How to Increase NAS Throughput

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HiJon89

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Mar 2, 2005
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I'm planning on getting a NAS for college next year to serve movies/music/games/etc. to everyone on campus but I've been disappointed at the transfer rates I've been seeing even on the ones that have gigabit ports (Usually 25-30MB/s read). Now I'm thinking of building a very cheap system and adding a gigabit NIC and using it as a NAS (really a file server tho) and I was wondering if I got two gigabit NIC's or a dual-port NIC would I be able to effectively merge or bind the connections so that throughput would be increased? Let me know what you guys think, thanks :)
 
Doubtful, the bottle neck you will likely see is going to be the hard disk controller or bus it's connected to, not the NIC. Hit up the storage forum for more on how to help with that situation, although it's likely going to cost more then you want to spend.
 
Well there are going to be 4x 250GB HD's in RAID 0 connected to an Areca ARC-1210 RAID controller in a PCI-E x4 slot. This combo normally provides well over 100MB/s sustained read speeds.

All of the benchmarks I've looked at show even the most expensive NAS'es are unable to provide over 40MB/s read speeds on large files and I think this is a limitation of the gigabit port. I'm hoping that by adding multiple gigabit ports I can reduce this bottleneck. I've been reading that multiple NIC's won't make much of a difference for individual connections because each connection gets handled by one NIC, but at least the multiple NIC's would help out if there are multiple people pulling files from the server.
 
I can get 75mbps over my 100mb network.

Your gigabit is NOT maxed out.
 
If you look at this chart you can see that even NAS'es costing well over $1000 can't even break 40MB/s read speeds:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_nas/Itemid,190/chart,13/
If that NAS had an eSATA port you would be seeing at least double those speeds which makes it clear to me that the gigabit interface is the bottleneck.

My guess is that adding multiple gigabit ports and a switch that supports per packet load balancing could greatly improve these numbers, my question is does anyone know how I can do that? :D
 
OP, the speed for those NAS devices are accurate, thats just how SOHO NAS devices are.

Keep in mind, that your campus network may be limited to 10/100 to the desktops anyways, so any attempt at trying to get anything more than 100mbit (12.5MB/s) would be fruitless. Keep in mind that if the network is 100mbit, you are still reading at 3 times the speed and the network would be your bottleneck.


If you want a real storage device, then dump a server on the network instead of a NAS.

PS. Dual NICs would probably not help in your case as it requires a lot more than just sticking in two network cards into a switch from one machine.
 
Well if it does turn out that the dorm jacks are 100Mb then the whole point is moot. I've e-mailed the teach department and I'm waiting to hear back. I've pretty much scrapped the idea of a NAS entirely at this point and I'm only looking at a file server or maybe even a game server, Counter-Strike 1.5 anyone? :D

EDIT: Wow I just had a crazy idea, on-campus game server rentals! That would be pretty aweomse :D
 
I really don't think you will get more than 100mb from your campus. Ever seen the cost of 100mb vs 1gig switches?
 
Yea, and how much of that do you think they will waste on some high end network equipment for the dorms? I don't think they could come up with valid reasoning for spending that kind of money to upgrade a network that's probably working just fine as is.
 
Ockie said:
OP, the speed for those NAS devices are accurate, thats just how SOHO NAS devices are.

Keep in mind, that your campus network may be limited to 10/100 to the desktops anyways, so any attempt at trying to get anything more than 100mbit (12.5MB/s) would be fruitless. Keep in mind that if the network is 100mbit, you are still reading at 3 times the speed and the network would be your bottleneck.
Click to expand...


QFT! I've even seen some college networks that completely isolate all clients from each over so most ideas in this thread would not be possible... VERIFY this is not the case before you put too much work into it.
 
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