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Copying files to the external hard disk of the Linksys EA6700 WLAN router via LAN is about 3 MB/s, but copying it back via LAN is only 250 kb/s. One file, file size ~ 10 MB. It doesn't matter which of the two PCs I use. I tried all combinations of copying files to and from the hard disk.

Any idea why reading is so slow? Usually I would expect reading is faster than writing.

Hardware: Linksys EA6700, Firmware 1.1.40.153731 
USB Port: USB3
Hard Disk: Toshiba v63700-C 1 TB (attached to Linksys WLAN router) 
Network connection: via 1 GB/s Netgear switch (no WLAN used).
OS: Windows 7 SP1 x64
Protocol: SMB
IP assignment: done by Linksys EA6700

Copying the same file onto a NAS which is attached to the same Netgear switch is fast in both, reading and writing, so I don't expect it to be a problem of the two PCs.

It is possible that some laptops are connected to the Linksys router which do some Internet traffic. Internet connection is 2 MBit/s (128 kbit/s upload). But I think and hope that this is not relevant in this case.

Connecting the disk locally to a USB2 port reads the file at 25 MB/s, so it's not a hard disk issue.

In Resource Monitor I can see that System has a connection to the Linksys router at the mentioned speed. When I cancel the copy process, data transfer drops to zero.

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  • What is the protocol used? SMB? Jan 1, 2014 at 10:41
  • Yes, SMB. Sorry I didn't specify this. Jan 1, 2014 at 14:46
  • Interesting, a copy over the local network should be able to nearly saturate a reasonably fast HDD. Given that your switch is a GbE switch, you should at the very least get double digit transfer rates (and possibly even > 100 MB/s). While doing a copy, can you check Resource Monitor to see where the data is going to? (Although it seems highly unlikely that the file transfer actually occurred over your Internet connection) Jan 2, 2014 at 18:10

1 Answer 1

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Linksys EA6700 has settings for media priorization. The two PCs which are connected via local network were set to high priority, which in fact decreased performance.

There are two ways of getting rid of the problem:

  • turning media priorization off completely
  • removing the PCs from high priority, setting to normal priority

Doing this, the transfer rate for both reading and writing is at 9,5 MB/s.

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