Bekijk de volledige versie : What transfer rate to expect with USB-HDD on WL500gP
packoman
05-08-2008, 11:13
Hi,
I'm looking to buy a WL500gP Ver 1. I would like to also use it as a NAS with a USB-HDD connected to it. I found some information on the transfer rates I can expect but they were a bit confusing.
What I found was that you should get a rate of about 3.5 MByte/s (read: NOT bits). This would be enough for me and I would buy it. In other posts on the other hand I found something about transferspeeds of 700kbyte/s, which would definitely be too slow. So can anyone confirm or rebute either of these numbers?
Thanks in advance,
Michael
Tamadite
05-08-2008, 14:46
Hi,
I'm looking to buy a WL500gP Ver 1. I would like to also use it as a NAS with a USB-HDD connected to it. I found some information on the transfer rates I can expect but they were a bit confusing.
What I found was that you should get a rate of about 3.5 MByte/s (read: NOT bits). This would be enough for me and I would buy it. In other posts on the other hand I found something about transferspeeds of 700kbyte/s, which would definitely be too slow. So can anyone confirm or rebute either of these numbers?
Thanks in advance,
Michael
Asus WL500gP is not intended to be used as a NAS device but as a pure router hence the fact of featuring USB ports is a mere matter of supporting low bandwidth demanding devices like printers or at most webcams. On the other hand the speed of transferring USB-HDD data depends rather much on the "HDD" you are using. I'm using a 8GB pen drive which is not intended to be used as a hard drive either. When running hdparm -tT I get following results as average:
Timing cached reads: 96 MB in 2.00 seconds = 48.00 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 18 MB in 3.14 seconds = 5.73 MB/sec
If you are looking for the best router/NAS performance I recommend you to look at those functionalities separately, for instance router Asus and NAS Qnap.
3,5 -> 4 MByte/sec is quite simple to achieve. Follow the excellent how-to's on this forum and you'll be good.
As in Tamadite's advice, if this speed is sufficient for you, go for it.
If you now already think those speeds are to slow, forget about it and get a real (=expensive) NAS. However, if you settle for these speeds (which is acceptable and workable in soho-environment) you'll get a lot extra which your normal NAS won't do.
Buy a harddisk with sufficient cache. 8MB or more.
I have one 2.5''harddisk with 2MB cache which i don't get more than 2MB/sec with.
Another disk i have achieves 3.5MB/sec. (WD Mybook)
packoman
06-08-2008, 15:58
Well 3.5Mbyte/s will be ok.
My idea is not to use as NAS for heavy usage, but rather to be able to sync and backup my Home-PC and my laptop and be able to access my data when I'm on the go (where the internet connection will be the bottleneck). So when I'll be copying data I won't need that fast transfer rates.
Besides from what I read, this router paired with Olegs firmware sounds like a killer device. So that I could even use it to centralize and script my LAN with WakeOnLAN for automatic backups, when my PC is off, i.e.: wake it per WOL with a script and run backup and shut it off again. This sounds very intriguing...
So I'll definitely be getting one of these. Look out for me asking Newbie questions in the next couple of weeks or so... :)
And thanks for your replies,
Michael
With hdparm and 3.5" 16MB Cache FreeAgent Pro 500 GB HDD i got this results:
/dev/scsi/host1/bus0/target0/lun0/part1:
Timing cached reads: 96 MB in 2.02 seconds = 47.52 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 30 MB in 3.17 seconds = 9.46 MB/sec
packoman
06-08-2008, 16:35
With hdparm and 3.5" 16MB Cache FreeAgent Pro 500 GB HDD i got this results:
/dev/scsi/host1/bus0/target0/lun0/part1:
Timing cached reads: 96 MB in 2.02 seconds = 47.52 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 30 MB in 3.17 seconds = 9.46 MB/sec
Actually I've already seen a couple of the test, but I don't understand what they represent. Are they actually cached and buffered read speeds over the network or just from the disk and nothing more? Especially the first result wouldn't make sense over a 100Mbit LAN that only has 12Mbyte/sec throughput...
Need some clearing up.
Thanks
GoldDigger
06-08-2008, 18:10
I am using WL500GPv2 with a Lacie 160GB USB/Firewire external hdd. Both ftp/samba max out at about here mentioned 3.5 MB/s speed. Guess you can't do much anything about it, cause I've tested it by copying bunch of huge files between two USB hdd's both connected to the Asus and speed got nicely divided by 2.
As for hdparm, it doesn't have anything to do with LAN throughoutput as it simply tests cached and non-cached read speeds of the disk.
