Slow Transfer Rate

[nostylez]

Hi guys,

I've been having issues since purchasing this NAS, which has been going on for months.
Transfer speeds drop to 3MBps sometimes even slower, usually the speeds starts at 20MBps then drops.
Streaming video is also a pain, pausing and skipping all the time with HD content.

The only resolution I find is restarting the NAS and that is a temporary solution that only last an hour or so. I've disabled plugins, etc, to no avail.

Also is it possible it could be the HDD I purchased, it's a 2TB Green Samsung drive.

Any ideas, would be much appreciated.

[BoostedGen2010]

Are you using all 4 drives and in what raid? 0, 10 or 5? Honestly I haven't seen that with this device. But I have had a lot of bad experiences with those green drives. They have this "green" power controller in then and at max are only 5400RPM drives. I noticed they do this thing over time when they stream data and they auto correct power consumption. So as you are playing media they will trying to spin down to save energy. I think they are nice drives if you are just putting on in your computer to use as storage but or doing media and raids or setting up servers I would never be happy with their performance.

just my two cents.

I would go get yourself some solid steady 7.2K drives so you get nice and even data. If you are going to do heavy media I would also suggest a raid 10. Unless you need TONS of space.

[nostylez]

Thanks for the reply,
I honestly have no idea what is going on.
I only have 1 2TB drive in the NAS at the moment.

I'll definitely be purchasing another HDD soon and avoid those green drives.

[Seamus]

Hello Everybody,
I am a new user of the Javelin which I purchased to replace an aged DNS-323.
Currently I have it configured in Raid 5 array using 4 x 2TB WD20EARX Green HD's (5400 rpm).
My transfer rates are dreadfully slow, in fact it took 8 minutes to transfer a folder of MP3s totalling 211MB in size.
I have an Asus RT-N56U router as well as a dlink 8 port gigabit switch and am using OS X Lion. My router has two usb 2.0 ports for HD's which I have to Lacie 2TB drives hooked to and the same file took mere seconds to transfer.
Even the DNS-323 is much faster than the Javelin and was wondering if anyone who is experienced with this unit could help me with the poor performance issue?
Thanks in advance.

[BadIntentions]

Green drives perform very VERY poorly in RAID5, for a test, break/Delete the array, and put one drive on its own in a RAID 0. If performance GREATLY improves, then its probably due to the green drives.

Chris

[Seamus]

Many thanks for the information. As an act of desperation, I flashed the bio's and have noticed a marked increase in performance.
I do plan on upgrading the drives in the system and went with these green drives as they were fairly cheap ($119 CAD) compared to the 3TB Caviar Black drives that I covet. Hopefully, hard drive prices will fall shortly once Thailand has recovered from the devastating floods that reeked havoc with hard drive manufacturing.

[HansSchulze]

I have also noticed this behavior recently, getting 300KB/sec on a quiet GB network after a few weeks of 5-files-a-day copies. Rebooting put it back to 10MB/sec+. Also have 2TB WD Green, and they work fine in another vendor's NAS.

[Omnigamer]

I purchased the Javelin a couple weeks ago, and I've been having very poor general performance as well. I have a RAID5 composed of 4x1.5 TB 7200 RPM Seagates. Out of the box I had reads between 16-24 MBps and writes at 6-10 MBps. After turning off all of the services (DLNA etc) the read rate shot up to 45-60 MBps, but write speeds only improved marginally to 10-13 MBps. I know that write speeds under RAID5 are supposed to be lower, but it should still be around 2/3 of the read rate.

I've watched the network traffic between my NIC and the Javelin's NIC, and it does make use of resources above 100 Mbps on both ends (so the gigabit link is working fine). It seems bursty though; neither side is fully utilized, and the actual load jumps around quite a bit. As far as I can tell, there are no other problems in either system, they're just not sending/receiving as much as they could. On the actual access side, the read and write rates should be several times better than what I'm seeing, but I can't verify that.

So hopefully something can get figured out for this. It's not an issue for me right now, but it's something that needs a fix in the long run.

[HansSchulze]

It seems that my slow speed (see above) was caused by NetGear router bug (DHCPNACK) causing the IP address lease to be terminated unexpectedly, having weird consequences on the Javelin. I am putting mine on EBay, I don't see a future to hoping that software gets corrected in the future, when there hasn't been a software update since the unit came out. I would rather the d-something brand that works slower, but works.

[ruben00]

I have an unmanaged gigabit switch on my network setup as illustrated bellow (best i could do)


Router
|
NAS ---- Gig Switch -----PC

My unmanaged switch supports (undocumented) 4k Jumbo frames. So that is what I enabled my PC for and the NAS for.
Im getting 35MB/sec UP and about 60MB/sec down
Took roughly 60 seconds to upload a 2.87GB file
I got RAID 0 on that first volume with 1 drive same as you

[wstam]

I have similar behavior on the Javelin. It slow down to only 1 or 2 MB/sec reading rate after running for days. After reboot, it back to 30-40 MB/sec over the Gigabyte network.

The PC and the Javelin is connect via an Acer Gigabyte unmanage switch. I turn off all service except DLNA server. The Javelin is manually assign static IP.

