Hi Everyone,
On my home network, I have my Truenas Scale system plugged in via ethernet, running SMB shares. When I try to upload or download files to and from my server the speeds are limited to the same speeds as my ISP. Shouldn’t it be as fast as what my network devices can handle? I run ethernet for all connections, with a tp-link deco WiFI 6 router. I guess this is more of a general networking question than anything.
It wouldn’t make any sense for you to be limited by your ISP for your local network.
A quick sanity check would be to remove your NAS & client device from your router entirely. Connect the two devices directly together by ethernet and manually set the IP and subnet on both devices to be able to communicate with each other & test again.
If nothing else it’ll remove any chance that your router is throttling your LAN. This is high levels of paranoia.
Otherwise it might be good to confirm the speed of your NICs on your client device, your router, and your NAS. For example if your PC has 10gig, your NAS has 10gig, but your router only has 1gig ports, then it’d make sense why you’re stuck at 1gig speeds (I’m assuming this is what your paid speeds to ISP in this example).
Still, details about your setups & the actual speeds you’re getting would be of use. For all I know it might be that your NAS/client read/write speeds are co-incidentally the same bps as what you’re paying your isp for.
I live out in the country more so we pay for 30mbs down and 15mbs up. When I am on my own home network my speeds should be higher than that. Everything is 1gig ports with cat 8 cables. The pool I am trying to read/write to is two WD 4TB red HDD in mirror. When I read/write from pool to pool I get great speeds only limited my the drives, but when I try the SMB shares over the network I have issues. How would I check the speed of my NIC? I’m not home at the moment otherwise I would try removing the devices from my router and test that way.
If your ports are 1gig then you’re already answered that one. If you’re getting 30mbps reads/write to/from the NAS, then it is 100% not an interface issue as interface speeds would be 10mpbs/100mbps/1gig/2.5g/5g/10g/etc.
If you are specifically going onto your client device & are able to download files from your NAS at 30mbps & upload to your NAS at 15mbps… then yeah something is wonky, but I can’t imagine what yet. Only way I can for that instance that to be possible is if your router isn’t recognizing your NAS & PC as being on the same LAN network, taking your data to the next point on your ISP’s network, and then sending the data back to your router, and then to your device.
Lotta need to see network config details to see how that’d possibly happen.
Yes this is more of a generic network question than a TN specific one.
In simple terms your SMB speeds are limited first by the end-to-end network speed, and secondly by the SMB protocol.
And you should also probably check that you are not confusing MB/s with Mb/s, because some technologies report in one type of unit and some in the other - 1MegaByte/s is actually 8x or 9x 1Megabit/sec.
Next you have to distinguish between the bandwidth the components should be operating at and the speed that they are actually operating at. Network speed will be the minimum of:
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The actual ethernet link speed between your NAS box and your router - you can run a console command on TrueNAS to determine the actual negotiated speed.
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The actual ethernet link speed between your router and your client - you can see the negotiated network speeds from the network properties on your client PC; or
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The actual wifi link speed between your router and your client - you can see the negotiated network speeds from the network properties on your client PC.
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Potentially other factors - not all network cards can achieve 100% performance. Ethernet and wifi both have a limit to the % of bandwidth that they can achieve. There may be other traffic. Your router (or specifically the ethernet switch inside the router) processing speed.
For example, just because the router is wifi 6 does not mean that you are getting full wifi 6 speeds - it depends on how far your PC is from the router and what walls are in between the two, on the network capabilities of the wifi card in your PC, and the configuration settings of the wifi card in your PC.
Also, you may need to check your ethernet packet size is consistent across all boxes and doesn’t exceed the packet size of the tpink router/switch. (Typically this is 1500 bytes, however some technologies support big-packets.)
Finally, depending on what you are doing, the SMB protocol can be somewhat verbose i.e. the client asks for a lot of small bits of information rather than asking for it in one big consolidated chunk.
There are also a lot more TCP/IP configuration parameters that could impact this, but the defaults are pretty well optimised, so unless you have tweaked these, then you shouldn’t need to worry about them.
I hope that this helps.
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Hi,
Thanks for the replies. I have found out what has been causing my issue which is the fact that I have a mesh router for my home. I’m not sure exactly how this was messing things up but it was somehow.
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If you want help, show us a configuration diagram and we will do what we can to help.
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I use several computers throughout my home, and having a mesh router system is fantastic for maintaining a strong signal and low latency. My mesh network consists of three nodes: a primary node on the main floor, which handles DHCP, a secondary node upstairs, and another downstairs. My TrueNas server is connected to the primary node via a network switch.
When I use my laptop near a secondary node and try to transfer files to or from my NAS, such as moving a 50GB video folder, the transfer speeds are around 30 megabytes per second. However, when I move closer to the primary node and my laptop switches to it, the transfer speeds jump to around 200 megabytes per second.
This discrepancy also affects my VPN connections for remote access, significantly slowing them down. I’m unsure why this happens, but it’s impacting the efficiency of my network.
I am not surprised. In essence, mesh routers are nothing more than just a slightly cleverer version of the wifi extender.
If you want fast wifi speeds, you likely need Gb hard-wired ethernet to AC or better wifi APs.
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I’ve always considered mesh networks a little gimmicky, they work but they’ve always caused pain for me when setting them up in the past (Nest (formerly Google Wifi) especially) and they just do not perform as well as I’d hope.
I picked up NWA50-AX APs new for about the same price as a ‘high end’ mesh network, flashed them with OpenWrt (as ZyXEL’s Nebula platform sucks), and run them as standalone APs with 802.11r. It works flawlessly!
(TP-Link Deco X55 is £237!!!)
Unless you mean you’re connecting routers via a wireless bridge, in which case I can only assume you can’t run ethernet between floors for whatever reason and I’d look into something like powerline ethernet as a more stable alternative, it has become a lot better in recent years.
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People too scared to learn to patch drywall imo 
Yeah, I do this too as WiFi doesn’t reach the length of my house, so, 2 wired access points linked back to my router. I agree mesh network can be gimmicky and access points to me are actually simpler and should be faster. The hard part is the wiring back to the router, but given I have a newer house with foam insulation, this means it’s pretty trivial in the attic.