Transfer Speed Issue When Transfer Media Data

[webitguy]

Hey guys,
I just setup FreeNAS for the first time tonight so I am by no means an expert on it.

I am using a newer desktop machine booting the USB with FreeNAS. I am currently only using one 2TB external HDD for my data. It had data on it but I ended up wiping it.

What I want to accomplish is this... I have multiple WDTV Live Plus machines in my home and I own about 6 external HDDs total. At least 4 of them are dedicated to movies, mostly 1080 mkvs. I would like these to live on my network so I dont have to duplicate the media per tv.

I was able to watch a sample.wmv file that I put on my newly added volume, so its shared and I added a user. So all that seems fine.

The problem Im having is now Im up to the point of putting data back on my drive (going to stick to just one until I get this working smoothly) and its soooo slow. I can only see the volume while shared. I cant see the drive anymore when plugging it into my windows 7 machine (my laptop), its there in computer management but no drive letter.

Ok, I know I need to upgrade some of my equipment cause some of it (hubs, NIC, etc) is a little aged, but is it normal that I only get 700-800KB/second when copying data back to that new share?

Ive gotten to be missing something. Hardware upgrades are coming hopefully some this weekend. PC is fine (6gigs of ram). So do i need gigabit NIC, gigabit router / hubs to make this speed up? I have read somewhere about cat5e... does that matter?

Can someone help? Ultimately I would like to control my media remotely via my tablet... play this file to this source...

Also is there another way to put the data on the external drive now that its set up as a cifs. Also I noticed when viewing the drive via Computer Management > Storage on my Win7 machine ... it showed 2gigs portion and then the rest of my drive.

Any help would be greatly appreciated... Im headed to bed tonight on this one... its got me beat right now. :)

Ken

 

[cyberjock]

Your post is a little fragmented. I'm not sure exactly what your setup was where you achieved 700-800kb/sec. I have a friend that has a WDTV and here's what he did.

FreeNAS Server with CIFS shared through his LAN. His LAN is all 100Mbit or 1000Mbit. Note that you should try to have a backbone on your network of Gb if possible. If your server is only 100Mb out and you try to do multiple streams you can expect there may be problems. He has Gb in the basement and 100Mbit on the ground level. All of the ports in the house connect to a 24 port switch in his basement. He only has 1 WDTV, but he could theoretically have multiple WDTVs like you have.

His media is all in 1 folder, and he simply browses to it on his WDTV and watches whatever he wants.

In your case, you have a few things working against you:

1. USB is evil for storing data. It's great as a temporary(long enough to copy your data to your zpool) but not much else. The forum has posts of lots of people who have tried creating a zpool of multiple USB drives, and it almost always ends badly. They lose power, someone accidentally unplugs 1/2 the drives, etc. There's just too many external wires to give room for mistakes. In short, you want a ZFS pool made of internal drives. You wouldn't unplug an internal drive while the computer is booted up and working, so why would you set yourself up for a mistake equivalent to that with USB.

2. I strongly recommend you get a gigabit NIC and gigabit switch that your network connects to. Theoretically you should be able to stream 5-7 movies simultaneously through a single 100Mbit NIC(your server in this case) but the potential exists to hit limits depending on the bitrate of the videos and such. You'll need to look at where your bottlenecks are and try not to stream more than probably 2-3 movies through any single 100Mb cable at the same time. If you are truly using a hub instead of a switch, you can give up on this whole pipe dream right now. A hub just won't cut it.

3. Not sure how you can control your media remotely via tablet. If WDTV has that feature I'm unaware of it. I don't own one myself and only played with my friends' for 5 minutes.

4. Your cabling 'should' be Cat5e or Cat6. If it isn't well, it should be trashed and replaced. I haven't seen anything below cat5e installed anywhere in probably 10 years. If your cables suck then don't expect good performance.

5. I'm confused about you saying it has no drive letter. If the drive was formatted in FreeNAS it will be in UFS or ZFS. Neither of those work with Windows. If you format the drive in Windows you will lose whatever files are on the drive.

You should read my noobie's guide(link in the sig). Just from what you've posted you know what you want. Now you need to do alot of research(probably more than you will want to do) and figure out how to get what you want. You also need to consider how much all of this stuff will cost ;). Buying the internal drives for your zpool will almost certainly be the most expensive part of this whole project. 3TB drives are the "sweet spot" for price right now.

