Slow transfer speeds

[cgethycx]

I have just reciently built a FreeNAS box.
specs:
FreeNAS 8.2.0-BETA3
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Brisbane 2.5GHz
4 x G.SKILL 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
Basicly a Dell E-521 with upgraded ram.
3 x Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARX 2TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s
1 x Western Digital Caviar Black WD2002FAEX 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s

FreeNAS is vanilla and is installed on a 2gb usb. Everything seams to be running just fine. I am trying to move a large amount of data to the box but I am only getting a transfer speed of 9.1 mbps. Other factors to consider: I am running live cd version of linux mint 10 on source computer, data is on external hard drive (usb 2.0), my main volume is setup as a zfs raid-z, all datasets have no size limits, all shares are SMB/CIFS.

I am wanting to say that speeds are slow because the data is transfering from an external drive over the network. Although I am hoping I am wrong and have just set up something wrong. Any input would be great thanks.

 

[ProtoSD]

Your slow speed is definitely because you are transferring from USB, although there are a lot of people experiencing speed issues, those are different. There are some tweaks you can do for CIFS if you're still having problems later, but there's no silver bullet at the moment. Some people get great speeds, others HAD great speeds and don't now, and others just have OK speeds ~20MB/s.

 

[cgethycx]

Well I guess it is good news that I have nothing set up incorrectly but bad news that it is going to take days to move all all of my data to my nas. More good news i should not have to move this much data again.

(answered: Q28 FAQ, LOL)Can I connect an external drive directly to the FreeNAS box and get better speeds for my transfer?

Edit:
Is there a faster sharing method other than CIFS?

 

[ProtoSD]

Edit:
Is there a faster sharing method other than CIFS?

Possibly NFS, but CIFS can actually work pretty well for some people. I can get 95MB/s on my little Atom system IF the data is cached, for example, I start a transfer, stop it, then start it again. If I restart the transfer from the beginning, everything up to the point that I canceled goes FAST and then drops to ~45-50MB/s. There is something that needs to be tuned somewhere, but I'm having trouble finding it. Other people find it works great without any changes. There are several threads of discussions on the topic, but not any definitive answers.

 

[StephenFry]

Why not do a little test and copy some data from the USB drive to a PC that has a Gbit connection to your FreeNAS and copy it from there. Then you should see different speeds.

We seem to have VERY similar hardware and by coincidence, at this very moment, I'm actually copying to my NAS from a USB drive connected to a PC, and the maximum speed is 30MB/s on CIFS, but that's limited by the speed of the USB-to-PC connection. My vanilla install gets 60MB/s easily from Windows (Samba/CIFS) and fills the Gbit from Linux (NFS).