Slow Samba Copying

[Randall Schwartzentruber]

I recently picked up a used DNS-321 for a deal and installed ALT-F on it first thing.

I then swapped two 1TB drives into it both full of data and formatted with NTFS filesystems.

Here's the problem:

When copying from a windows computer to the DNS-321, the fastest data-transer speed I'm getting is around 2MB/s, which maxes our the DNS-321 CPU completely for the duration of the copy.

The windows PC I'm copying from has a gigabit NIC, the router is a Linksys E2000 (DD-WRT) and I have gigabit networking enabled on the DNS-321.

Copying from samba shares on the afforementioned windows PC to shares on another windows PC I get transfer speeds of 60-100MB/s.

Copying from the DNS-321 to the Windows PC, I am getting around 8MB/s.

What am I doing wrong?

Is it possible that the NTFS filesystem on the two drives is causing the NAS that much grief?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Randall

[Chris Goerss]

I have had much better speed with samba when using ext4 vs ntfs on my 323. I get around 15mb'ish on a good day depending on what else my 323 is doing at the time. I wouldn't expect to get true gigabit speeds from any of these dns3xx nas units a lot due to the cpu and memory. But that's just my opinion.

Chris

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[João Cardoso]

On Saturday, July 13, 2013 3:06:44 AM UTC+1, Randall Schwartzentruber wrote:

I recently picked up a used DNS-321 for a deal and installed ALT-F on it first thing.

I then swapped two 1TB drives into it both full of data and formatted with NTFS filesystems.

NTFS and FAT are not linux-native filesystems, and are provided mainly for occasional usage with external USB disks or pens, that are mostly NTFS or FAT formatted.

Not being linux-native poses a series of problems, as its file ownership and permissions are very different from the ones used on linux. Worse, there is no NTSF filesystem check and repair on the base firmware, and you would need to install the ntfs-3g-progs Alt-F package, which again poses the ownershipe/permissions problems. I think that most disk-instalable packages will not work properly under that conditions.

Being able to work with NTFS/FAT filesystems as its main filesystems is by itself astonishing, and the vendor's firmware will not allow it by any means.

Thus, it is not advisable to use NTFS or FAT for normal usage.

Is this the reason for the low transfer speeds?

Don't know. Most probably it is not, although I would expect lower performance on non-native filesystems.

Here's the problem:

When copying from a windows computer to the DNS-321, the fastest data-transer speed I'm getting is around 2MB/s, which maxes our the DNS-321 CPU completely for the duration of the copy.

The windows PC I'm copying from has a gigabit NIC, the router is a Linksys E2000 (DD-WRT) and I have gigabit networking enabled on the DNS-321.

Copying from samba shares on the afforementioned windows PC to shares on another windows PC I get transfer speeds of 60-100MB/s.

With a 20x more powerfull CPU (3GHz versus 166MHZ), four or eight CPUs versus one, 120x more cache memory (32KB versus 4/6MB) and 100x more main memory (4/8GB versus 64MB) that would not be very difficult... overall, a modern PC has almost 1000x more horsepower than our little box.

Copying from the DNS-321 to the Windows PC, I am getting around 8MB/s.

That's *very* good, as the 321 is even under-powered that the 323. Write speed is the issue; use ext4 for the filesystem.