 

[webitguy]

1) Yes I have 4x 2TB external HDDs I would like to use. Note taken that external can be a hassle, but aren't saying external wont work are you?

2) This is where my problem is Im sure. Yes I do have a HUB ... probably 15 years old or so... don't laugh. My network is 6meg dsl in my office that goes to a switch (not sure which type, but somewhat newer, Im at work so cant check), then a line goes from there to my living room to this fossil hub. From this mini network I have one line to my WDTV, one line to my freeNAS box. Back when I bought this thing I dont think I ever heard of a switch... lol. My NIC is probably only 10/100, which im guessing needs to be upgraded too on my pc.

3) I saw someone do something similar to what I want to do on youtube with Twonky. I will investigate this further.

4) Im not sure about my cabling. Its been there for a several years. I will start by upgrading my NIC and switches and then see if I need to do more with the cables.

5) This was me saying that I setup the drive as a ZFS drive in FreeNAS and I can see it on the network but due to the speed issues i tried connecting it directly to my laptop (Windows 7) via USB, but it doesn't allocate it all. Its seen only in Manage Disks in computer management. It shows the 2TB as a 2Gig portion, then the rest of the drive, no drive letter. So I guess you cant get Windows to see this drive type directly. I was asking was there another way to put data back on the drive aside from the slow copy speeds.


As of this morning, I tried playing a 1080 mkv and it played. It played a sec, stuttered, played a sec, stuttered, the whole way, but it did play. It was completely unwatchable at this moment though.

Thanks for the detailed reply. Again my goal is to be able to put my media on my network so any tv or any other device for that matter can access it without being directly connected to it like im having to do now with my WDTV connected via USB to my drives. If there is a better way to accomplish this please let me know.

Ken

 

[cyberjock]

1) Yes I have 4x 2TB external HDDs I would like to use. Note taken that external can be a hassle, but aren't saying external wont work are you?

Will it "work"? Depends. If you want good speeds, probably not. Your stuttering may be related to you using USB. USB was never meant to be a method of transporting tons of data. If you want reliability, definitely "no" based on prior usage in the forum. I don't think you can run SMART tests on USB drives either. Don't come asking for help if all hell breaks lose if you are using USB drives. It's just a major disaster waiting to happen. It's like putting rocket fuel in your car and saying that since your engine ran for 2 mins with it it'll be fine. Sure, it may work right now, but you have no idea how bad of an idea it is. I've gone so far as to warn people. If someone chooses to do it despite all of the evidence that it's a bad idea that's totally on you. Don't expect me to shed a tear if you lose your data. It really makes no sense to me that people want ZFS for reliability, then go and deliberately choose an inherently unreliable method to store their data.

2) This is where my problem is Im sure. Yes I do have a HUB ... probably 15 years old or so... don't laugh. My network is 6meg dsl in my office that goes to a switch (not sure which type, but somewhat newer, Im at work so cant check), then a line goes from there to my living room to this fossil hub. From this mini network I have one line to my WDTV, one line to my freeNAS box. Back when I bought this thing I dont think I ever heard of a switch... lol. My NIC is probably only 10/100, which im guessing needs to be upgraded too on my pc.

Yeah, you need switches everywhere, and nothing on your network can be slower than 100Mbit. Often movies are 5-15Mbit/sec, so you can see how 10Mbit link won't work out.

4) Im not sure about my cabling. Its been there for a several years. I will start by upgrading my NIC and switches and then see if I need to do more with the cables.

Good idea. :)

5) This was me saying that I setup the drive as a ZFS drive in FreeNAS and I can see it on the network but due to the speed issues i tried connecting it directly to my laptop (Windows 7) via USB, but it doesn't allocate it all. Its seen only in Manage Disks in computer management. It shows the 2TB as a 2Gig portion, then the rest of the drive, no drive letter. So I guess you cant get Windows to see this drive type directly. I was asking was there another way to put data back on the drive aside from the slow copy speeds.

Yeah, ZFS is pretty much Unix/Linux only. Microsoft doesn't support it at all because they want you to use their proprietary format NTFS. :P

As of this morning, I tried playing a 1080 mkv and it played. It played a sec, stuttered, played a sec, stuttered, the whole way, but it did play. It was completely unwatchable at this moment though.

That is probably your network speeds, but it could be related to USB. USB can only transfer at max 30MB/sec, and with significant latency compared to SATA and IDE. You may find that using USB just won't cut it. But I guess you'll find out.