Problem with transfers to NAS

TrueNAS General
1

Hello everyone, I need some help with my NAS server. I have an HP PowerEdge T110 II computer with 4 HDDs (2x WD Blue, 2x Seagate for Servers) plus one SSD for the system. I have one RAID and one non RAID POOL. When I set everything up on TrueNAS(before I had OMV), it looked fine, but when I tried copying files from my MacOS 26 computer to the server, the transfer started at about 60 MB/s and then dropped down to almost 0 — and this repeated roughly every minute. I searched for a reason but couldn’t find anything. I have 6 GB of RAM (ECC) and 4 is always free somehow.

What can I do now? The server is connected to a router via an Ethernet CAT5e cable, and I don’t see anything that could be causing the problem. Could it be macOS? It’s similar on Windows, so probably not. I should mention that when I use the Blackmagic RAW speed test, it consistently shows around 50 MB/s, so it’s not that bad.

Thanks in advance

2

Please list the exact drive model numbers, both wd blue and Seagate (barracuda) drives can be smr drives which are known for slow transfer speeds

Edit: and 6gb ram is below the minimum requirement which is 8gb.

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3

Check your exact types of the HDDs. Especially the WD Blues. Dont know what you mean with “Seagate for servers”. Again, they have an exact model name and number. If some of them are SMR discs, you have the main reason for the slow writes. For ZFS you want CMR discs only.
Also, the minimum RAM for Truenas is 8 GB (16Gb is strongly recommendet).

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4

Also the MAC may be using sync writes (or may not). On the dataset rather than have sync standard use Disabled instead - see if that makes a difference.

However as others have said:

  1. More memory
  2. Check those disks. If the disks are SMR then they are unsuitable.
5

My discs:

  • ST1000NM0033-9ZM173 (2x)

  • WDC WD10EZEX-00WN4A0 (2x)

    They are all CMR drives.

6

For now, I want to try to fix this problem with the 6 GB of RAM. If I can’t fix it, I’ll buy an additional 2 GB

7

When I was testing the transfers, the memory usage was only about half, so I think the amount of RAM is sufficient; but if everything still doesn’t work, I will buy an additional 2 GB.

8

What does zpool status -v say.

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It says they are no data errors on any of my pools and they are all ONLINE.

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  • What kind of files are you copying? (big or small, media or text)

  • How many files are you copying at once?

  • How many files are in the destination folder?

11

For tests I copy one random app from macOS like GIMP. On destination folder I don’t have any files.

12

Anybody?

13

Donno - what version of TrueNAS, wasn’t there some huge SMB bugs that recently got more or less patched out?

14

I had the same problem with OMV, so it isn’t a problem with the system, but maybe with the configuration.
PS: I have the newest version of TrueNAS.

15

Any other ideas???

16

If you are using ZFS, I don’t see any way that the system can be using only 2GB memory… The system may be using 2GB for services but there would also be memory allocated to ZFS cache. At any rate, you’ve already been coached by experienced TrueNAS people regarding memory.

Since you face the same issue with both OMV and TrueNAS, I’d suggest it may be a hardware issue. There are three things I’ve encountered over the years that made me go crazy with untraceable problems:

  1. Network cable gone bad. Yes, I once had a network cable fail. This is an easy one to check - just try another cable.
  2. Ethernet switch malfunction
  3. Computer power supply malfunctioning but did not die completely. This has happened to me twice and can be very frustrating to chase down.

Good luck,

System: TrueNAS 25.04.2.6 | Supermicro X9SCM-F | Xeon E3-1240V2
32GB ECC RAM | PNY 120GB SSD for boot
3 WD Red 4TB + 1 HGST Deskstar NAS 4TB in RaidZ2
Toshiba 128GB M.2 SSD
17

After many responses from users, it seemed appropriate to close this thread. Some time after writing this post, I bought another RAM stick, so I finally have 8 GB of RAM. I returned to OMV and I have to say that now I’m very satisfied. The transfer speeds are satisfactory and the performance of applications running in Docker is great. I connected my Mac computer via an Ethernet cable and now I have a stable connection to my folders on the NAS. Thank you to everyone who wanted to help, and I hope that when I gain more experience in this area, I’ll be able to help others as well :slightly_smiling_face:

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