I have a diy nas server and used truenas scale. I have 4Tb video files that i want to move to my pool locally like a copy paste thing. Is there a way to do that without using my internet data. My Nas system is directly connected to the internet modem. Please help🙏
What do you mean by that? I’d assume that your “internet modem” is really a hybrid device: ISP modem + home router
So do you mean that the NAS is connected to one of the LAN ports on your modem?
No transfers to/from your NAS should ever go through your “internet data” connection. It’s all within your local network. (Never mind VPNs for now…)
With all of that said, your TrueNAS server is likely on your local network, which means you can create an SMB share, and then copy the files over from any PC that has the USB drive connected to it.
This will use your LAN, and should be about 90-120 MB/s, give or take, and depending on the number of files.
Finally a God sent help🙏
Please, please winnie I need help because as you know by now I’m very new with NAS ssrvers. First question, where should I connect the NAS server if not the internet modem because I don’t know where to basically connect it.
Is it a modem-router combo unit?
Is the TrueNAS server plugged into one of its LAN ports?
Yes my nas server is connected directly to the internet modem that has like 4 lan ports. I’m so dumb. Do I have to buy a router?
Okay, and so your NAS server is connected to a LAN port. Local network.
No data transfers to/from TrueNAS are going through the internet.
So create an SMB share, and then from your PC/laptop you can copy the files from the USB drive to your NAS server via the SMB share.
Yes I already tried the SMB but the speed that i get is only 1MB/s. I’m pretty sure theres something wrong with that.
You’ll have to share your hardware, setup, the OS / software you’re using, and system info.
My hardware is 12th gen intel core i9 12900hk
14 cores, 20 threads. 32gig ram and for now 4 x 6tb hdd seagate ironwolf in ZRaid1
Software is dragonfish 24.04.2.2 truenas scale
Update: Hi winnie, I tried switching out my ethernet cable and that connects my Nas server to the modem-router and found out that the cable is the reason I’m only getting 1MB/s transfer speed through smb. After swithing to a cat7 cable I’m getting speed of 40 to 60MB/s. But still only half of what you’ve mentioned of 90 to 120MB/s.
@Ray_Macrohon Ray
Apologies for the length of this reply, but hopefully you will find this information useful.
Some Ethernet explanations
The box that connects you to the internet (the “ISP Router”) is usually a combination device that contains a (4-port) switch, a firewall, and a NAT (Network Address Translation) router all in the one box. It is the switch part that provides the 4 ethernet ports on the back and which creates your internal LAN - and this LAN will typically have IP addresses of the form 192.168.x.x.
Ethernet ports can come with various speeds - most ISP routers come with either 100Mb or 1Gb speeds (but they can be higher e.g. 2.5Gb or 5Gb or 10Gb). The “b” in “Mb” or “Gb” is for “bits per second”, and the thing to remember is that when you are looking at file transfer speeds, they are typically measured as MB or GB and here the “B” stands for “bytes per second”. As a quick rule of thumb, to convert MB to Mb you should multiply by 10, so when you say you are getting 1MB per second that is equivalent to an end-to-end LAN speed of 10Mb per second - and this does seem a bit slow.
So, your switch ports have a maximum speed, and your old NAS ethernet port has a maximum speed, and these define the maximum speed of the link between the switch and your old NAS. When the link is connected the two boxes negotiate a link speed which can be no more than the minimum speeds of the two ports but can be lower if the Ethernet cable (or the plugs) is of low quality (i.e. the wire has been badly bent or crushed or the plugs were not fitted properly etc. - or possibly if the cable length is too long (> 100m) though in these situations that is unlikely). Through the device management interface you can often query the actual ethernet speeds that have been negotiated.
Your TrueNAS box will do the same for its connection to the switch.
And THEN … the maximum speed from one NAS box to the other will be the minimum of the two link speeds.
