Cheap NAS

Connected two devices to the gig switch. My office PC (which already had a gig card) and the FreeNas server. I didn't have to reboot my desktop (XP Pro SP3) - it saw the gig connection dynamically. I did have to reboot the FreeNas box. Good thing about the FreeNas box is that it recognized the new gig card with little effort. Transferring the network cable from a 10/100 switch to the Gig switch I still had to reboot FreeNas as it didn't dynamically change the speed of the NIC though. I like this little Dell switch (its not a Cisco 2900 series) but it has better reviews than the Cisco/Linksys switch line (small gig). I can't configure the switch ports, egress, etc but it is sufficient.

Having multiple patch panels is helping me with this endeavor. (16 port patch panel behind server rack, 16 port patch panel adjacent to media panel and 12 port patch panel inside of media cabinet).

Here are some transfer speeds. The speed is nice though with gig sized HD movie transfers. Adding my Mediagate and two other servers to the mix today in they too has a gig nics in them.


I was hoping for faster:

Office desktop -> .7GB file to FreeNas Server - 14 Mb/s

gig2.jpg
 
Thanks Gatchel....looking to test with Windows 7...but can test my Vista MCE setup....

also found this:

While in real-world situations, the network will be severely bottlenecked by the hard drives. In a synthetic memory-to-memory scenario we demonstrated that our plain-Jane gigabit network delivered speeds very close to the theoretical 125 MB/s gigabit limitation. Typical drive-to-drive network speeds in a real-world situation will likely be limited from 20 to 85 MB/s, depending on the speed of the hard disks.
For fun, we also tested some short-run cable scapegoats such as power cable interference, cable lengths, and Cat 5e vs. Cat 6. In our small home network, we found that none of these really had a significant impact on performance, although we must point out that in a larger and more complex network with longer cable lengths, these factors might become viable concerns.
At the end of the day, we can heartily recommend that anyone who moves a lot of files should already have a Gigabit Ethernet network at home. If you're not there already, upgrading will yield a nice bump in speed when upgrading from 100 megabit, which will likely be in the range of a two-fold data transfer rate increase at the very least.
Gigabit Ethernet in a home network can be leveraged to even higher multiples of performance if the network is based on a NAS running a hardware-controlled RAID array. In our real-world test network, this resulted in a 4.3 GB file transfer that took only one minute to copy. Over a 100 megabit connection, this same file would likely have taken about six minutes to copy.
Gigabit networks are coming into their own as an affordable standard. Now all we have to do is let hard drive speeds catch up. Or, take the more proactive approach and use your enthusiast smarts to build storage arrays able to work around the limitations of today's HDD technology. The result will undoubtedly be better throughput from your gigabit network.
Click to expand...

from here it makes for interesting reading.

Gigabit Ethernet: Dude, Where's My Bandwidth?

Read this about utilizing Jumbo frames:

Note that getting jumbo frames to work can be a real pain and in many cases is probably not worth it. When you make the switch on a given subnet over to jumbo frames, you must simultaneously change *every* host on that network/VLAN or you will have weird problems where some hosts can talk to each other and others have difficulty for some types of connections. TCP connections might work, but UDP connections fail intermittently (i.e. you can mount an nfs mount but when transferring files it fails).
Click to expand...

How To Configure Jumbo Frames
 
I've now connected about 6 devices to the gig switch. Interesting cuz I connected two Windows 2003 standard servers and did another "copy file" test - drag n drop. The new goal now is how close can I get to 112 Mb/s (theoritical gig line speed). Unlike the FreeNas speeds I got better performance to the Windows 2003 server:

Office desktop -> .7GB file to FreeNas Server - 14 Mb/s
Office destop -> .7GB file to 2003 standard server #1 - 45 Mb/s

I am still learning. As mentioned above a couple of issues have cropped up. Not as concerned about cabling (its all 5e and should suffice)

1 - using cheap 32 bit PCI gig NIC's can be a bottlenect (but at $8 each) and just testing I am ok for now
2 - drive speeds - the FreeNas box is a combo of a bunch of leftover drives (both SATA and IDE)

I am not sure if it matters right now but still have 100/10 NICs on my current firewalls. The two mini-itx boards that I was previously using had two NICs, one at gig and one at fast ethernet; so I might go back to these (if I fix them?). Noticed that the embedded 2003 NAS server has three Intel Nics. Two are standard fast ethernet and one is gig. I also noticed that if I stream video from a gig connected server the video stream comes up faster than previously connected server at fast ethernet. (both HD and DiVx).
 
Just received mine, it's labeled as a fujitsu siemens as well. Going to try 4x ST31000528AS seagate 1tb. They are not listed on the compatible hardware list at intel but I'll see how they work with the stock software.
 
Pete,

Finally got Win2k8 installed. It acts REALLY pokey...but I think that's two things:
1) it's only the GUI part. I don't have HS installed yet...so I can only go by how the "server" part of it acts...
2) I think the GUI part will get faster when I get a driver installed. Win2k3 acted the same way until I installed the video driver...built in is bad.

The server itself seems to run really well.

Anywhoo...the WHOLE point of installing this was to see if I could in fact get FASTER file transfers, overWindows File Sharing...

The talley is in. Just as I got when I went FTP, I am NOW being hardware limited on one PC or the other by the PCI bus speed. I can x-fer files at 55-70MPS!!! (70 seems to be a burst until the "cache" fills, then it's just whatever the hard drives / PCI bus can handle). That's up from a MAXIMUM of 30-38ish over Windows File Sharing.

