Speed up file transfers

TrueNAS General
1

I have been looking at ways to speed up file transfer speeds between my pc and Truenas ElectricEel-24.10.2.4, and any other device.

I have changed the lan cable to a Cat6a, also changed my failing Netgear 1Gb switch to a TP Link 2.5Gb switch, but the transfer speed between my pc and Truenas is only around 65mb/sec

The specs are:

x5 2Tb Western Digital all in 1 pool

16Gb of Kingston Value ram ECC

SuperMicro X95CM-F motherboard with Gigabit lan ports

I googled how to do what I want and basically it says to enable mutichannel in advanced settings of SMB. When I do that I get an error:

NetBIOS names may not be one of following reserved names: dialup, batch, gw, world, null, local, enterprise, builtin, anonymous, domain, self, interactive, network, gateway, proxy, server, restricted, users, authenticated user, internet, tac

So I guess it’s not a simple job then.

Edit:

I found a link to the TrueNas documentation on setting up SMB mutichannel, but if there is any other way of speeding up file transfers , I’d rather go that way if possible

Thanks

2

Forget about multichannel. There is something else amiss.

First run a test with iperf3 between Truenas and your windows? PC. Iperf3 is available on Truenas and can be downloaded for windows.

Also, what is your pool layout ? RAIDZ1 ? Do you get 65MB/s writing or reading ? What type of file(s) are you using for the test ?

2 Likes
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Agree, it has nothing to do with multi-channel.

If this is write performance, are you SURE that these are not so called Device-Managed Shingled Magnetic Recording (DM-SMR) hard drives? The capacity suggests they wouldn’t be but what is there Model / Make?.

1 Like
4

Thanks for the reply.

My pc is Linux mint and I have iperf3 on it. When I run iperf3 on my pc to the ip address of TrueNAS iperf3 -c 192.168.0.42, I get iperf3: error - unable to send control message: Bad file descriptor

Then when I run it on TrueNAS to the ip address of my PC I get: iperf3: error - unable to connect to server: Connection refused

The pool layout is Raidz1 and the 65mb/sec speed is for transfering from my pc to TruNAS , so writing to TrueNAS

5

use the webshell or an ssh session and simply type iperf3 -s. that will start the iperf server on the truenas side or iperf3 -c if you want to use truenas as the client

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The HDs are WD 2TB NAS drives and I don’t have any other information as they have been in the system for just over 12 years now

Thanks for the information on iperf3 and I ran it from my pc , which gave a transfer speed of over 900Mbits/sec, and on TrueNAS it was reading?? at the same speed.

ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate
[ 5] 0.00-10.00 sec 1.08 GBytes 928 Mbits/sec

So, silly question time, why don’t I get that when I transfer a 1.5Gb file to TrueNAS

7

Iperf reads and writes to RAM.

It seems 65MB/s write performance is your pools maximum.

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No benefit to switch to a faster switch unless all NICs can run at 2.5GbE or better.

You should double and triple check that all wires are good.

Then see if you’re dealing with an auto-negotiation issue. Ie hard code 1GbE speeds.

Even with a single VDEV, I am able to saturate a 1GbE connection.

9

Just saw your iperf data. Is that random, incompressible data? If so, we can rule out the network.

The age of the drives suggests they shouldn’t be SMR either.

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SMB runs on a single core - thread.

When you transfer a huge file and look at the dashboard CPU utilization, what is the max of any of the cores / threads?

You may be CPU bound.

11

Impressive.

It would help to know what model they are, to rule out SMR. The “Disks” screen will show you the model #'s.

I think you mean MB/s? This equals 520 Mb/s, which is about half the throughput of what a 1-GbE ethernet adapter is capable of.

How are you transferring files on Mint? Did you mount the shares via the cifs kernel module? (mount, fstab, or systemd-mount)

If you’re using the built-in “Network” feature of the file browser, such as Caja, Nemo, or Thunar, then you can expect to see as much as a 50% performance decrease.

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The model numbers of the disks

WDC_WD20EFRX-68EUZN0

WDC_WD20EFRX-68AX9N0

WDC_WD2001FFSX-68JNUN0

WDC_WD20EFRX-68AX9N0

WDC_WD20EFRX-68AX9N0

Oops, yes it is MB/sec.

I’m transferring files from my linux machine to TrueNAS via the Files window, and opening a folder in Network/TrueNAS etc

Ok so a 50% decrease due to using Nemo file browser, so which other method should I use for a better speed. I use Nemo more of a convenience , but if there is a faster or better way, I’ll try it

13

Per NAScompares, those are CMR

image
image1290Ă—2242 306 KB

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That leaves a misconfiguration re: SMB or CPU overload?

Did all these drives pass their SMART tests? Or, is the NAS web gui showing any alerts / error messages re: drive performance?

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No not all the drives passed a Smart test, as 1 of them has failed with 7 errors and I guess it needs to be replaced.

Could that be a reason of slowish transfer speeds

16

The file manager’s built-in method uses GVFS, which is where the 50% performance penalty comes from.

You can still use Nemo to access your shares, but you need to mount them using the cifs kernel module.

  1. Create an entry in /etc/fstab.
  2. Reload the systemd daemon.
  3. Restart the “remote file systems” systemd service.
  4. Navigate to the path of the share.

To make it more convenient, you can add a shortcut to your “Places” side pane or in your “Favorites”. This will be as easy as accessing a folder, except that the “folder” is the root directory to your SMB share on the network.

17

I switched to a faster switch because I needed another because 6 of the 16 ports had failed and I need 11 ports for all my lan connections. I bought an 8 port 2.5Gb switch and already had another 5 port switch which is used for things that don’t need a lot of speed