Of course, this assumes that you are transferring the data directly from one NAS box to the other. But if you are using e.g. Windows Explorer to copy or move the files from one NAS to the other, then you are actually copying the data 1) from the old NAS to your PC, and then 2) from your PC to the new NAS. If your PC is connected over wifi that link may be substantially slower than even 100Mb, but even if it isn’t, then obviously copying the data in two stages will be a bit slower than copying data directly from your old NAS to the new one.
(As an example, because my laptop supports Wifi-5/803.11 ac, I recently upgraded the wifi access point in my lounge to one that supported wifi ac/wired Gb ethernet uplink, but to get end-to-end Gb speeds between my NAS box and the Wifi AP I had to buy a separate Gb switch - and even then I needed to buy a newer PoE adapter AND a new patch cable to get 1Gb end-to-end. But boy-oh-boy has this made a difference to the file transfer speeds - I can now get 300Mb/s throughput between my laptop and the NAS as opposed to c. 50Mb previously.)
However, if a connection via your switch is still too slow, then if your NAS boxes both have two Ethernet ports that are faster than your switch supports (e.g. your NAS boxes both have 1Gb ethernet ports, but your switch is 100Mb), you can consider making a direct connection between the two boxes by plugging an ethernet cable directly between them. You will need to manually configure IP addresses on these ports, but you may be able to have a substantially faster direct connection for file transfer between them. (If you want to try this we can help you configure these ports.)
Sending data direct from one NAS to the other
We don’t yet have enough information to help you here because although we know you have TrueNAS / ZFS on the new NAS box, we have no idea what software you are running on the old NAS box.
If you can provide more details then we can probably help you.
Great news. 40MB to 60MB is c. 320Mb to 480Mb which are pretty respectable speeds for 1Gb ethernet but definitely not quite as good as you might expect.
120MB/s over 1Gb ethernet is a theoretical maximum, but there are many factors that can impact that. There may be Ethernet / operating system overheads slowing things down, or the data transfer may start to be limited by the speed that data can be read from disk on one server or written to disk on the other one.
But if he’s copying from a portable USB drive, it sounds about right.
This is probably a limit of your USB drive.
Not sure where the USB drive has come from - OP was talking about an old NAS system.
Thread title.
Ah - maybe I got the wrong end of the stick. I read this as meaning and original DIY NAS server and a 2nd used TrueNAS Scale server. But on second reading perhaps not.
Then there is the mention of a network. I would imagine the best way to move data from a USB drive to a NAS is to plug the USB drive into a USB port on the server and use a shell to cp the data across, so I am unsure where the network and a network cable issue comes into this.
Ah well.
TrueNAS used to include a feature to do this, but it never did work very well and has been removed in more recent releases–IIRC one of the biggest issues was permissions. The general recommendation is to send data over the network, as that ensures it will be written by the proper user with the proper permissions.
The problem, of course, is that with terabytes of data, this can take a long time.
Protopia you don’t have to apologoize for anything, I love learning new stuff. Any information from the experts or the experienced ones I will gladly take. I appreciate putting in your time to explain, and to winnie as well🙏
1 Like
I think I have one more problem/question for you guys. When I said I’m making trasfers through smb share at 40 to 60MB/s I was doing that transfer from my laptop using a wifi connection. I’m pretty sure I need to connect my laptop using an ethernet cable to the modem-router so that I won’t use my ISPs data? And if yes, is it going to be a plug and play if I connect an ethernet cable or do I have to configure something in my windows settings?
40MB/s-60MB/s is pretty darned respectable for a Wifi connection.
You will not use your ISP data if you are using Wifi - wifi is on the LAN side of the firewall and should not send data over your internet connection.
If you connect your laptop to the switch (modem-router) using an Ethernet cable (and you turn off the wifi on your laptop to be certain that the ethernet connection is used) then you might get a bit more speed if it is the wifi connection which is the bottleneck and not the disks. The Ethernet connection should be plug-and-play i.e. should get an IP address automatically) just like wifi.
1 Like