TS-431 USB3 speed is slow

[dingdongrb]

Sorry if my question is not in the correct section of this forum.

I am not only new to this forum (my first post) I am also a new NAS owner and I'm learning as I go, please be patient with me..

Currently I have only one 4Tb drive installed into my NAS bay and I'm in the process of taking my external USB HHD which is loaded with videos and moving (cut n paste) them into the NAS drive. This seems to be taking forever and the speed I see is only 5-6 MB/second. What am I doing wrong and how can I make this occur quicker?

[dingdongrb]

Never mind I figured it out myself.... I would tell you but I am a little embarrassed... As I said, I'm a newbie to having a NAS as this is my first... Oh well, live and learn....

[pwilson]

Never mind I figured it out myself.... I would tell you but I am a little embarrassed... As I said, I'm a newbie to having a NAS as this is my first... Oh well, live and learn....

You aren't the first "newbie" and you won't be the last. Please share anyway. Your embarrassment might save someone else from a lot of grief. Please, Community Forums are about "sharing", and helping each other, please "give back" to the Community helping others benefit from your new found wisdom.

I've been playing with Linux for 25 years, even I make mistakes. Wisdom comes from Experience. Frequently Experience comes from bad judgement. We're no smarter than you are, we've simply been doing this longer than you have. We were all "newbies" once. Please share the issue and solution for the benefit of others.

If you search my posts, you'll discover a few embarrassing messages there too. We're a Community. We learn from each other. "Newbie" is like "Virginity", it can be "cured" with experience.

[dingdongrb]

Fair enough Patrick and reading through many of the posts I see how much of a contributor you are.

So as I stated I had an external HDD full of movies that I wanted to migrate over to my 4 Tb single drive in my new NAS system. I had the external HDD connected to the NAS USB port but the speed was only about 5.6 MB/sec and I just couldn't understand why. Then I realized that I made the 'cut-n-paste' command from my PC File Explorer so I was essentially networking from my PC to the NAZ which in turn went out and did the task with the external HHD..... Duhhhhh So after thinking I wised up and went to the NAS control panel and using the 'File Station' I merely did a 'move' from the external HDD to the NAS.... My speed is now more inline with what a USB 3.0 port speed should be, 40-50 MB/sec.... I feel like an idiot but only if I do it again...

[pwilson]

Fair enough Patrick and reading through many of the posts I see how much of a contributor you are.

So as I stated I had an external HDD full of movies that I wanted to migrate over to my 4 Tb single drive in my new NAS system. I had the external HDD connected to the NAS USB port but the speed was only about 5.6 MB/sec and I just couldn't understand why. Then I realized that I made the 'cut-n-paste' command from my PC File Explorer so I was essentially networking from my PC to the NAZ which in turn went out and did the task with the external HHD..... Duhhhhh So after thinking I wised up and went to the NAS control panel and using the 'File Station' I merely did a 'move' from the external HDD to the NAS.... My speed is now more inline with what a USB 3.0 port speed should be, 40-50 MB/sec.... I feel like an idiot but only if I do it again...

Nothing to be embarrassed about here. You identified the issue, and resolved it all by yourself. This makes you "wise" rather than "stupid". You should be "proud" to share this information. You did a great job of both troubleshooting and resolution.

I typically use "SSH + /usr/bin/cp" (Linux "copy" command) rather than File Station for this type of effort here but I'm an SSH fan. I love working with the Linux CLI. The important part of this thread, isn't that you used File Station, but rather than you identified the "bottleneck" causing the issue, and resolved it.

Great job. Thank-you for sharing.

[jeraldban]

dingdongrb: Thank you for sharing, like Patrick said, everyone is a newbie at some point. I am one right now! I did the EXACT same thing you did, but I wasn't as smart as you, so I searched for solutions here. You saved me a whole bunch of grief and time.

And thank you Patrick for constantly providing advise and help, as you've also saved me a lot of time and spared me of lots of pain!

[extraverage]

Hello guys,
I just got a new TS-431 and I have the same experience.

I installed 2x WD40EFRX disks and I attached my old external HDD via the front USB3 port.

I use FileStation in the browser window for copying or moving files. This is extremely slow.
Is there a better solution or some kinda trick?

