and what your laptop can handle. If you're being shown 866 Mbps link speed, that might be two antennas with 80Mhz channel width each, on 11ac. It's possible your laptop lies to you about WiFi speeds. It's also possible another component slows you down: What does the disk show when you do this? Maxed, or cruising with lots of headroom? What's the comparable speed when on Ethernet, on the same laptop?

 

[AlistairLM]

Had the same issue as the original post, and yes it was the Network Cable for me, not the NIC or the Router or Switch connected (as all were correctly rated to Gb speeds).