Slow speeds via Powerline Adapter

[Makaveli6103]

I have my Freenas connect via powerline adapter in the other room. I am only getting around 5-10MB/s on my HTPC and 45-60MB/s on my iMac that is connect to it via a switch. Is this the powerline's fault or something else.

Freenas -> 5 port switch -> iMac
Freenas -> 5 port switch -> powerline adapter -> powerline adapter -> Netgear WNDR3700 -> HTPC

 

[cyberjock]

Powerline does suck pretty badly. It's great for surfing the net and streaming one movie. Try to do more than that and you are looking at poor performance. I haven't used or seen anyone use powerline firsthand, but depending on the model(Newegg shows some that claim 85-500Mpbs theoretical) that only converts to 8MB-62.5MB/sec. Again that is theoretical. I'd expect actual performance to be something slower(perhaps MUCH slower).

In my opinion, powerline is great for situations where wifi performance would be good but you can't use wifi because of walls or distance.

 

[Makaveli6103]

I should have mentioned that I am using the Netgear XAVB5101 Powerline Nano500 which is rated at 500MB/s but we all know it is not that fast. But according to SmallNetBulder's review, (here) they are getting much faster speeds from powerline to powerline adapter.

 

[jgreco]

What sort of iperf numbers do you get?

Powerline is going to be finicky about many things, but fundamentally you have to remember that you're going to be introducing some latency at a minimum, and maybe some packet loss -> retransmission delays, and that's not going to make for great performance. Try various things, be careful what you have that might be creating powerline noise, see if you can get the units on the same circuit, or you could try rubbing some cheetah blood on the units.