Help please - New to FreeNAS and have very slow file transfer rate

[Cap Cave Man]

Hi All
I'm very now to the world of FreeNAS (well NAS in general infact), I've been looking a solution to my family media sharing requirements and FreeNAS seems to be the option form me.
I've converted an old PC:
425W power supply
i3 3220 cpu
H77n gigabyte MB
8 gig ram DDR3 1333
Currently 1 green 1.5 Tb disk
(I have 2 more 2TB green drives waiting for the final set up, but still in testing mode, after initial transfer and sorting files will be stable and there will not be much removal only reading)

So, I installed FreeNAs on USB, booted up, set the root password, set the admin email address (I think i got this bit wrong, may come back to it), enabled console logging, configured a ZFS storage (was allowed 1.3TB of disk space, No RAID, just a striped drive), Didn't create any users, set permission for any to do anything, Created a NFS share (have both MAC and Windows machines), Started Services, installed Plex plugin ans started it running. All is good up to here. (want to install firefly next but will do some searching on how to do then when questions below are answered)

I'm now trying to transfer files on to the NAS for later sorting and it's taking 1 hour to transfer a 2Gig movie from external drive attached to MAC and up to 20 mins to move a 500 meg file from one location to another on the NAS, when connecting to the server from my mac.

My questions are:
1 - is this normal?
2 - will I get better transfer rates when I have 2 drives on a RAID format?
3 - what setting can I change to speed things up
4 - would CIFS be better that NFS or is it just personal choice
5 - have I missed something very simple and will have a face palm moment when it's pointed out to me.

Let me know if you need any more information and that's for feed back/help/sarcastic comments

 

[Yatti420]

Considering you have an external drive connected (firewire or USB?) this can slow things down dramatically.. You need decent client pcs to ensure you'll get good speeds...I would try CIFS out and see if this improves the situation.. 8gb is the bare minimum you can run with ZFS.. But with a single user it shouldn't be an issue..

Hardware wise I'm assuming your not running ECC ram which is a big nonon for ZFS/FreeNAS.. The Mac you have most-likely runs ECC.. You also have a realtek chipset on that motherboard while not optimal with a good CPU and decent amount of ram you should be able to saturate (assuming clients have gigabit and network is sound)

 

[Cap Cave Man]

Considering you have an external drive connected (firewire or USB?) this can slow things down dramatically.. You need decent client pcs to ensure you'll get good speeds...I would try CIFS out and see if this improves the situation.. 8gb is the bare minimum you can run with ZFS.. But with a single user it shouldn't be an issue..

Hardware wise I'm assuming your not running ECC ram which is a big nonon for ZFS/FreeNAS.. The Mac you have most-likely runs ECC.. You also have a realtek chipset on that motherboard while not optimal with a good CPU and decent amount of ram you should be able to saturate (assuming clients have gigabit and network is sound)

Thanks for your feed back Yatti,
I'll give CIFS ago this week and see what happens.
Also, does anyone know where I can buy ECC RAM from in Australia (preferably not ebay, unless it is a reputable seller that someone can recommend)
Cheers

 

[cyberjock]

You mb and cpu don't support ecc RAM. You'll need a whole new system.

 

[Cap Cave Man]

You mb and cpu don't support ecc RAM. You'll need a whole new system.

That makes me sad... looks like CIFS is my only hope, unless there is some other magical solution.
Don't want to go back to windows share as windows firewall screws with the devices on my network and FreeNAS seemed to be the answer. All hope is not lost yet :p

 

[cyberjock]

Uhh...cigs doesn't negate the ecc requirements. Read our sticky on the topic.

 

[Whattteva]

I may have missed this in your post, but how is the NAS connected to the network and the client computers? I hope it's not WiFi.

 

[L]

The specs on that drive should push 150MB/sec on SATA, but real life would probably be 50-100MB/sec, although with a mac I have never pushed more than 50MB/sec(on 1gbe), I have never had the time to see why it peaks there..

I actually have a similar setup. I have 4 usb drives and I do get much better speed than that. I run afp and my test is regularly taking all my isos and moving them. The load is about 35GB and takes about an hour. It runs are about 8-15MB/sec. If it wifi, that's the killer, I can move it over to wired and about multiple times faster.

If you stripe the drives, you should also get better performance, but I would guess your bottleneck is on the network.

 

[Cap Cave Man]

NAS has a direct wire to router and external hdd connected to that.
Looks like I'm going to be going needing some new hardware, I wonder if I can get a ASrock C2550D4I and some ECC RAM in Perth Australia for a good price.

 

[Whattteva]

NAS has a direct wire to router and external hdd connected to that.
Looks like I'm going to be going needing some new hardware, I wonder if I can get a ASrock C2550D4I and some ECC RAM in Perth Australia for a good price.

