Slow speeds on the Dockstar

At max I seem to only get 14-16kB per sec, what speeds is everyone else getting and what can I do to speed it up?

That's very low. I've bench marked networked I/O at over 11 MB/s for reading and over 9 MB/s for writing (and that's with the --sync mount flag.) There are some tuning parameters but I never bothered as that's nearly maxing out the 100 mbps ethernet connection and was good enough for me. Asynchronous writes should bring the write speed nearer to the read speed, but I never tested it. I prefer to be safe and mount synchronous as my area suffers momentary outages, especially in summer.

** edit **
Testing was done from Win7 as the client.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/13/2011 09:02AM by kraqh3d.

Ya i found out that my switch is to blame, dont know why. Its not magaed or anything and its a 1Gb switch. I moved it to the FIOS router and now im getting 2-5Mbps.

Can you point me in the direction of the tuning paramaters and tell me what FS you are using? On the pen drive its ext2 as I think thats the only thing that will boot using uBoot. Top usb is NTFS but thinking about trying XFS per some of the other posts here.

I am using USB Hard Disk and formatted the data partition as ext4. I am easily getting a read speed of about 20 MB/s on a Gigabit network.

I have a GoFlex Net in a similar config and with a SATA hard disk I get about 30-35 MB/s :)

Both using Samba and on a Windows client.

Has anyone here researched or posted transfer rates with respect to different USB2 chipsets in the USB2-SATA enclosures?

I am getting a very nice flat, stable 11.7MB/sec w/ my new Dockstar-converted-to-TimeCapsule (we are mostly Macs at home - I'm running it via Netatalk, not Samba), but I'm thinking the usb2 enclosure for my 2TB disk must be a bottleneck.

????


(btw, samba seems a bit slower, definitely less smooth in terms of regularity of speed)

=======================

EDIT:

After doing some checking, I see that smartmontools actually supports my USB2 enclosure (Cavalry), and many others.

root@TimeCapsule-DS:~# smartctl -d sat,12 -A /dev/sda  
smartctl 5.40 2010-07-12 r3124 [armv5tel-unknown-linux-gnueabi] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f   200   200   051    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0027   168   160   021    Pre-fail  Always       -       6558
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       174
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   200   200   140    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x002e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   093   093   000    Old_age   Always       -       5430
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032   100   253   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       51
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       37
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       1194
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   117   111   000    Old_age   Always       -       33
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0030   200   200   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   0x0008   200   200   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0

I guess the trick is going to be to get a enclosure that is supported by smartmontools, and is _fast_.

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• davy's Github Repo's rescue-dg

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/16/2011 05:31PM by davygravy.

I have but all my drives are Fantom USB2 to SATA 2TB drives. I have three different models but they all were about the same, near full 100 mbps ethernet doing read and write tests, using Samba no less. Testing was done individually. I never tried to run simultaneous tests against all three at once gauge the impact of concurrency.

And thanks for that tip on smartmon. I just assumed it didnt work on USB drives so I never tried. I'll have to try it out.

kraqh3d Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> ... I've bench marked networked I/O
> at over 11 MB/s for reading and over 9 MB/s for
> writing (and that's with the --sync mount flag.)
> There are some tuning parameters but I never
> bothered as that's nearly maxing out the 100 mbps
> ethernet connection and was good enough for me.
> Asynchronous writes should bring the write speed
> nearer to the read speed, but I never tested it.
> I prefer to be safe and mount synchronous as my
> area suffers momentary outages, especially in
> summer.


That looks comparable to what I get, but well under what Varkey got... ahh well...

Strange, I got higher throughput (iirc) on myPogoPlug...

=====================================================

• davy's Github Repo's rescue-dg