Super-slow NAS speeds?

[angry aussie]

Hey all,
a week ago, as a school project, I decided to make a NASBOX.
All went well, I have the server up and running with FreeNAS 8.3.1.
I have 1 issue... The transfer speeds are HORRIBLE.
Transferring a 2GB movie TO the server, speeds are from 3MB/S to 0KB/S.
Reading from the server is a little better, from 4MB/S to 0KB/S.
I think something is bottlenecking my server.

My setup -
Acer Veriton D461 Motherboard
4GB DDR2 RAM
Intel Core 2 DUO 3.00 GHz CPU
450W PSU
RJ-45 Ethernet
1X 5200rpm 2TB HDD
1X 7200rpm 1TB HDD

Router -
Technicolor TG587n v3
4x 1 gigabit LAN ports (NAS is plugged into this)
802.11n (2.4GHz)

Hard drives are SATA2, but that's still at LEAST 300 MB/s read/write.
They are on 60-minute spindown, 2 hour standby. Power level 1.

I transfer/read movies from my Samsun Galaxy S3, and laptop.
Whether I'm reading/transferring through 3 walls, or right next to the router, it makes no difference.
I'm honestly at my wits end. I know that this is possibly the lowest hardware for a NAS, but it's the best I could convince mum and dad to let me buy. (All of the hard ware, apart from the router and hard drives, were for sale as a whole computer from my school for $50.)
Would more RAM make this better? To improve, probably $20 would be the max to make performance better.
Sorry for the huge question, but it would be awesome if I could see better performance.

 

[jgreco]

Use "iperf" to determine whether you are having a network problem or performance problems on the NAS.

If you can get good speeds using "iperf", then we might be able to help you. If you cannot get good speeds with iperf, your problem is your network, and you need to sort that out.

SATA2 does not mean your hard drive speed is "at LEAST 300MB/s". A contemporary SATA 4TB hard drive like the new Seagates transfer at about 150-160MB/sec average. A reasonable point is that the transfer speed of the hard drive means that SATA2 vs SATA3 is not a bottleneck; a modern hard drive on SATA3 isn't really any faster than on SATA2. Just a little bit less latency maybe. Could result in a minor speed increase, but nothing big.

ZFS isn't going to do well on your system, so if you want to use that machine, and you can prove that the network isn't a problem, start over and use UFS. You should wind up with a very pleasant and responsive NAS.

 

[angry aussie]

Awesome, thanks. I'll use iperf when I'm home from work tonight. By the way, it's using UFS. thanks! I'll post my reply tonight :)

 

[jgreco]

If you're using UFS, then your problem is very likely your network. That starts with your network card, which for a machine from Acer might very well be a Realtek or even worse, and moves on to the wireless aspects. iperf will help sort that out.