So, am I pleased? HECK yeah! I think that just to get that one feature of teh extra speed will be enough to make me put up with any and all issues installing HS and re-getting it to work with the NEW OS (win2k3 had it's issues, esp. with media stuff...and Win2k8 is by default locked down!).

So, Pete, I would suggest switching if you want your server to actually PUSH it's hardware!

Hopefully more detailed testing later on. Right now it's time for bed!

--Dan
 
Thanks Dan. Thinking of 2008 for a new storage box.

What base HW CPU/Memory/RAID are you using on the 2008 box?

It appears that the bottlenecks relating to speed now are more at the bus than the NIC.

Been testing bit copies of HS partition over to a BSD raid setup and a W2003 setup with compression.

Total partition is about 20G / utilized is about 15G / compressed is less than 10 G with a total time of around 10 minutes of copying time over to a networked storage array with a real mix bsd (both raid SATA and all the extra IDE drives that I had sitting around) and a W2003 with RAID5 array for comparisions.
 
pete_c said:
Thanks Dan. Thinking of 2008 for a new storage box.

What base HW CPU/Memory/RAID are you using on the 2008 box?

It appears that the bottlenecks relating to speed now are more at the bus than the NIC.

Been testing bit copies of HS partition over to a BSD raid setup and a W2003 setup with compression.

Total partition is about 20G / utilized is about 15G / compressed is less than 10 G with a total time of around 10 minutes of copying time over to a networked storage array with a real mix bsd (both raid SATA and all the extra IDE drives that I had sitting around) and a W2003 with RAID5 array for comparisions.
Click to expand...

Pete,

2.12GHz Celeron D
3 gig ram
OS is on a single drive (IDE)
everything else is on a RAID 1

I'm using a P4SCA mobo (Love SuperMicro...well worth the cash!)

Now that I'm on Win2k8, Maybe I can finally get to taking apart that Touchscreen so I can let Dumetre know if I need a new control board or not!!

--Dan
 
pete_c said:
How To Configure Jumbo Frames
Click to expand...

Very interesting article! I wish it went into much more detail though. All devices on the network must support jumbo frames -- that is nearly impossible if you have any devices such as printers or cheaper NAS's. I wonder if subnetting and/or vlan's would break the network apart enough - which would suck, because then you're splitting the network on physical capabilities instead of logical orginization.

Anyways, here's a screenshot of a transfer I had from my computer to my NAS (mapped drive M:)... I took this screenshot because I knew it wasn't possible. Going from 4-drive RAID-0 to 4-drive RAID-0; Local compuer has ToE network card. Going from my main system (Win7x64) to my server (Win2k8x64) I can easially hit 80% to 85% saturation of the gbit link. I agree with the other article, the bulk of the time the limiting factors is the speed of the drives.

Kent

fastDrives.png
 
I installed a couple of different copy applications almost for the purpose of looking at the speed of transfer. Think I purchased one of them. FreeNAS actually does a graphical depiction. I've switched a few more boxes over to using PCI Gig Nics and it does help doing large transfers between W2003 boxes and FreeNas Boxes. These are still not PCIE cards nor do I have SATA300 drives in these boxes.
 
agreed. In my testing, you should see about a 2-3x increase in speed when switching from 100baset to gig.

However, if you switch BOTH to SMB2.0 compliant OS (FreeNas is one of them) and Gig, my testing shows 5-7x increase in speed. Probably would get more if my PCI bus wasn't limiting me!

--Dan
 
Still playing with FreeNAS box. Updated software last week and now getting more consistent fast transfer speeds from and to both IDE / SATA Raid drives in single box. (15Mb /s which is a good line speed).

Now thinking of adding drives to other two NAS boxes initially Intel Network Storage Server - SS4200E.

Anyone using this one right now?


Some pics:
 
It looks good Dan. Just finished first base install (W2003) / snapshot on the new HS dual core mini-itx box. I can now try Windows 7 and snapshot base. I too have to utilize a PCI SATA drive card (150SATA and a bottleneck). Noticed that the new Intel Inf files contain SATA Raid configurations for said MB.

I am still playing with FreeNAS for related pure NAS endeavor. I am seeing decent transfer rates but am taxing the box. I have two SATA 4 port PCI cards in it, two SATA connections on the MB and two IDE connections. I have the SATA cards connected using software RAID1 pairs and IDE drives in RAID0. I am using a 4 drive SATA raid cage and have plenty of HD mounting room inside of the box. The cage itself has two cooling fans (its a 4 in 3 slot raid cage). Plus I've added two supplimental cooling fans to the box. I still needed to take the side panel off of the box to cool it down a bit. I know I'm pushing the 650watt PS connected to it right now. I had to split the power leads up a bit to provide power to the HD's.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

BraveSirRobbin
Needing Remote Access Advice
Replies
6
Views
542
BraveSirRobbin
BraveSirRobbin
B
Alarm Monitoring for Omni LTe
Replies
3
Views
208
pete_c
pete_c
J
Unlocked cell phones still carrier locked???
2
Replies
15
Views
2K
LarrylLix
L
T
False Alarms on ELK-6052 Wireless Heat/Smoke Detector
Replies
0
Views
193
Thirdwaver
T
J
Changes to Oracle VPN?
Replies
2
Views
250
JimS
J
Back
Top