I also only have 1 WD Green 2T drive in the Javelin. It should not be the Green drive problem.

Just after reboot, the CPU usage is only 3-4% and Memory usage is about 1/5 in the Javelin status page when the Javelin is idle.
When the Javelin slow down, the CPU usage is about 25-30% and Memory usage is about 1/2 in the Javelin status page when the Javelin is idle.

I guess something wrong in the Javelin's OS that keep locking more and more resource in time.

[wstam]

I turn off all service (Web Directory, BT, DLNA, iTune, MySQL) and protocol (Mac, FTP, UNIX) except the Windows protocol for file server. My Javalin now run stable even after 5 days of running.

I root the Javalin. Telnet and use TOP command to check the cpu usage. It is only 0% to 1% when it is idle.

I am going to turn on the service one by one and find out which one slow dow the Javalin.

[wstam]

I turn on the DLNA. Monitor the CPU usage by the Telnet/TOP for a day and decide to turn it off.

When it just turn on, the MediaSpider and FFMpeg process use up most the CPU due to the media scan.
After the media scan done, the FFMpeg process do not fire up, but the MediaSpider process fire up every 1 or 2 minutes. Each time the Media Spider process will run for around 10s and the CPU usage is as high as 100%. During this time, the Javalin has very very slow respond. In the mean time, some process fire up occasionally and use about 10%-20% CPU usage for several second.
Why I can't schedule the DLNA re-scan? The Re-scan can only be automatic or manual.

Once I turn off the DLNA, all those process are gone. The Javalin respond back to normal. No reboot require.

DLNA will slow down the Javalin in every 1 or 2 minutes, but it is still not the root cause of the slow down. In my last attempt without the Telnet/TOP check, I have DLNA and all protocol turn on and running for 3 days. After it slow down, then I turn off the DLNA. I still have to reboot to bring the Javalin back to normal.

I am going to try other protocol.

[ruben00]

I got DLNA turned on on my Javelin, I'm going to try turning it off to see if i get better performance than the previous numbers I posted!

Good work so far wstam, definitely following your work!!

[wstam]

I turn on all the protocol (Windows, Mac, FTP, UNIX) and turn off all the service, my Javelin still running stable after 5 days of uptime.

I have 2 media players (Asus O!Play and Patriot PBO) connect to Javelin via Window protocol and non-stop playing My Little Pony TV series for 2 days (using Repeat-ALL option in the player). In the mean time, I run BT from my computer and save directly to the Javelin; I also copy large video files from Javelin. My Javelin is running rock solid and all players play the video smoothly.

I will turn off the DLNA service forever.

One more thing I notice, the TOP command report most the memory is used up, but the memory usage from all the listed processes is only sum to a few percentage. I can’t find where the memory used up. Also, the Javelin Management web only report 1/6 memory is used.
However, in my last test that after turn off DLNA and before reboot, I saw a virtual memory swapping process run occasional. I guess the major cause of the slow down is the virtual memory swapping. If the DLNA has memory leak and occupy a big amount of memory, the memory reside in the swap file size will be very large and slow down the Javelin significant. In this case, only reboot will release the memory and bring back the performance.

To test this guess, use a player non-stop playing video from Javelin via DLNA for several days. Once the slow down is happened, using the Telnet/TOP to check the status.

I am lazy now and I will not perform the above test. Hope someone can do the test and let use knows the result.

[VulgarHandle]

I will turn off the DLNA service forever.

I registered to these forums, specifically to bump this thread and give many thanks to wstam.
What I quoted solved all my problems. Thank you very much.

[chienpourri]

It totally makes sense that this would be the cause of the problem. This service constantly scans your files to update the DLNA index. There must be a memory leak of some kind with that service, which means the devices gets slower and slower over time as RAM fill up and never gets released. You need a reboot to start fresh again, but stopping the service also works well.

While I agree that this is not a solution for someone who needs DLNA, for those who don't it's an easy fix.

Maybe Patriot has a fix for that in the upcoming v2 firmware, or at least instead of a 24/7 DLNA scan maybe we could choose when the scan happens (once a day, once a week week or manually by pressing a button).

[VulgarHandle]

The whole interface needs a massage. Clicking buttons on the "Home" menu will automatically turn on certain services, which I'll list:

Just clicking the "Download Station" button will turn on "BT Server", it then occupies the "Server" tab in "Download Station" with 11 BT servers, which it then tries to connect to.

Clicking the "Media Center" button will turn on "DLNA Server"

Clicking the "itunes Server" button will turn on "Firefly Media Server"

[COBRASoft]

Any progress on this DLNA problem? I just installed my Caviar Red HD's in RAID5 and streaming sucks like hell. It stutters every half a minute. Almost all services are turned off and the NAS is connected to my Sony Smart TV through a gigabit router from D-Link.

[SARBound]

Make sure you have a fully-compliant gigabit network cable.

I usually make my cables myself out of Cat 5e, but for some reason, the one I made to use with the Javelin wouldn't hit gigabit speeds. The Javelin also recognized the link as 100 Mbps (rather than 1000 Mbps).

Using the provided Cat6 quality Ethernet cable solved all issues I had. I get around 27-29 MB/sec most of the time.