Slow NAS transfers

K

King_Weaver

Gawd
Joined
Nov 26, 2006
Messages
620
Ok so I have a small home network, for me, my brother and my boxee box thats coming tuesday :D Anyway, I have a netgear dgn2200 router (wireless n 300 router with adsl2+ modem) and a WD mybook 2TB usb 2.0 external hardrive. I also using an hp envy 17 that definitely has wireless N, and its literally only about a foot away from the router (on the same desk) so i know its getting about a good a signal as possible. Anyway, when I hook the HDD up over USB 2.0 it writes files at about 20 MBps, but when its connecting as an NAS through the router it only gets about .9 MBps when hardwired, and about 2.5MBps over wireless N. What gives? Its a 300mbps (37.5MBps) wireless connection, this should be more than enough bandwidth to transfer at the HDD's full rate. Anyway, any suggestions on how I could tweak this, or change it around to make it faster would be greatly appreciated.
 
Also Im reading a related thread and someone suggested using a separate file copy program. This could help with loading files on the drive from my pc, but im worried that when my boxee box comes in that the NAS is gonna run too slow to stream 1080p movies.
 
Is it possible that this is just a limitation of the NAS function of this router? should i look into getting something stand alone like a pogoplug pro or something along those lines? Or do you think this would work, hooking it up in reverse where the usb is connected to the boxee box, and then transfer files over the network to it. The boxee box should have much more power than the routers NAS function. I just hope i can mount the drive on my laptop if I do it that way.
 
Last edited:
router based NAS are slow, theres no way around it. ive never seen a router with a USB port that could do over a few single Mbps. you will never stream 1080p from a router. get a real NAS if you want decent speeds.

Its a 300mbps (37.5MBps) wireless connection, this should be more than enough bandwidth to transfer at the HDD's full rate.
Click to expand...
not nearly. a decent hard drive will get 80-120 megabytes per second read speeds. you need a gigabit link (1000-Mbit/sec or 125-Mbyte/sec) to take advantage of full drive speed. and 37.5MBps is the "theoretical max" speed. this does not take into account TCP/IP or other protocol overhead, which can be 5-20%. but this is moot because the router doesnt have the processing power to handle anywhere near that speed. nothing that you plug into the routers USB port will run at more than the current speeds you are getting.
 
Not to mention that wireless networks seldom get 100% of their theoretical max speed in the first place.
 
HHunt said:
Not to mention that wireless networks seldom get 100% of their theoretical max speed in the first place.
Click to expand...
I'd even go a step futher and just say "never" get close to their max. Most people don't even realize how much overhead their protocols have and then on top of that wireless is shared access subject to interference...
 
mattjw916 said:
I'd even go a step futher and just say "never" get close to their max. Most people don't even realize how much overhead their protocols have and then on top of that wireless is shared access subject to interference...
Click to expand...

I've seen pretty close, but you also have to keep in mind wireless is typically half-duplex.
 
cool, this alot of information. I cant really afford a full fledged NAS device right now but I may be able to swing something more basic like a pogo plug pro (ill take any other cheap solutions that you might reccommend, it just needs to run one usb 2.0 drive with either just a gigabit ethernet port or wireless N or both), and my drive only writes at about 20MBps and reads at like 65MBps or so it doesnt need to be anything extravagent. Or i could just hook the external HDD directly to the boxee box and setup samba share from it to the rest of the network, that way I should be able to play 1080p movies off of it just fine regardless of the network. But there is still the problem of writing files to it from my laptop. Do you think the boxee box would have enough power (and the correct functions) to be able to support a higher read/write speed than the USB ready share function on the router ? (obviously Im still limited to wireless N).
 
It is a limitation of the NAS itself. Most NAS devices have incredibly weak CPUs which cannot handle large (or even small) amounts of data over wireless or wired network connections. Like the others have said, you need to setup a real NAS using an OS such as FreeNAS.

Yes, you can connect the NAS to your system and use it as an external HDD, and use Samba/SMB to share it to other systems.

As for the USB port on your router, it may have slightly better performance, but those are mainly used for flash drives and just sharing very small files, not for streaming SD or HD video.
 
Red Falcon said:
It is a limitation of the NAS itself. Most NAS devices have incredibly weak CPUs which cannot handle large (or even small) amounts of data over wireless or wired network connections. Like the others have said, you need to setup a real NAS using an OS such as FreeNAS.

Yes, you can connect the NAS to your system and use it as an external HDD, and use Samba/SMB to share it to other systems.

As for the USB port on your router, it may have slightly better performance, but those are mainly used for flash drives and just sharing very small files, not for streaming SD or HD video.
Click to expand...

