Freenas Help

[mbf123]

I recently setup FreeNas on a old Pentium 4, 1 GB ram, and 2 80 GB western digital hard drives. with a hard connection and a built in NIC.

I had heard that on a local network you could get similar write speeds to a fire wire 800, (or at least way faster then a external drive with usb 2.0.

But no that everything is set up and running, samba (windows) is only getting about 1.5 to 2 mb per second down and up.

This is not good, I have messed around with all the different settings, but no significant change.

I have a 1 mb per second internet speed, so i will not be using ftp, and the local network should be affected by my crap internet anyway.

What should i do to get my samba going 10 plus? or will it also be like that?

Also in the web interface it says I have only 66 GB of usable space and 72 GB total, yet all my config files and the OS are in the flash drive (which is 4GB).

Why is this?

Thanks alot!!!!

[mbf123]

EDIT: Does NFS have something to do with this?

[ascorbic]

First, what is yoru network set up? Are you on a gigabit lan? What sort of router/switch are you on?

Also just as an FYI, for local transfers (ie not to the itnernet) your internet speed will not affect your NAS speeds.

[mbf123]

100 mbps, thats what's in the box, and its a buffulo router?

Is that what your asking?

btw what is the average NAS speed?

Edited July 1, 2010 by mbf123

[ascorbic]

100 mbps, thats what's in the box, and its a buffulo router?

Is that what your asking?

btw what is the average NAS speed?

Close enough I suppose.

Average NAS speed will vary widely depending on hardware, files being transfered and a bunch of other things.

Here is what you need to understand though, 100 mbps is megaBITS which is 12.5 megabytes. When you say 10 plus I am guessing you want 10 megabytes/sec, that will never happen with your current set up. TCP overhead alone can lop off almost 30% of your connection speed which would bring your theoretical max down to 8.75 megabytes/sec.

I'd guess 2-3 megabytes/sec is probably the max you'd see. Try transfering a good sized 5 gig file for a test. Lots of small files will take longer than one big file.

What are your FreeNAS settings?

Edited July 1, 2010 by ascorbic

[mbf123]

I have been testing with a 1 GB movie.

Where can i print off my current settings? Do i need to type them out?

Could i put a "gigabyte" thing in my box, to make it go faster?

Edited July 1, 2010 by mbf123

[ascorbic]

I have been testing with a 1 GB movie.

Where can i print off my current settings? Do i need to type them out?

What are the speeds of your hard drives on both the client machine and FreeNAS machine.

I am not sure about printing out FreeNAS settings, I used it probably a year ago now.

[ascorbic]

Could i put a "gigabyte" thing in my box, to make it go faster?

This cracked me up a little.

In a word, No.

Your box could have a 10 gigbyte "thing" and it would still probably perform the same. Your entire network needs to be gigbit if you want to see faster speeds. That means the FreeNAS box as well as your buffalo router.

But gigabit alone will not guarentee faster transfer speeds. There are lots of small factors all over that affect network performance.

[Infiltrator]

Close enough I suppose.

Average NAS speed will vary widely depending on hardware, files being transfered and a bunch of other things.

Here is what you need to understand though, 100 mbps is megaBITS which is 12.5 megabytes. When you say 10 plus I am guessing you want 10 megabytes/sec, that will never happen with your current set up. TCP overhead alone can lop off almost 30% of your connection speed which would bring your theoretical max down to 8.75 megabytes/sec.

I'd guess 2-3 megabytes/sec is probably the max you'd see. Try transfering a good sized 5 gig file for a test. Lots of small files will take longer than one big file.

What are your FreeNAS settings?

What can you do to increase the transfer speeds and reduce the overhead? Raid, gigabit, a better os I guess.

Edited July 2, 2010 by Infiltrator

[wh1t3 and n3rdy]

I get about 1.5MB/s over wifi to my FreeNAS box.

[ascorbic]

What can you do to increase the transfer speeds and reduce the overhead? Raid, gigabit, a better os I guess.

The easiest are probably:

Raid on the NAS box with SCSI or 10k rpm drives

Gigabit every where using Intel NICs (no realtek)

Jumbo Frames enabled on the router/switch

Edited July 2, 2010 by ascorbic

[mbf123]

I get about 1.5MB/s over wifi to my FreeNAS box.

Someone just told me that your internet does not affect local network transfers.

?

[ascorbic]

Someone just told me that your internet does not affect local network transfers.

?

This is correct.

[Infiltrator]

The easiest are probably:

Raid on the NAS box with SCSI or 10k rpm drives

Gigabit every where using Intel NICs (no realtek)

Jumbo Frames enabled on the router/switch

What speeds can you get with x4 10rpm hdd, set up in raid 5 in FreeNas?

[Wetwork]

I have a FreeNAS on 3.0 Dual core with 2 gig of ram on a gig network with 6 - 1 TB HDD 7200RPM with a RAID5 setup and the best transfer speeds that i am seeing is somewhere between 7 - 9 mbps. This is due to the limitations of the FreeNAS o/s to be able to do asynchronous read/writes from the NIC card to the Drives and then back. This issue is being addressed according to the Freenas forums and they hope to resolve it with the next release (god knows when that will be considering that it was several YEARS in between this current version and the previous)

My best advice is either deal with it or go forth and spend money on a REAL NAS because with your setup your not going to be getting any better with your present config

[ascorbic]

What speeds can you get with x4 10rpm hdd, set up in raid 5 in FreeNas?

I don't know about FreeNAS specifically but with my home setup running openfiler I have noticed the limiting factor is my desktop, it isn't quick enough to feed openfiler but I usually get around 60mb/sec transfer rates.