Slow xfer speeds on gigabit network

[dcarrington01]

Morning All, recently upgraded to FreeNAS 9.2.1.5 and got ll my shares and volumes created and up and running. I am currently transferring data over to the NAS box and the speeds are about 2MB/Sec. I have googled slow connections and the like and nothing seemed current.
I went into the reporting section and didn't see anything above the 5% mark. My system is below.
I saw a couple various postings on people adjusting the network buffers, but have yet to do, or find out much on that in the latest version of FreeNas. Any help or ideas would be appreciated, I gots lots to xfer!

System Board: EVGA nVida 780i
CPU: Intel Core 2 Extreme X9650
RAM: 8GB
Drives: 7, WD Enterprise 4TB SATA drives in RAIDZ3, with std LZ4 compression

 

[cyberjock]

Uh.. you have 28TB of raw data with 8GB of RAM... upgrade your RAM is a good place to start.

 

[cyberjock]

There's lots of things that can cause slow transfer rates. Bad disk(s), bad networking, inadequate hardware. Poke around the forums to see how to do check your disks for problems.

 

[dcarrington01]

Thanks for the quick reply! With the hard drives I only have 14th usable (lol). Unfortunately that mobo will only support 8th of ram max. I have Freenas lag up on a 16Gb flash drive.
I have checked the various connections and router configurations and transferring files machine to machine is crazy faster.
Would teaming the NICs help, or is that even possible in FreeNas?

 

[cyberjock]

Teaming won't help. 2MB/sec means something is wrong. No reason to add more complexity. My guess is a bad hard drive as that often causes absolutely pitiful speeds you are seeing. But, if you don't have enough RAM you can also have those terrible numbers. To be honest, you're *going* to have to up your RAM to get good speeds on a pool of that size. So you need to start planning your upgrade strategy.

 

[Ericloewe]

Your hardware is woefully inadequate. An NVIDIA chipset is enough for me to declare a machine a lost cause.
As Cyberjock said, you're going to need more RAM anyway: Perfect opportunity to send that NVIDIA chipset back to the caves of hell that spawned it.

 

[dcarrington01]

Your hardware is woefully inadequate. An NVIDIA chipset is enough for me to declare a machine a lost cause.
As Cyberjock said, you're going to need more RAM anyway: Perfect opportunity to send that NVIDIA chipset back to the caves of hell that spawned it.

LOL thanks for the replies. The hardware was from my wife's old computer I built up (was a facebook machine), Figured FreeNAS was much more useful than facebook.......

 

[Ericloewe]

LOL thanks for the replies. The hardware was from my wife's old computer I built up (was a facebook machine), Figured FreeNAS was much more useful than facebook.......

Certainly, but you'll have to scale back on the storage or upgrade (which ends up meaning whole new system, unfortunately).

Are you running a PCI NIC? I don't remember anyone who got Nvidia's GbE adapter to work with FreeNAS (A friend once wasted a whole afternoon before he got one working with Ubuntu, so you can imagine the level of driver support those things have).

 

[dcarrington01]

Certainly, but you'll have to scale back on the storage or upgrade (which ends up meaning whole new system, unfortunately).

Are you running a PCI NIC? I don't remember anyone who got Nvidia's GbE adapter to work with FreeNAS (A friend once wasted a whole afternoon before he got one working with Ubuntu, so you can imagine the level of driver support those things have).

Nope, I am running the on-board motherboard NIC(s) . I can stream some short videos wirelessly from the NAS, without too much lag so far. I'll have to see how the movies actually work ont eh big TV (once I get them loaded up on to the NAS in the right format)

 

[Ericloewe]

Nope, I am running the on-board motherboard NIC(s) . I can stream some short videos wirelessly from the NAS, without too much lag so far. I'll have to see how the movies actually work ont eh big TV (once I get them loaded up on to the NAS in the right format)

As a stopgap measure, you might want to try an Intel NIC. It may help solve your problem.

 

[c32767a]

Nope, I am running the on-board motherboard NIC(s) . I can stream some short videos wirelessly from the NAS, without too much lag so far. I'll have to see how the movies actually work ont eh big TV (once I get them loaded up on to the NAS in the right format)

can you post output from an ifconfig -a and netstat -m?

Next step would be to get iperf for your client PC and try some iperf tests between your FreeNAS box and client PC. that'll at least tell you if the network layer is capable of better than 2Mb/s.


Also... Intel based gig cards are inexpensive.. You really should consider grabbing one before sinking a lot of time into troubleshooting this.

 

[dcarrington01]

can you post output from an ifconfig -a and netstat -m?

Next step would be to get iperf for your client PC and try some iperf tests between your FreeNAS box and client PC. that'll at least tell you if the network layer is capable of better than 2Mb/s.


Also... Intel based gig cards are inexpensive.. You really should consider grabbing one before sinking a lot of time into troubleshooting this.

I ordered up an Intel card form newegg, so it should be here this week. After I get it installed, I'll run some tests to see what it does. Thanks for all the info!
On a side not though. Say I do replace the Mobo and RAM with some newer hardware. Will FreeNAS still see/utilize all my data on my drives or would I have to xfer that first?

 

[dcarrington01]

OK, so speaking of hardware, I was able to scrounge up an HP mobo with processor. DO you guys think that the setup below would be better than the current nForce 780i board and QX9650?
XW4600 motherboard (X38 chipset)
Core 2 Duo Q8400 CPU (64-bit, 3GHZ CPU)
8GB DDR2-800 RAM (up-gradable to 16GB, DDR2 is stupid expensive now!)
Intel PCI Gigabit LAN

 

[Ericloewe]

I ordered up an Intel card form newegg, so it should be here this week. After I get it installed, I'll run some tests to see what it does. Thanks for all the info!
On a side not though. Say I do replace the Mobo and RAM with some newer hardware. Will FreeNAS still see/utilize all my data on my drives or would I have to xfer that first?

If you move the drives and the boot drive, everything should just work.

OK, so speaking of hardware, I was able to scrounge up an HP mobo with processor. DO you guys think that the setup below would be better than the current nForce 780i board and QX9650?
XW4600 motherboard (X38 chipset)
Core 2 Duo Q8400 CPU (64-bit, 3GHZ CPU)
8GB DDR2-800 RAM (up-gradable to 16GB, DDR2 is stupid expensive now!)
Intel PCI Gigabit LAN

It's certainly less dubious than an Nvidia chipset... But for the price of the extra 8GB DDR2, you might come close to a new system.

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah, that system isn't much better. Considering the cost of the RAM upgrades for DDR2 you could build a new system for only slightly more money that uses DDR3.

I'm not convinced this is a networking problem. Networking problems at that speed is usually a sign of using wifi. If you are upset that you aren't getting great speeds over Wifi you shouldn't be using FreeNAS. Anyway, at those speeds it's almost always some kind of disk related problem.

 

[dcarrington01]

Hmph. SO I am going to upgrade my hardware LOL
I ordered a AMD FX-6300, with a Gigabyte mobo, and will be running 32gb of PC3-12500 RAM
The NAS is going to be more powerful than my desktop........

 

[gpsguy]

Your CPU supports ECC RAM. Did you buy ECC RAM and a motherboard that supports ECC RAM?

I ordered a AMD FX-6300, with a Gigabyte mobo, and will be running 32gb of PC3-12500 RAM