Ok, so right now its looking like my best option is to leave it hooked up to my pc and share it over the network to the other devices, thats fine but the only drawback is that my pc would have to be on and logged in, in order to access the drive on any device. Id like to try hooking it up in reverse where the external hdd is connected via usb to the boxee box and then sharing it from the boxee box to the rest of the network. I remember back in the xbox media center days (running on an actual xbox) you could shares its drives over the network... it was slow but the functionality was there. Im not even sure if the boxee box will have a feature like that but since its software is based off xbox media center I would think so, and its atom powered so it should have enough juice to process file transfers at a decent rate. What do you guys think?
 
Last edited:
If it has an Atom processor, it can do 10/100 easy, but going with gigabit, you aren't going to get much beyond 15-20MB/s if it is a single core. It should still be good enough though to handle it as long as it is using Samba for Windows shares.
 
Red Falcon said:
If it has an Atom processor, it can do 10/100 easy, but going with gigabit, you aren't going to get much beyond 15-20MB/s if it is a single core. It should still be good enough though to handle it as long as it is using Samba for Windows shares.
Click to expand...

That should be fine, like i said my drive only writes at about 20MBps so that should be good, I just hope the boxee box will support samba. My boxee box comes in tomorrow, I will post back with how it all goes.
 
Red Falcon said:
If it has an Atom processor, it can do 10/100 easy, but going with gigabit, you aren't going to get much beyond 15-20MB/s if it is a single core. It should still be good enough though to handle it as long as it is using Samba for Windows shares.
Click to expand...

no an atom processor will be able to keep up with gigabit no problem. many people make hardware firewalls out of atom-based computers. samba also has more overhead then most other protocols.

the boxee has a nVidea tegra 2 CPU which is 1ghz and has hardware h264/mpeg decoders (newer boxees' have an intel Atom CPU which are even better). depending on the USB port speed on the boxee, it *should* work better much then the router (which has a cheap 7-year-old boradcom 5325 processor and relys on another cheap 3rd party USB controller chip to do the USB functions). not sure if its software allows it to work as a NAS, though the hardware is able to support what you want.
 
No, Atom's (single-core) do not keep up with gigabit, far from it. The N270 @ 1.6GHz for example, caps out around 15-20MB/s with an integrated RealTek NIC. The newer Atoms may fair a bit better, but it is still far from being good enough. At a minimum, a dual-core Atom such as the N330 or above are needed for 30MB/s+.

But honestly, as long as only one stream of 1080p HD content is running from the Boxee, it should be just fine, or even two 720p videos, so the OP should be more than good.
 
Thanks guys, so here is an update. So yea I got my boxeebox which is really cool, the only things I dont like is that the browser kinda sucks and the remote control doesnt having any mousing functionality, but it does have samba support! Unfortunately now I'm running into another bottleneck, regardless of which machine the hdd is connected to I was maxing out my wite speeds at a whopping .5MBps over the network, regardless if the connection is pc> boxeebox or boxeebox > PC or even PC>PC. So I'm thinking that there is a problem with the wireless network. So from a suggestion on the boxee forums I ran netstumbler last night, and I found quite a bit of 2.4ghz traffic in my area. So I switched my wireless router to channel 9 because no one was using it and it helped somewhat. It went from .5MBps to 2.5MBps. But there was no 5ghz band traffic, so now Im in the process of trying to bridge my dgn2200 to my D-link DIR-825 which supports dual band wireless n. Only thing is that its looking like the dgn2200 doesnt have a bridging feature, I guess I could just hook up the dgn2200 to the "internet" ethernet port on the DIR-825 but then Id have 2 separate LAN's and routers and Im not sure what that would do to my network speeds... does anyone have any suggestions on how to bridge a netgear dgn2200, or another way I could use just the dgn2200's dsl feature and use the DIR-825 just for the LAN?
 
If your wireless network is capping at 0.5MB/s, then either it is 802.11b or there is an 802.11b connection on the network, creating the bottleneck. Everything must be 802.11a/g/n for the network to run properly. Think of it this way, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, the same goes for wireless networks.
 
Red Falcon said:
If your wireless network is capping at 0.5MB/s, then either it is 802.11b or there is an 802.11b connection on the network, creating the bottleneck. Everything must be 802.11a/g/n for the network to run properly. Think of it this way, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, the same goes for wireless networks.
Click to expand...

