Tenda TEL 9901G

[srhubs]

Can you please help a newbie?

I've converted an old AMD 3000+ with an MSI MS 6741 motherboard and 2GB of RAM into a NAS as a bit of a project to stop getting borred (much more fun than buying one!). The motherboard only has a 100 Mbps internal NIC, so I bought a cheap Tenda TEL9901G Gigabit NIC to see if I could get better transfer rates.
The Tenda NIC seems to be working, but at very, very low speeds. Does anyone know if this NIC is fully supported or what I can do to speed thing up? I've read throught the other posts, but can't find anything to help.

Thanks in advance,

SRHubs

 

[gpsguy]

Had I replaced my NIC, I would have used an Intel pro/1000. Fully supported & recommended for FreeNAS. In OEM packaging, the cost is about $30 USD.

The component you didn't tell us about, are your drives. How many, what size, ZFS or UFS. What version of FreeNAS are you running?

If you're using ZFS did you read section 1.4.2 of the manual?

Define low speeds? How are you accessing your system? FTP, CIFS, ...?

 

[srhubs]

Thanks for a quick reply... and sorry for a delay in mine.

I had read a lot about the Intel NICs but figured the Realtek chipset on the Tenda NIC would have been supported. Looks like I was wrong! Anyway, I took your advice and swapped to the Intel NIC and now have far quick read/write times. A rough estimate is 480mbps. Good enough for my needs.

To answer your questions, I stopped using FreeNAS 8 as my motherboard could only take 2 Gb of RAM, and installed FreeNAS 7 on a 2 Gb SD card which is plugged in to a SD to IDE converter. The converter is Master on the primary IDE channel. A DVD RW is Slave. IDE channel 2 has 2 old PATA HDDs. A 60 Gb for documents and a 250 Gb for music, videos and photos. Both are set up for Ext 4 with an AFP share.

The next stage will be to replace the PATAs with a 2Tb SATA.

Thanks again for taking the time to reply.

 

[jgreco]

Realtek chipsets are supported. However, the little hamsters on the wheels that push bits around inside a Realtek chipset sometimes get very tired, so you may see various odd things related to them and performance. Perhaps one of your hamsters is sick or deceased.

The simple fact is that Realtek chipsets are slanted towards extremely cheap desktop connectivity for Windows PC's. As such, their ability to efficiently line up packet after packet and pump them out at full speed for billions of packets without issue is very questionable, while few people would argue that the Intel parts would fail at such a task. There is a reason that you tend to see Intel ethernet chipsets on server grade motherboards and server Ethernet adapters.