file copy soooooooo slow!

[mc2fool]

I did some more testing, using a randomly selected folder of files, and a couple of large video files:

So file size isn't the issue. I think at this point you have to try with another PC, to determine if it's the PC or the NAS. Even a laptop with only 10/100 should do it...

[vrdiver]

So file size isn't the issue. I think at this point you have to try with another PC, to determine if it's the PC or the NAS. Even a laptop with only 10/100 should do it...

I'd forgotten about that - will test that next and report back.

[vrdiver]

I think at this point you have to try with another PC, to determine if it's the PC or the NAS. Even a laptop with only 10/100 should do it...

Added a test to an HDD on my laptop, via ethernet cable attached to the router (pulled cable from NAS, so same as NAS tests except for destination):



So, my conclusion from the laptop test (everything the same except for the target device) is that it's the NAS that is the bottleneck.

As I understand it, the WD Red drives (4 x 3TB, RAID 5) should be capable of much higher throughput, so it's either the NAS firmware (upgraded from RADiator to Readynas OS 6) or the NAS Hardware (CPU or RAM). I've ordered some more RAM, to increase from the current 1Gb to 3.5 / 4Gb (I'm assuming it will have the old 3.5Gb memory limit). The CPU is soldered in, so a bit more of a challenge to swap; might have to think about a replacement NAS (re-use the drives) if all else fails.

Haven't tested the Paragon full and incremental backups either, so work still to be done.

VRD

[Itsallaguess]

As I understand it, the WD Red drives (4 x 3TB, RAID 5) should be capable of much higher throughput, so it's either the NAS firmware (upgraded from RADiator to Readynas OS 6) or the NAS Hardware (CPU or RAM).

NAS hardware will always get in the way of full SATA drive-throughput.

Have you tried disabling full data journalling in your NAS settings to see if it affects your transfer speeds?

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[Infrasonic]

So, my conclusion from the laptop test (everything the same except for the target device) is that it's the NAS that is the bottleneck.

As I understand it, the WD Red drives (4 x 3TB, RAID 5) should be capable of much higher throughput, so it's either the NAS firmware (upgraded from RADiator to Readynas OS 6) or the NAS Hardware (CPU or RAM). I've ordered some more RAM, to increase from the current 1Gb to 3.5 / 4Gb (I'm assuming it will have the old 3.5Gb memory limit). The CPU is soldered in, so a bit more of a challenge to swap; might have to think about a replacement NAS (re-use the drives) if all else fails.

Haven't tested the Paragon full and incremental backups either, so work still to be done.

VRD

Investigate swapping out the motherboard/CPU if there is a good upgrade that will fit the NAS case?
Decent 6 bay isn't going to be cheap.

[vrdiver]

NAS hardware will always get in the way of full SATA drive-throughput.

Have you tried disabling full data journalling in your NAS settings to see if it affects your transfer speeds?

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

In the old OS, yes, I had. In the new version, if I understand it correctly, it uses BTRFS (COW) which I had set to "OFF" for the tests.

[vrdiver]

Investigate swapping out the motherboard/CPU if there is a good upgrade that will fit the NAS case?
Decent 6 bay isn't going to be cheap.

Funnily I was just looking at a MB ( https://www.amazon.co.uk/Supermicro-Mic ... merReviews ) to see what my options were!

Unfortunately, I need to buy 4 external drives to complete my backup strategy, which is going to dent my PC budget, so may have to hold off upgrading the MB and CPU (and RAM) until I have the basics in place.

VRD

[mc2fool]

Added a test to an HDD on my laptop, via ethernet cable attached to the router (pulled cable from NAS, so same as NAS tests except for destination):
:
So, my conclusion from the laptop test (everything the same except for the target device) is that it's the NAS that is the bottleneck.

Maybe, but what you've actually shown is just that PC->NAS is a problem, which you already knew

When I said try with another PC I meant anotherPC->NAS, rather than originalPC->anotherPC, and while what you've done does have some utility I'd definitely try laptopHDD->NAS.

