First and foremost I am very new to nas and am learning alot but still feel like i have no idea what im doing most of the time…
The Hardware Im running TrueNAS on currently is a HP Prodesk600 G6 mini pc, Intel core i7 10th gen, 64Gb ram, intel Optane 16/256Gb nvme boot drive, and a intel i226-v 2.5G nic connected through the a+e m.2 port, my drive pool is connected via the thunderbolt port.
I have the nic connected to my ubiquiti pro max switch via a 2ft known good cat 6a cable at a 2.5G port. Once everything was setup and my pool created windows smb share etc i started to copy some files to test my speeds and was surprised i was only getting a transfer rate of 11MB/s. i checked and my cpu and ram utilization while transferring was 1-2%, then I looked at my Unifi app and saw that the port I was connected through was only negotiating FE speeds. When I tried to manually configure the port on Unifi to force 2.5G i would loose connection altogether until i reset to auto config where it went back to FE. I’ve checked in the bios and it picks up the i226v and shows as healthy/properly working. i have changed cables/ports just to be sure and nothing changes.
I’m really not sure where to go from here, at this point id even be happy with gig speeds… Like i said I’m new to this and its a lot of new information so I’m banging my head felling like an idiot rn when its probably an easy fix(hopefully) tia for any help!
So you are at 100Mbit/sec? That is terribly slow.
Fist of all, do you have a 1GbE on that TrueNAS computer? If yes, try it out. See if you can get 1GbE speeds.
As for the NIC connected to the computer, could you provide the make/model of the hardware?
Have you tested the hardware using a Live CD/DVD OS like Ubuntu to see what the network speeds are?
And have you used iperf? It seems that a lot of uers like to see those results.
Also, possibly a failed piece of hardware.
When you get there, enable and set up Jumbo Frames on TrueNAS. I had to do that to get my network speed up. I think it was 9216, something like that. And of course I had to have jumbo frames setup on my Windoze machine as well.
While jumbo frames are really good (and give a ~5% boost), I advise against them while your network has other issues.
Right now I have an issue – when activating jumbo frame on my mono built-in port, it doesn’t work (no speed boost). But what is much worse is this renders my TrueNAS not able to boot after reboot. I had to restore the previous boot-env.
Of course this is just an anecdotal issue, but I think that you should know.
I suggest you directly connect your truenas and your client (without a switch/router in between). Do not forget to set static IPs from the same subnet on both ends. And test smb performance after this.
It does have another on board port that I think is gig that I can try, I’ll try that when I get home from work later.
The nic in the computer is this one from Amazon Amazon.com: Intel i226-V Gigabit 2.5G Ethernet Server NIC Card - 30CM - M.2 Interface for Enhanced Network Speeds,Support youyeetoo X1 X86 SBC : Electronics
I did test that it worked at 2.5g on the win 10 install I wrote over for truenas
I have never used iperf but I can try to use it when I get home later to share the data.
Thanks for the help
Be careful with Jumbo Frames, you need to enable them everywhere* to really benefit from them. Any device that does not support Jumbo Frames and does not properly handle Path MTU Discovery will see a performance degradation when talking a device with Jumbo Frames enabled. I have no trouble getting over 1Gbps without Jumbo Frames, I have a dual (bond) pair of 10Gbps (SFP+) between my TN and my Ubiquiti ES-48 switch, but all my client connections are 1Gbps.
What are Jumbo Frames? Normal ethernet has a packet size limit of 1502 bytes. Jumbo Frames enable packet sizes up to between 9,000 and 10,000 bytes. Ethernet uses something called MTU (maximum transfer unit) to help prevent breaking a packet that is too big into smaller packets (called fragments). If your network has a link between sites that is encrypted, for example, the encryption may grow the number of bytes in a packet, creating fragments. If the devices talking to each other support Path MTU Discovery they can agree on a smaller MTU for that logical connection and avoid fragmenting the packets. When you enable Jumbo Frames you increase the MTU from 1502 to (in @joeschmuck 's note) 9216. You can see where this can cause issues if one of the devices only supports a maximum MTU of 1502 and it does not handshake (Path MTU Discovery) correctly.
*everywhere: including on your switches, the Ubiquiti switches do support Jumbo frames as a global parameter.
Agreed, which is why I said “When you get there”. I was not saying enable jumbo frames while an issue still exists.
Yes, I actually forgot about that, I made certain my switch handled Jumbo frames incase I needed it. When I get a new computer for Windows/Ubuntu use, I will plan for 10GbE as my TrueNAS machine has that already.
@Lumpystien Yes, give the built in NIC a try and it may work great, especially if it is an Intel NIC. Realtek is not very great for the OS in use but it will generally work well enough. Well enough to troubleshoot this problem.
I purchased a supposedly nice 2.5GbE NIC for my TrueNAS, I wanted to improve my backup speed and verifications for my Windows computer. I found out quickly that while the selling place said Linux was supported, it was not well supported and I could barely get the NIC to work. I yanked it out and sent it back, then purchased an already proven Intel 10GbE NIC. I have no plans to use 10GbE as my main computer does not have the ability to support this, however the new card does support 2.5GbE and worked great in TrueNAS.
I would really like to know if you find a good working M.2 to RJ45 NIC, now I want to look for one to see if they have a 10GbE for my Windows Computer. That would be fantastic. It is one of those super small footprint systems, No expansion slots but it has 2 M.2 slots and I’m only using one of those. Time to look I guess.
Doo a search on Google for something like “truenas iperf” and you should find some references. I’m on vacation right now and using a smartphone, which I hate using for texting. Yes, I’m old.
Best of luck to you.