Well i've been copying by wireless with a Killer Wireless-N 1103 in a Gigabyte P15 laptop , didn't think the speed would drop that much but after your post Rob i connected to my network wired and i got 54MB/s. With me having trouble copying files from one share to another i didn think it would drop much but i'm not very network savvy.
Hi Simmers, looks like Robert gave you a tip that moved you forward a bit.
Your 54MB/sec looks ok, thats about the max you will ever get on Gigabit LAN if you re copying from one share to another, using your laptop connected via ethernet wire, (assuming your ethernet is Gigabit LAN and everything is well on it)
What you did was copying files form one share to another, depending or your situation this is a final test or not, for example, does your users normally work copying files between shares like you tested, or instead they read and write from the FreeNAS to their local PC? if your day to day use is the last case, then you need to focus on that test.
The longer explanation for your 54MB/sec is below.
Lets see if I can elaborate:
By my own experience and by WD RED specs, you should be able to read and write from a single HDD at about 145MB/sec (thats not considering network bottlenecks, SATA controller issues, etc)
What does this mean? it means that if you take two new WD RED HDDs and connect them on a PC (via SATA III port) you could load windows, linux etc on that PC, test read/write from one disk to another and you should see files copying at that speed. Basically a 1GB file should take less than 9 seconds to move from one HDD to another.
Now, if you take those HDDs and put them on a FreeNAS box, you should be able to do the same, read and write (locally, from one HDD to another, no network) at around 145MB/sec.
Next, would you be able to see the same speeds from your laptop, well that depends.
If you test that using Gigabit LAN (like you did, connecting your laptop via ethernet wire), you should expect max speed of 125MB/sec (thats the maximum you can do over regular Gigabit LAN).
Remember, all this as long as you are copying from the FreeNAS to your laptop or the other way around AND as long as you have a fast HDD on your laptop as well, because if you have a slow HDD on the laptop, then the file transfer speed will be limited by that HDD on the laptop, correct?
So, make sure you have a laptop with an SSD if possible, and test the speed of that HDD first (using Crystal Disk Mark or something like that).
Make efforts to get a laptop that can pass 145MB/sec on the sequential test of Crystal Disk Mark, locally, no network involved.
Once you determine you have a laptop with a HDD fast enough, then you trust your test better.
If you test over wireless is a little more difficult to predict your expected file transfer speeds, because there are many standards (A, B, G, N, etc) and they all have different speeds and suffer from interference, noise, etc so you are recommended to benchmark your systems without LAN and with LAN, but when benchmarking using Wi-Fi, you have to start taking the results with a grain of salt and possible involve the Wi-Fi guy so you rule out the wireless part some other way.
Now, back to your 54MB/sec:
If you copy between shares, using your laptop, then the data goes from the FreeNAS to your laptop and back to the FreeNAS, so your network connectivity matters as well, and in the best of the cases you will see Gigabit speeds cut by half, because you are using the same wire to read the date AND write the data, thats why I said at the beginning of this post that your 54MB/sec looks ok (thats around 125MB/sec divided by two, minus the overhead of the LAN, OS and such), but only if you are copying from the FreeNAS to the FreeNAS, using your laptop.
If that is what your users will do all the time, then no more tests are needed, but if your users copy from the FreeNAS to the PCs or the other way around, then I suggest you test as explained before, testing first the speed of the laptop and copy files between that and the FreeNAS.