Many thanks for the help,
Cheers,
K

ps:
• I am on OSX if it counts
• Firmware version is 4.2.0.20151118

[slavae2015]

Hi there,

same issue here: very slow copy speed from external USB 3.0 drive to QNAP-431 Raid5 NAS.

Copy is done direct over Filestation

Any idea anyone?

THX a lot!

S.

[mikewebb]

I thought I would revive this as I've been having this issues ever since I've installed my TS-431 early last year. After many months of working through everything I could think off or read about, I somehow feel as though the issue is ultimately my fault for going cheap on a NAS with "no grunt". But still, there is no explanation for the ridiculous slow speeds when doing a USB3.0 direct attached external HDD. Transferring using the 1Gbs network connection is faster.

OK here is my testing and findings.

Firmeware 4.3.3.0238
For external HDD I've have tried a WD and Seagate 1, 2 and 4 TB as well as a 512 SSD. No difference in speed transfers.
For internal drives I have 4 x 3TB WD red
On the NAS I have tried JBOD, RAID10 and RAID 5. No difference in speed
File system on HDD I've tried EXT2, EXT4, exFAT (with and without licence), HFS+, NTFS. No difference in speed.
I've tried using the front and rear USB3.0 ports. The rear ones are on average half the speed of the front one

File being copied for testing is a 1.6GB movie file
Speeds file copied 5 times and speed averaged
- Using the network = 49 MB/s
- Using rsync -a on the command line while ssh'd into the NAS = 24 MB/s (nearly 90% CPU) (Consistent speed)
- Using rsync -az on the command line while ssh'd into the NAS = 7 MB/s (nearly 100% CPU) (consistent speed)
- Using filestation 5 = 46 MB/s (60% to nearly 95%) (wildly fluctuating speeds)

Same tests using rsync -a on linux system with Xeon and m.2 using exfat-fuse= just over 100MBs consistent speed so something some where was maxing out, maybe sata/usb bridge on the usb device?

Something is extremely under performing or wrong with the NAS, yes it is cheap and low powered but was specifically designed for the storage and moving of files in a common user friendly manner.

The TS-431 was stop gap measure while researched a NAS and backup solutions. It now sits in an outbuilding for offsite storage of LVM snapshots

Mik

[mikewebb]

Same tests using rsync -a on linux system with Xeon and m.2 using exfat-fuse= just over 100MBs consistent speed so something some where was maxing out, maybe sata/usb bridge on the usb device?

Mounted the exFAT formatted USB HDD on the same linux workstation, still using fuse as it is the only option that I know off (besides forking out again for the paragon license). This time I used the flush option. Nearly a sustained 200MB/s 20GB of 1GB files.

I noticed that the qnap doesn't doesn't mount ufsd file types with with the flush option, maybe because it can cause data lose if a user just yanks out the USB drive? I tried to manually mount the drive as ufsd with the flush option but there is some wackery going on that wont allow me to do that..

Mike

[dchang0]

@mikewebb, are you maxing out anything in the performance monitor? I have seen someone's blog post with a graph of throughput (across the LAN) increasing noticeably with a RAM upgrade on a QNAP NAS (I don't remember the model).

I suspect the NAS in the blog post was using swap space less often due to having more RAM, but it might also be some sort of caching mechanism for the RAID drives. If your RAM util% is maxed out all the time, you might not be getting the best possible throughput.

I am sort of in the same situation as you--I just bought a USB 3.1 external enclosure because my old USB 2.0 enclosure was too slow, but I have not even begun to use the new USB 3.1 enclosure to see how well or how badly it performs. I have a beefier but old NAS model, TS-469 Pro. Not the same as yours, but maybe there is some crossover.

UPDATE: I am testing my new USB 3.1 external drive now using the dd commands described here:

http://www.binarytides.com/linux-test-drive-speed/

It is fast. I got between 56MB/s and 75MB/s copying DVD-sized ISOs using the dd command with bs=1M. It might be a good idea for you to try using dd, as it is sure to be of lower overhead than FileStation.

[mikewebb]

Yes. The CPU was maxing out. I don't use the GUI in the browser to copy files around. My go to is rsync with a health dose of regex, I just find it a faster, more stream lined process.

I'm very happy with the way I'm utilising my TS-431 now. Storing off server incremental LVM snapshots. I have it configured raid 10 dishing out LUNs via iSCSI with a tiny power cost.