Best way to browse media-heavy volumes from a PC?

[Nerevarine]

I've been using regular explorer on my Win 7 PC to browse my NAS volumes, since I use them basically like attached storage most of the time. Some of the folders are really heavy/slow to load though, since Windows won't index network drives. The folders with lots of media like pics or videos, are so slow to browse that it really is starting to get frustrating.

I'm not using spin down currently, all drives are set to maximum performance. And my actual transfer rates are very close to my 1 Gbit local limit.

What can I do to make this better? Do I need some sort of faster dedicated cache, as in SSD? Also, are there settings in Windows (or FreeNAS) that can make this better? There really is no way to force indexing right? Is there other software that is better to use for this, like some sort of file browser with its own indexing/thumbnail service?

I don't know if it would be possible, but since my drives are always online and mounted on my PC, I would like a piece of software that could save like a local image of the files on my SSD main drive on my PC, and use that for browsing, detect any changes made on the actual volumes, and simply load any non-cached data when needed. And ofc simply open the actual files from the network volume when opened. Is this impossible or am I missing something? Like would it take up huge amounts of space locally to simply store a browsable index/thumbnail type thing?

And last thing, I have thumbnails turned off for network drives in Windows atm, because of another thing. Would this slow it doen even more, since it would have to create new thumbs temporarily or something when I browse those folders?

 

[anodos]

Post the following:

• Server hardware specs
• Protocol used to share
• Version of FreeNAS

Adding an L2ARC will probably not help. Adding more ARC will almost always help, but there may be some configuration changes to CIFS (if that's what you are using) that you can make to improve performance depending on the situation.

 

[Nerevarine]

Built my NAS using left over parts from my previous main PC.

Gigabyte P55A-UD4 mobo
Intel i5 750 @ 2.66GHz
4GB DDR3 RAM (might be a bit low?)
Gigabit built in ethernet, 4 HDDs, 3 seagate, 1,2 and 4 TB. 1 WD 2 TB. Three of them were USB external drives until I took them apart for the NAS. 4 separate ZFS volumes, one for each drive.

Using CIFS. FreeNAS v 9.2.1.7.

 

[anodos]

Built my NAS using left over parts from my previous main PC.

Gigabyte P55A-UD4 mobo
Intel i5 750 @ 2.66GHz
4GB DDR3 RAM (might be a bit low?)
Gigabit built in ethernet, 4 HDDs, 3 seagate, 1,2 and 4 TB. 1 WD 2 TB. Three of them were USB external drives until I took them apart for the NAS. 4 separate ZFS volumes, one for each drive.

Using CIFS. FreeNAS v 9.2.1.7.

Your best bet is to bring your system up to at least 8GB RAM.

 

[cyberjock]

You don't even meet our minimum hardware requirements, let alone recommended requirements.

Yeah, don't be upset about performance (or reliability) when you don't even meet the minimums!

 

[Nerevarine]

I'm not upset with FreeNAS...did I say I was? Besides, I have tried to read up on specs, and many seem divided as to what is needed for what. I'm running one plugin (Plex), and there is only ever 1 user at a time accessing anything, so demands aren't that high on all accounts. And I do get very nice transfer rates, so I thought that might be enough for me. But as I'm still very new at this I'm still learning.

What I was mainly asking was if there is no way to index contents on a network drive on a Windows PC.... That would have nothing to do with either my server hardware specs or FreeNAS. But I will try to find some cheap RAM to test out and see if that helps my issue. I appreciate that tip.

But about indexing and thumbs? Are there any workarounds? Other programs? Settings worth checking?

 

[ewhac]

What @anodos said. No amount of cutesy caching hacks on the Windows side is going to change the fact that your FreeNAS box is exhibiting all the symptoms of being resource-starved, and probably thrashing its poor little brain out. Get your FreeNAS up to at least 8GiB of RAM (preferably more, since you're also running Plex). Once FreeNAS isn't resource-starved, check subjective performance again and, if things are still sluggish, then you can begin thinking about additional performance tweaks.

 

[Nerevarine]

Oki dokes, will start with that. Thanks.