You said the NAS has two ethernet ports, have you tried both? Have you had the NAS do error checks on the drives? Have you done RAID maintenance (or whatever is as such on that NAS)?

Oh, you mentioned a while back that the NAS is out of warranty, so I assume you've had it for a while. So did it used to whizz along fine? Or....

[Infrasonic]

Another option would be to run RAID 10 (mirror + stripe) rather than 5 (if the NAS will do it).
You'll lose the parity of R5 but it will be quicker operationally and if you need to rebuild the raid array after a drive failure.

Used Xeons come up on eBay and elsewhere quite a bit as the data centre's upgrade, as do engineering samples (but that's a bit wild west...)
Real time transcoding then becomes an option, so you could use the NAS for Plex et al for UHD media server work.

[Infrasonic]

https://www.hotukdeals.com/tag/nas

[vrdiver]

What you've actually shown is just that PC->NAS is a problem, which you already knew

When I said try with another PC I meant anotherPC->NAS, rather than originalPC->anotherPC, and while what you've done does have some utility I'd definitely try laptopHDD->NAS.
Fair enough: if the test I did had reported the same slow speed, I'd have had to do it the way you envisaged.

You said the NAS has two ethernet ports, have you tried both? Have you had the NAS do error checks on the drives? Have you done RAID maintenance (or whatever is as such on that NAS)?Yes, yes and yes. I even tried bonding the two ports as well as running with both as separate network connections - no discernable impact on speed, except the bonded test showed slightly lower throughput, so I reset them to independent ports pretty sharpish!

Oh, you mentioned a while back that the NAS is out of warranty, so I assume you've had it for a while. So did it used to whizz along fine? Or....I used to leave stuff running whilst I was away and never noticed too many problems, but since retirement I've been looking at getting rid of lots of little external drives (e.g. 1 for music, one for photos, one for video, one for docs, one for email etc.) which were handy for travel but terrible for sane backup management. I've also moved Time Machine onto the NAS, and started to look at its performance. Long story short: no idea whether the problem was always there - should have checked it years ago

Was doing a bit more reading and noticed some posts on iSCSI. Hadn't really thought about it before, but decided a quick test wouldn't hurt. Setup is software only - no hardware changes required (i.e. runs through router over ethernet cables).

Result added to previous tests:



The iSCSI drive appears as a local drive on my PC, which is not a problem. The transfer speed is x20 faster and looks useful.
So, before I set up iSCSI as my solution, is there anything I should be aware of?

VRD

[vrdiver]

Another option would be to run RAID 10 (mirror + stripe) rather than 5 (if the NAS will do it).
You'll lose the parity of R5 but it will be quicker operationally and if you need to rebuild the raid array after a drive failure.

Used Xeons come up on eBay and elsewhere quite a bit as the data centre's upgrade, as do engineering samples (but that's a bit wild west...)
Real time transcoding then becomes an option, so you could use the NAS for Plex et al for UHD media server work.

I mentioned earlier I need to buy some larger external drives to backup the NAS to as part of my overall backup strategy.

Currently I have 4x3TB in RAID 5, which gives me 8TB effective storage on the NAS (9TB theoretical). I could go to RAID 10 which would drop it to 6TB, but increase the read spead by 33% and double write speed. On the down side, to get more space I'd have to add a pair of disks, which would block me from adding an SSD cache (if that turns out to be of interest).

Doubling the write speed from 3.45 to 6.9GB/s would obviously be an improvement, which might be further improved with an SSD cache and more RAM, but as I posted (just above) the iSCSI solution may make this path either of less interest ('cos iSCSI has given me x20 write speed) or even more interesting if I can double the iSCSI speed!

Replacing the NAS motherboard (you know it's old when I say I've just ordered DDR2 RAM for it) may be another project to look at, maybe after getting my storage and backup plan properly operational.

[Infrasonic]

Well that iSCSI result looks good!

Maybe it's an ethernet networking protocol issue then?
The SATA/SATA source speeds certainly aren't an issue.

