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All, I'm having bandwidth issues on my home NAS and cannot figure out how to break 3MB/s (megabytes, not megabits), read and write.

I have a mid grade QNAP TS-431 Dual Core Arm based home NAS with 512 MB of RAM. This NAS is attached to a Linksys EA9200 router over two load balanced one foot Cat 7 cables. The router gets it's IP directly from the cable modem allowing the router to manage the entire network.

I've determined the maximum MTU by running the following on a windows client.

ping www.google.com -f -l 1472

I have four 2TB SAS Drives spinning at 7200 RPM's. All identical, make, model, and lot, brand new when purchased. They have only ever been used in this setup together.

My NAS is running Samba to allow for client's to mount their home directories. I occasionally will turn on FTP, but this is off unless needed which is rare.

I can't imagine this would be a hardware issue. All HDD temps are under 30C and within 1 degree of another. There are no warnings or errors coming from any of the disks and the entire setup, including the network is nearly one year old to the day.

I've tested this with 20 GB of photos over samba and ftp. Transfers are all done via 5 GHz wifi with full reception. I've also tested with one ~20GB ISO which is a collection of several other ISO's. The average transfer speed of 2.5MB/s remains consistent.

My question is three fold.

  1. For this setup, where only one client is connected does an average of 2.5MB/s seem accurate? I feel like this should be flying past 2.5MB/s

  2. Is there anything that I should be checking on my network that I might not have considered? Networking is not my strong suit.

  3. I have a server that runs several internal applications. It's much faster than the NAS. Would I be better off fronting the NAS connections on the server and reading/writing from the NAS via iSCSI?

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    I looked at two benchmarks for that NAS - one said 20MB/sec, one said 120MB/sec. Something isn't right. Suggest you ask on "Super User" since "Server Fault" is for business ICT questions.
    – Tim
    Dec 7, 2016 at 0:31
  • You can't saturate 1Gbps don't use dual NICs, you don't have cross wiring or any real need for it, if you hit 125MB/s on 5Ghz I'd be surprised.
    – Jacob Evans
    Dec 7, 2016 at 1:04
  • disconnect both cables from the qnap, directly connect it to your laptop, give your laptop an IP on the same network, test transfer speeds, post results, or just go buy a new wireless router :)
    – Jacob Evans
    Dec 7, 2016 at 1:16

1 Answer 1

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CIFS is slow and QNAP NAS is powerless to properly handle the storage load. CIFS has no multipathing option, therefore, I see here it would be beneficial to use iSCSI which is faster allowing you utilize your two connections with MPIO. You can read more about iSCSI here: What is the advantage of iSCSI over SMB?

It seems to me it would be possible to squeeze out 2 Gbit gathering the whole RAID performance (if the internal storage can handle such speeds).

Also, for even faster setup, you can use StarWind Free on top of QNAP boxes that adds RAM and SSD-based caching or log structuring and speeds spindles even more. https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free

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