Slow network speed

I got my TrueNAS System with following specs: An Intel Celeron G 6900, An ASRock Z690 PG Riptide, 16GB DDR4 RAM with speeds of 3200 MHz, 2 Seagate Barracuda 2TB drives, and an 500GB NVME from crucial.
My problem is, that my transfer speed is usually around 10 MB/s acording to file transfer in windows, even thoguh, my infrastructure is wired up for Gigabit.
I use the integrated 2.5GB nick from the NAS Motherboard and the Gigabit nick integrated in my PC motherboard.
All cables are Cat.5e or Cat6 and the Network switch is Gigabit.
I don’t know, where to change sertain settings, but I couldn’t find anything on my own in the UEFI.

At a guess, you’re probably assessing your network “speed” by the transfer rate when you copy a file from your TrueNAS to a client on the network, or vice versa. This isn’t an accurate measure of your network speed, but rather the combined speed of your network (switch and cabling), the NICs connecting your computers to the network, the bus connecting NIC to storage, and the storage itself on both clients.

As such, the perceived slowness could be on any of those components.

You can eliminate the storage from the equation by using iperf to test:

Also: be sure not to confuse MB/s and Mb/s

Your network is gigaBIT capable, but some apps and OSes tend to report transfer speeds in megaBYTEs per second. So your 10MB/s is actually 80Mb/s, which is what you’d expect to see on a 100Mb/s network

Those Baracuda Drives are SMR drives which are known to cause slow transfer speeds and are generally advised against using with zfs.

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Okay, that’s goo to know. I have those drives in a mirror but aditional 2 should arrive in a few days and then I will do it with Raid 1 so that I can still loose one drive. As for the speed, thank you!

Due to the fact, that iPerf 3 is without a key and also no publisher, and as it doesn’t open a window, I can’t use it sadly.

As @LarsR said, those drives are SMR and is advices not to use. I do not think adding more will be very smart, get CMR drives.

If you can, RMA those drives in favor of CMR drives, here’s a list from seagate that shows which drives are CMR and which are SMR:

So, what is the difference of CMR and RMA drives?
Is it only speed or is there more?
btw., I have planned to use those for long term storgae with easy acsess and speed is not too big of a problem, as long as it isn’t unnessescairy slow.

CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) and SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) are two different technologies used in hard disk drives (HDDs) to increase storage density.

The main difference lies in how the data is recorded on the magnetic disk platters within the HDD:

  • CMR drives use a traditional recording method where each data track on the disk is written independently, without overlapping. This allows for more reliable random read/write performance.
  • SMR drives, on the other hand, use a technique where the write heads partially overlap adjacent data tracks, creating a “shingled” effect. This allows for higher storage density compared to CMR, but comes at the cost of reduced write performance, especially for small random writes.

The key advantages and tradeoffs are:

  • CMR drives provide better random read/write performance, but have lower storage density.
  • SMR drives offer higher storage density, but suffer from slower write speeds, especially for small random writes.

SMR technology is primarily used in high-capacity consumer and enterprise HDDs where sequential data access is more common. CMR remains the preferred choice for applications that require high random I/O performance, such as enterprise servers and high-end desktops.

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You’ll typically find that SMR HDDs work okay until they fail and you have to replace one. The rebuild/resilver I/O requirements are too much for the SMR disks and it will fail.

So, as others have said, very much not recommended for use in a system like TrueNAS that’s based on ZFS.

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So, for an update to you all: I bought 2 Ironwolf NAs 4TB drives from Seagate through https://reichelt.de for the System. It should arrive in 1-2 days according to the platform. One nice thing is, that Seagate pays for the shipping cost over there!

Also, I just checked all LAn cables, and one was Cat5… so… I lied at the beginning. sorry for that, I currently do a test with all my files to see the new speed. NAS cmd also says Gigabit now, so that seems correct.

Update: I got myself some IronWolf 4TB drives and they work fine! Also the speed ist pretty good.

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