Maybe check out the NIC at the source and destination ends and what the protocol variables there are too, see if you can squeeze even more out of it?

[vrdiver]

https://www.hotukdeals.com/tag/nas

Thanks for this. I looked at these guys for HDDs, but found they were significantly more expensive then newegg.com (UK site).
NAS boxes look competitive though.

[Infrasonic]

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-dri ... -for-2017/

Hard Drive Reliability Statistics for Q4 2017
At the end of Q4 2017 Backblaze was monitoring 91,305 hard drives used to store data. For our evaluation we remove from consideration those drives which were used for testing purposes and those drive models for which we did not have at least 45 drives (read why after the chart). This leaves us with 91,243 hard drives. The table below is for the period of Q4 2017.

Cont.

[mc2fool]

What you've actually shown is just that PC->NAS is a problem, which you already knew

When I said try with another PC I meant anotherPC->NAS, rather than originalPC->anotherPC, and while what you've done does have some utility I'd definitely try laptopHDD->NAS.
Fair enough: if the test I did had reported the same slow speed, I'd have had to do it the way you envisaged.

Well I'd say you should still do it anyway...

What you know is that originalPC->NAS has a problem and originalPC->laptopHDD is ok. That doesn't mean that the NAS itself has a problem, it could be the interaction of originalPC and NAS that's the issue. If laptopHDD->NAS is good then you know it's something specific to originalPC->NAS that's the issue, whereas if laptopHDD->NAS is also bad you can look for whatever is common with laptop and originalPC.

Now, the thing that's in common could just be the NAS but given your stonking results with the iSCSI setup it's clearly a software configuration problem...

[mc2fool]

I've also moved Time Machine onto the NAS...

Ah, so you've also got a Mac then...that's very useful, as it's another, and different, implementation.

So, what sort of throughput do you get Mac->NAS?

[vrdiver]

Ah, so you've also got a Mac then...that's very useful, as it's another, and different, implementation.

So, what sort of throughput do you get Mac->NAS?

TM was taking "days" to create a full backup (part of the motivation here is that Mrs VRD has a 1TB SSD and a 2TB HDD in the Mac, both of which are getting full (video editing) and the NAS would let me backup 3TB to one place, unlike the 2TB hard drive I was using. Once backed up* I can be a bit more ruthless in cleaning up / refreshing the Mac).
I've downloaded an iSCSI Initiator for the Mac but not played with it yet - but hoping to see the same improvements!


*By backed up, I mean at least two copies, not including the primary machine file - e.g. NAS plus copy on external HDD. Currently, I'm still with primary file plus single copy.

[vrdiver]

Some comments on Encryption.

Background googling suggested the CPU in my NAS (an Intel Atom D510) doesn't have any encryption support (unlike say, a modern i5 processor). When encrypting on the fly, the CPU would become the bottleneck.

I didn't notice any speed differences between an unencrypted file transfer and using a Veracrypt container mounted on the NAS, both being very slow. The Netstat CPU monitor didn't show CPU as a bottleneck.

iSCSI gave me x20 throughput to the unencrypted target, but once I tried that with Veracrypt, the throughput dropped back to the slow speeds seen before. Not good news, as that meant either backing up to a local disk on the PC and then transferring a large encrypted file, which seems crazy for small incremental backups, or accepting that backups will run very slowly.

HOWEVER!!
The iSCSI mounted disk that exists on the NAS but appears as a local drive on the PC has the option to "Turn BitLocker on" (right click on the drive in File Explorer).
Once BitLocker has been applied, a repeat of the file transfer resulted in a return to the unencrypted speed initially reported.

It seems that iSCSI and BitLocker process locally before copying out to the NAS, whereas VeraCrypt and the standard network access to the LAN end up doing more remote processing, which, in my case, means utilising an older, slower NAS CPU.

So, my backup infrastructure will now utilise BitLocker encrypted iSCSI file systems stored on the NAS, which in turn will be backed up to external HDD for disconnected and off-site storage.

VRD