You didn't answer the whole question. NAS is connected wired, but how is your Mac connected to the router? The external HDD connected to that (that being router USB port or your NAS USB port or your Mac USB port?). Some routers do have the ability of sharing USB drives through CIFS. If you are using Tomato firmware however, and the drive is formatted with NTFS, expect VERY SLOW transfer rates as most consumer routers do not have enough CPU power for NTFS-formatted drives.

I'm now trying to transfer files on to the NAS for later sorting and it's taking 1 hour to transfer a 2Gig movie from external drive attached to MAC and up to 20 mins to move a 500 meg file from one location to another on the NAS, when connecting to the server from my mac.

Again, this is the reason why I asked how your Mac is connected to the network (via wire or wifi).
Also, you need to clarify what "moving from one location to another on the NAS". Are you moving it around just internally on the server or you're moving from/to your Mac?

 

[Cap Cave Man]

You didn't answer the whole question. NAS is connected wired, but how is your Mac connected to the router? The external HDD connected to that (that being router USB port or your NAS USB port or your Mac USB port?). Some routers do have the ability of sharing USB drives through CIFS. If you are using Tomato firmware however, and the drive is formatted with NTFS, expect VERY SLOW transfer rates as most consumer routers do not have enough CPU power for NTFS-formatted drives.

Again, this is the reason why I asked how your Mac is connected to the network (via wire or wifi).
Also, you need to clarify what "moving from one location to another on the NAS". Are you moving it around just internally on the server or you're moving from/to your Mac?

Lets see if I can give a better answer this time :)
NAS is connected wired = Yes,
but how is your Mac connected to the router? = wifi (said sheepishly)
The external HDD connected to that (that being router USB port or your NAS USB port or your Mac USB port?) = USB port on router.
Some routers do have the ability of sharing USB drives through CIFS.= didn't know that
If you are using Tomato firmware however, and the drive is formatted with NTFS, expect VERY SLOW transfer rates as most consumer routers do not have enough CPU power for NTFS-formatted drives. = What for mat would you recommend? I can turn back on the windows machine I have to reformat the drive or I could do it through the MAC (macbook air)

Again, this is the reason why I asked how your Mac is connected to the network (via wire or wifi). = wifi
Also, you need to clarify what "moving from one location to another on the NAS". Are you moving it around just internally on the server or you're moving from/to your Mac? = on the server but I'm doing by being connect to the NAS on the MAC e.g. NFS/FreeNAS/Folder 1 to NFS/FreeNAS/Folder 2

Hope this information is a bit more useful
Thanks for your help

 

[Whattteva]

Lets see if I can give a better answer this time :)
NAS is connected wired = Yes,
but how is your Mac connected to the router? = wifi (said sheepishly)
The external HDD connected to that (that being router USB port or your NAS USB port or your Mac USB port?) = USB port on router.
Some routers do have the ability of sharing USB drives through CIFS.= didn't know that
If you are using Tomato firmware however, and the drive is formatted with NTFS, expect VERY SLOW transfer rates as most consumer routers do not have enough CPU power for NTFS-formatted drives. = What for mat would you recommend? I can turn back on the windows machine I have to reformat the drive or I could do it through the MAC (macbook air)

Again, this is the reason why I asked how your Mac is connected to the network (via wire or wifi). = wifi
Also, you need to clarify what "moving from one location to another on the NAS". Are you moving it around just internally on the server or you're moving from/to your Mac? = on the server but I'm doing by being connect to the NAS on the MAC e.g. NFS/FreeNAS/Folder 1 to NFS/FreeNAS/Folder 2

Hope this information is a bit more useful
Thanks for your help

Ahh, now your issues are starting to make sense, doesn't it. A lot of the things I've mentioned were right on the money.

WiFi on the Mac is going to be a huge bottleneck. Remember, your speed is limited by your weakest link. WiFi is certainly nice and convenient if all you do is surf the web, check emails, etc, but many people fail to realize, it's just not viable if you expect to transfer gigs of files through it.

Moving on to HDD on router USB, I know for a fact that NTFS performance is ultra slow on my Asus RT-N16 Tomato v1.28 router and I ended up reformatting it to ext3. Obviously, your performance will vary on the firmware you use. I haven't tried other formats (FAT32, HFS, etc.), but it may be worth a try.

Finally, I'm assuming you're using AFP on the file management. I've never personally used that protocol myself, but it may try to buffer the files and pass it through your Mac to perform the actual transfers; In which case, your transfers would be ultra slow even if you're simply moving things around internally. Another thing that you have to consider is if you're moving files between 2 different datasets. It will be treated as if they are two separate partitions so "moving" will not happen instantly as what you would expect.