Gigabit LAN (Wired) COnnection

[JDogg016]

Ok so I am a bit of a newbie at all of this.  Here is my problem.  I have the Almond + router running on the latest firmware.  I have a cat5 cable running from the router to my Linksys SR2024 Gigabit Switch.  From there I have another Cat5 cable running into my QNAP TS-412 NAS Drive with a gigabit port.

My understanding is that because I have a gigabit router, connected to a gigabit switch, connected to a gigabit NAS drive; I should have gigabit local area network speed. 

Yet the data transfer across my NAS drive is constantly well below that (think 5 mb/s).  I have tried with AFP,SMB,NFS and FTP logins and I get the same speed.  Even testing my iPhone across the wifi network with internal network testing apps, I only achieve about 50mbps.

Point being, my LAN seems slow and I am trying to discovery why? Any thoughts?

[Ashok]

@ JDogg016,

Ensure that we are using Cat 6 not the Cat 5 or the cable which we provided, also try with different LAN ports on the Almond+.

[razzfazz]

What are you testing the speed between? The NAS and ...? Also, what "internal network testing apps" are you using?

[JDogg016]

Thanks... I will check the cabling today when I get home but I am 99% certain its Cat6 and I am relying on the NAS Drive speed which shows transfer speeds between 1-5mbps and I am checking the speed based on with the iOS app speedynet to display transfer speed between an iPhone and my iMac (iMac being wired).  Transfer speeds are nowhere near gigabit speed.

[grouter]

Transfer speeds are nowhere near gigabit speed.

They're not going to be. The disks/NAS is your bottleneck. Here's a review that shows roughly 70Mbps downloads in a 4-disk RAID0 setup. So that's essentially your best case scenario.

http://www.techspot.com/review/400-qnap-ts-412-turbo-nas/page7.html

Regardless, you should be doing better than the 1-5Mbps you stated.

[Petermann]

Another thing you may want to consider is using only factory made Cat6/Cat5e cables, in case any part of the network path uses hand-crimped jacks. Sometimes I've seen speed issues with hand-crimped cables not done well.

Also, out of curiosity, have you explored using one SSD as a cache device if your NAS supports it (even though this isn't the cause of your network issues)?

Edit: added Cat5e

[TheLostSwede]

Ok, let's go with facts here, not assumptions.

First of all, Cat5e cables are plenty, you don't need Cat6 unless you're running 100m+ lengths of it.

The QNAP TS-412 is a rather old and "slow" NAS by modern standards, but at the same time, you should see higher speeds than what you're getting. Normally you should see higher performance reading data from the NAS compared to writing data to it.

Are you sure it's 1-5Mbps (Megabits) or is it 1-5 MB/s (Megabytes). This is a very important distinction to be made. If it's 1-5Mbps, it's super slow and something is very wrong. If it's 1-5MB/s it's still slow, but 5MB/s is about what the NAS can manage in terms of writing data to it. Read speeds should on the other hand be closer to 9-10MB/s.

A couple of things to check is that you 1. don't have any cable issues as mentioned 2. check that not one of your network cards (including the NAS) is set to operate at 10/100Mbps rather than Gigabit speed. 3. Check that the NAS isn't set to use Jumbo Frames when the PC is not, as that would cause some issues. 4. try taking the switch out of the calculation, test again and then do the same with the router and use the switch instead. If one or the other has an issue, you should spot it here.