Spankin Noob question - Slow Transfer Speed

[mobius]

Been lurking for a little while, couldn't really find a good solid answer to my question. I'm debating building a FreeNAS box vs getting a ReadyNAS from Netgear. I'm not a huge fan of a lot of maintenance, but I'm not an illiterate on all things PC... Anyway, Just for a demo I set-up a basic FreeNAS on a computer I have sitting around doing nothing. It's a mediocre machine really, but it was just for testing purposes. Basic set-up is a Athlon II X2 220, 2GB RAM, 500GB drive, etc.. Anyway, got the set-up all done and imported the drive (it's NTFS and until I commit I don't want to reformat yet), set-up the share and mounted the drive on my Win7 machine. So all that for the simple question.

I did some test file transfers and was absolutely blown away by the speed. I mean DANG, fast. BUT, when I try to transfer any file over say 15MB, it throttles down to maybe 200k/s and takes for ever. I have several files that are pushing 10GB each. Or more. SO, is the speed bottle neck my RAM? If I had say 8GB would it be faster? or is this just the nature of the FreeNAS system to throttle large files. It's not affecting smaller files at all. I can transfer 6MB files all day long at blazing speed. (Which is good for MP3's.) BUT I have HD videos too and I'm thinking at this rate it's gonna take 2-3 years to transfer all my files. j/k. Bottom line, would upping to 8GB help? OR not?

Thanks for your consideration, great little product you got here.

 

[b1ghen]

If you are using NTFS I would guess that is your problem, ZFS is the way to go on FreeNas. NTFS support is dismal at best, I think it's only there so you can import your data, not use it for sharing files.

2GB is like you say a little low for ZFS though, minimum recommended is 4GB but it can run pretty ok with less if you tweak it a little.
There is no penalty running large files with FreeNas, many people (me included) are using FreeNas with large videofiles with great success and speeds.

 

[mobius]

If you are using NTFS I would guess that is your problem, ZFS is the way to go on FreeNas. NTFS support is dismal at best, I think it's only there so you can import your data, not use it for sharing files.

2GB is like you say a little low for ZFS though, minimum recommended is 4GB but it can run pretty ok with less if you tweak it a little.
There is no penalty running large files with FreeNas, many people (me included) are using FreeNas with large videofiles with great success and speeds.

So you think it's less about the hardware and more about the file system right now? I have a blank drive I can format and run a test on, just to see what happens.

My plan is this. If this works out well enough, I'm planning to moderately update this unused computer to make it more useful. I'm not going to sink a lot of money into this project, cause I can buy a ReadyNAS for $150. SO, my plan is to update the motherboard, pick-up a mid-size tower (it's currently a small form factor case), and add some memory. I can do all that for under $100. I have 5-1TB drives just itching to be RAID'd up. BUT, I run a lot of video editing and constantly have to transfer 2GB files to my current server. Right now, it takes only a minute or so. I can't have it taking 2 hours for each file.

 

[b1ghen]

So you think it's less about the hardware and more about the file system right now? I have a blank drive I can format and run a test on, just to see what happens.

My plan is this. If this works out well enough, I'm planning to moderately update this unused computer to make it more useful. I'm not going to sink a lot of money into this project, cause I can buy a ReadyNAS for $150. SO, my plan is to update the motherboard, pick-up a mid-size tower (it's currently a small form factor case), and add some memory. I can do all that for under $100. I have 5-1TB drives just itching to be RAID'd up. BUT, I run a lot of video editing and constantly have to transfer 2GB files to my current server. Right now, it takes only a minute or so. I can't have it taking 2 hours for each file.

Yes I doubt it's the hardware that is creating these problems for you.

Just for giggles I have an older system running FreeNas 8 x64 on pretty lame old hardware (Pentium D 930, 2GB RAM, single 2TB Green HDD using ZFS) and I transferred 2 1GB files (didn't have a 2GB one handy) to it and it took 40 seconds, so about 50 MB/s. I am sure I am limited by the old crappy integrated Realtek NIC in that box.
Btw, if you have a 64 bit cpu make sure you use the x64 version of FreeNas even if you don't have more than 4GB of RAM.

 

[mobius]

Thanks. I did use the x64 version. You have really piqued my curiosity. I'm not at home right now, so I can't plug in the spare drive and play around... BUT I could reformat the one that's in there remotely and play.... There isn't anything on it just a totally clean install of Win7.... Hmmm.... What the heck. I'm gonna try it and see what happens.

UPDATE:

Wow. OK, NTFS sucks with this set up. NBD, just really shocked at how poor the speed is. I reformatted the drive to UFS (want to up the mem before I go with ZFS) and the bottle neck is gone. I'm only getting 30MB/s or so, but that's a lot better than 200kb/s. Thanks!

UPDATE 2:

Wasn't even thinking about it, but my previous test was using an external drive connected via USB to the computer. SO I was bottle necked by USB before. Took a 4GB file off an eSata connected drive and re-tested. running about 50MB/s now. That will definitely work.

 

[mobius]

Final update: I ran a test copying a 1GB file from my striped RAID on my main PC to the FreeNAS share. 97MB/s sustained. Faster than I've ever transferred any file to my server. I'm more than happy with 50MB/s, 90+ is ridiculous to me. I'm sold on FreeNAS now.

 

[dazang]

I love stories like this. It is so similar to mine. Once I used FreeNAS I was stupified by the speed. I think FreeNAS is quite possibly the most useful out-of-the-box BSD/Linux distro I have ever seen. I am definitely a fan!