Theres no 802.11b connection as far as I know. Mine is on 802.11n, the boxee's is also on 802.11 n, and I just checked my brothers laptop, his is on 802.11g. There is alot of other access points in the area though and they are all running on 2.4ghz bands (mostly g). Thats when I switched the channels, which only helped a little. Im thinking I want to cut off the dgn2200 from the lan and use it just as a modem then set up my DIR-825 to handle all the lan traffic.
 
The LAN portion makes no difference, so I'll leave that up to you for personal preference. As for your network, the problem is your brother's laptop, as it is on 802.11g, which makes every other connection run at g speeds. 802.11g caps (if everything is perfect) at 3MB/s and normally runs on average at 2MB/s. Make sure to use WPA or WPA2 for encryption to make sure no one else in the area is eating up any bandwidth. If you are streaming 1080p HD video, you need a wired connection, period. 802.11n isn't even really enough as it eats up far too much of an Atom's processing power and also doesn't provide enough bandwidth to really do this properly. 720p HD video can be streamed just fine on it though. You can access the DGN2200's firmware and ensure that only 802.11n connections can be made, but whoever needs the wireless access and doesn't have n will be out of luck, since this isn't a dual-band router.

What is the size of the video you want to stream?
 
Red Falcon said:
The LAN portion makes no difference, so I'll leave that up to you for personal preference. As for your network, the problem is your brother's laptop, as it is on 802.11g, which makes every other connection run at g speeds. 802.11g caps (if everything is perfect) at 3MB/s and normally runs on average at 2MB/s. Make sure to use WPA or WPA2 for encryption to make sure no one else in the area is eating up any bandwidth. If you are streaming 1080p HD video, you need a wired connection, period. 802.11n isn't even really enough as it eats up far too much of an Atom's processing power and also doesn't provide enough bandwidth to really do this properly. 720p HD video can be streamed just fine on it though. You can access the DGN2200's firmware and ensure that only 802.11n connections can be made, but whoever needs the wireless access and doesn't have n will be out of luck, since this isn't a dual-band router.

What is the size of the video you want to stream?
Click to expand...
Im no longer trying to stream videos, I have the hdd directly connected to the boxeebox which is going to do all the media playing and it plays 1080p over usb 2.0 just fine. But its a 2TB drive so i want to use it for network storage for other things to, and using the samba feature of the boxeebox i can do that. Unfortunately its just really slow. Right now im trying to bridge my netgear dgn2200 to my d-link DIR-825. The DIR-825 has two separate wireless radios, one for 802.11b/g/n 2.4ghz and then another for 802.11a/g 5ghz. I was gonna setup two separate wireless networks so that my brother can still get internet access but I can keep my laptop and the boxeebox on the 5ghz wireless N. Im just not shure how to do that. I can set it up as a just a wireless access point off the dgn2200, but then everything would still get routed to it over 10/100 ethernet at that. (the dgn only has 10/100 no gigabit). anyway that pretty much sums up what i want to do.
 
Last edited:
I could also just keep the wireless function on the dgn2200 turned on for my brother (since he needs 2.4ghz g, and to give him his own network) and then link the other router up as an access point and set the DIR-825 to run 5ghz wireless N only. The only question is how to keep the networks separated, I want file transfers and other lan connections to remain completely on the DIR-825, but at the same time they need internet access so it has to be hooked up to the dgn2200, but i only want internet traffic to go to it. I hope I explained that well, as I am very sleepy. :(
 
Why not just use the DIR-825 and disconnect the DGN2200, or just use the DGN2200 as a switch without wireless? If you can dual-band the DIR-825, you should be good. I think you're over-complicating things with this setup. btw, having everything on wireless is a bad idea. If you are going to use the Boxee with the USB drive for other things than just video, you should have wired connections.

What size files were you planning on using? If we're talking word docs and image files, then wireless is no big deal. If it is music/video files, then you are going to need to start routing some ethernet cables with your setup. ;)
 
Red Falcon said:
Why not just use the DIR-825 and disconnect the DGN2200, or just use the DGN2200 as a switch without wireless? If you can dual-band the DIR-825, you should be good. I think you're over-complicating things with this setup. btw, having everything on wireless is a bad idea. If you are going to use the Boxee with the USB drive for other things than just video, you should have wired connections.

What size files were you planning on using? If we're talking word docs and image files, then wireless is no big deal. If it is music/video files, then you are going to need to start routing some ethernet cables with your setup. ;)
Click to expand...

The problem is that the dsl modem is built into the dgn2200, theres no way I can cut it out of the network. But at the same time the DIR-825 is the only one that supports 5ghz wireless N. I'm trying to connect the wan ethernet port on the DIR-825 to one of the ports on the dgn2200. I just don't know how to set it up properly.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top