Help, file transfer slowness

[thr3e]

My setup:
CPU: Intel i7-2600
MOBO: BioStar TH61 ITX v2.0 (bios flashed to latest 5.02 and I was able to install FreeNAS)
RAM: 16gb (2x 8gb) of Crucial DDR3L-1600 (it's running at 1333, the max the MOBO can support and yes I know ECC RAM is recommended but my CPU doesn't support ECC anyhow)
Storage: 4x 3TB red drives (with RaidZ, no encryption or anything fancy, everything is default)
OS: latest FreeNAS 9.10 stable release

Just wanted to say I'm new to FreeNAS, just built my first box. Read some guidelines, and watched a few youtubes but once I got hang of it, it was pretty easy to set up. My issue now is I got my share setup (SMB), when I transfer a movie files from my Win10 to the share, it's only doing about 7-8mbs!! So I thought it could be my wireless for the Win10 machine, I wired the laptop directly to a LAN port of the same router the FreeNAS is hooked up to, no luck. So I thought my bottleneck could be RAM, so I swapped out the 8gb I had in there initially and put in 16gb (from reading, more RAM always better). Also got new cat5e cable, still no luck. Then I started to research to see if my NIC (Realtek RTL8111E) was compatible, some say it's not, some reported their's working fine and are getting 70-80mb/s. I also looked at my NIC setting in command line and it is showing 1gb full duplex, see below:

Code:

re0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500														 
		options=8209b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_MAGIC,LINKSTATE>										
		ether 00:30:67:da:																								   
		inet 192.168.1.3 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255																
		nd6 options=9<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED>																						
		media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)																		
		status: active

I did read somewhere, if I update the driver for the NIC it might resolve slowness issue. There is a new driver out on (10/25/2016 ver. 1.92) listed on realtek's site, but before I follow the step to update it I want to ask some experts on this forum should I do it? even tho FreeNAS is reading my NIC correctly? What else could be bottlenecking my setup that I might be over looking?

Any input is appreciate it, thanks!!

 

[dlavigne]

Ditch the realtek NIC and replace it with an Intel.

 

[thr3e]

Ditch the realtek NIC and replace it with an Intel.

I really hope this can be resolved without getting a new NIC.
This is a ITX board, I have a ARCTIC Freezer 7 Pro heatsink sitting on top of the CPU and it's kind of blocking the PCIe slot a little.

 

[Ericloewe]

Let me blunt: there is going to be little to no interest in investigating this on hardware that is very far from being recommended. The hardware recommendations exist for a reason and ignoring them (for whatever reason) will automatically lower the community's interest in investigating oddities.

 

[thr3e]

Let me blunt: there is going to be little to no interest in investigating this on hardware that is very far from being recommended. The hardware recommendations exist for a reason and ignoring them (for whatever reason) will automatically lower the community's interest in investigating oddities.

Thanks, being blunt is fine, I understood the recommendations of the HW before going in. But also saw a lot of others running on non-recommended HW and it's working fine for them. Just see if anyone out there could help me out, give any inputs.

I'm going to get home test some more, to see if it has anything to do with my router. (using a Asus RTac66u, piggy backed on the Verizon/Actiontec MI424WR rounter), going to check if my HW acceleration is enabled on the router, and QoS is turned off. (even tho, when I'm downloading from the web the speed is fine)

 

[thr3e]

So after a few days of trouble shooting, I've found the issue! It is in fact the Realtek NIC, even tho in FreeNAS shell it's reading "
media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>", it's not actually doing the speed... It's only doing 100!! I found out by using crossover cable, and hooking the box up to my Win10 machine that has gigabit port. I went into windows event viewer and found that the gigabit port auto negotiated to the FreeNAS box only at 100mb.

So now I downloaded the latest drive from Realtek site, and now my next steps is to read and learn how to compile the driver into a kernel and mount it.
The driver is a ".c" file, need to compile it to ".ko" file, wondering if anyone have any tips or a step by step instruction on how to do so?

Thanks in advance!!

 

[Ericloewe]

So now I downloaded the latest drive from Realtek site, and now my next steps is to read and learn how to compile the driver into a kernel and mount it.
The driver is a ".c" file, need to compile it to ".ko" file, wondering if anyone have any tips or a step by step instruction on how to do so?

To be honest, it's one of those things that you either know how to do or shouldn't be doing at all (unless you're trying to learn).

Besides, FreeNAS probably has a very recent driver anyway, that doesn't do Realtek NICs much good.

 

[thr3e]

Besides, FreeNAS probably has a very recent driver anyway, that doesn't do Realtek NICs much good.

FreeNAS 9.10 was released Mar 22, 2016
Realtek newest drivers was just posted on 10/25/2016, see this link

I just want to give it a shot, if anyone can help.

I did purchase a new Intel NIC as a PlanB incase this building kernel/module goes no where, but let's hope it work and I don't have to use the new NIC as my overly large heatsink sits ontop of the CPU is blocking the PCIe slot on this ITX board. (I will either have to rotate the heatsink, or purchase a new low profile one)