Is this network speed test accurate?

[jkousholt]

I've done a bit of testing, seeing if my FreeNAS performs as it should.
When doing Windows file transfers, I think it performed okay, but not impressive.
Then I did a test with LAN Speed Test software from totusoft. The test writes and read a 100 MB file from my Win7 to a shared CIFS folder.

And here's the result:
(writing 767 Mbit/s / reading 904 Mbit/s)

For comparison, I did a test on my Synology DS-107+:
(writing 131 Mbit/s / reading 88 Mbit/s)

The FreeNAS result looks impressive, but is the result correct?

My FreeNAS box specs:
FreeNAS-9.2.1.5-RELEASE-x64
Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 @ 3.16GHz
8 Gigs of RAM
3 x 3 TB WD Red - Raid Z
Onboard Gigabit Ethernet

I also did a read/write speed directly on my zpool, using this guide: http://www.benwagner.net/uncategorized/test-readwrite-speed-in-freenas/
And got a write speed of ~192 Mbit/s and a read speed at ~768 Mbit/s.

Edit: Got a hold of the abbreviations...

 

[jgreco]

"mbps" ... megabastards per second?

Please use identifiable abbreviations. "MBytes/sec" or "Mbits/sec" are very good choices.

 

[cyberjock]

I will tell you from personal experience that Lan Test is NOT a good test for getting speeds.

 

[jkousholt]

"mbps" ... megabastards per second?

Please use identifiable abbreviations. "MBytes/sec" or "Mbits/sec" are very good choices.

Done! :)

 

[jkousholt]

I will tell you from personal experience that Lan Test is NOT a good test for getting speeds.

Is there any good network tests, that provides reliable results?

 

[solarisguy]

Get a large video file (a 1080p one from YouTube, if you do not have DVDs or m2ts from your camera around). Concatenate it multiple times, so its size is larger than RAM in your FreeNAS.

Copy it to FreeNAS. More than once (to different names...), but not simultaneously.

Read those files back (one by one, not in parallel).

Expect around 100MiB/s (100 * 1 048 576 bytes per second, often written as 100 MB/s), so a 20GiB file would take above 3 minutes to transfer. This is a very reliable test. Now, if your disks cannot read or write at that speed..., then you are measuring your disks throughput.

Use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iperf for a comparison