Here are results from Asus:
Timing cached reads: 58 MB in 2.02 seconds = 28.71 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 12 MB in 3.09 seconds = 3.88 MB/sec
while these are from P4 1.7, 512 MB with 40GB IDE disk:
Timing cached reads: 728 MB in 2.00 seconds = 364.02 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 92 MB in 3.02 seconds = 30.49 MB/sec
@raas
Could you please give me a link to the proper "How to" to configure samba to get the best performance in moving files from HDD connected to the asus and the PC. I followed the optimal how to from wengi in partitioning and formatting th HDD, installing transmission; but i'm using the original samba in oleg's firmware. With this configuration i find a very slow transfer rate moving files from asus conncected HD to PC and vice-versa.
Another question is: how can i connect to the HD connected to the asus from internet? can you suggest me the easiest and safest way to do this? Thank you for your answers
Tamadite
02-09-2008, 21:02
Another question is: how can i connect to the HD connected to the asus from internet? can you suggest me the easiest and safest way to do this? Thank you for your answers
The easiest is via FTP. The easiest and most secure is via secure FTP (SSH/SSL/TLS).
The complicated, secure and with the same sort of access as you have while accessing your HD from your LAN is via VPN. Via VPN you can map the HD as you do it in your LAN without incurring in security issues; on the other hand you might have long response times.
The slowest modern pendrive or any harddrive is faster, then WL-500gp.
In realworld 2-4MB/s is all i can achive with samba or ftp on any drive.
Asus has no DMA - so CPU usage is the problem
The easiest is via FTP. The easiest and most secure is via secure FTP (SSH/SSL/TLS).
The complicated, secure and with the same sort of access as you have while accessing your HD from your LAN is via VPN. Via VPN you can map the HD as you do it in your LAN without incurring in security issues; on the other hand you might have long response times.
Sorry but i use this router since few months. Pratically, i've to enable FTP server in oleg's firmware, give a name and a PW, but how can i know the address at witch i've to connect to?
Secure FTP is made using for example a program like putty? and in that case how i know the address? thanks
The address of the ftp server is 192.168.1.1 or you can configure a DNS.
@tex,
network speed
if you've followed wengi's tutorial then you should have disabled the builtin samba in step 1, and installed the samba2 package in step 10.
I don't have experience with transfer speeds with the buitin samba, so my best bet for you to get your speed on par is by following the complete tutorial from wengi, and not just parts of it.
hdd connected to the internet
like tamadite said, through ftp (or http, but you've to run a webserver)
also, you'll have to do some port forwarding on your main router (don't know if you use the router functionality of the asus or have a diff. router) to bind port 21 (ftp) of your outside ip (www.whatsmyip.org) to the inner ip of asus (normally 192.168.1.1)
HTH
Tamadite
03-09-2008, 19:39
To my post #2 below I can add the following results:
FTP transmission rate
================
Transmission environment: wired LAN-to-LAN
FTP Server: proftpd 1.3.1-4
FTP Server type: FTP (no encryption)
FTP Client: Inbuilt in Windows XP (command prompt)
Source File Placement: 8GB USB Pen Drive
ftp> get xyz.bin
200 PORT command successful
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for xyz.bin (437923584 bytes)
226 Transfer complete
ftp: 439520841 bytes received in 265,38Seconds 1656,23Kbytes/sec.
To my post #2 below I can add the following results:
FTP transmission rate
================
Transmission environment: wired LAN-to-LAN
FTP Server: proftpd 1.3.1-4
FTP Server type: FTP (no encryption)
FTP Client: Inbuilt in Windows XP (command prompt)
Source File Placement: 8GB USB Pen Drive
ftp> get xyz.bin
200 PORT command successful
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for xyz.bin (437923584 bytes)
226 Transfer complete
ftp: 439520841 bytes received in 265,38Seconds 1656,23Kbytes/sec.
hi,
have you tried vsftpd ?
in my experience vsftpd is twice as fast as proftpd.
@raas
Thanks for suggestions. i tried to install samba2 as il wengi tutorial disabling the samba from firmware, but when i've to configure it with web-interface
http://IP.ADRESS.OF.ASUS:901
i cant find that page.. can you please help me?
@tex,
Hi,
have you saved the configuration after installing samba?
flashfs save && flashfs commit && flashfs enable && reboot
and, did you litteraly follow the link: http://IP.ADRESS.OF.ASUS:901 ??:eek:
(like haven't you changed ip.adress.of.asus to your actual ip of the asus, if you haven't changed this it would be http://192.168.1.1:901 :rolleyes:)
@tex,
Hi,
have you saved the configuration after installing samba?
flashfs save && flashfs commit && flashfs enable && reboot
and, did you litteraly follow the link: http://IP.ADRESS.OF.ASUS:901 ??:eek:
(like haven't you changed ip.adress.of.asus to your actual ip of the asus, if you haven't changed this it would be http://192.168.1.1:901 :rolleyes:)
i followed the tutorial litterally...i got only some difficoulty in coping/pasting the content of S10xinetd with vi. I can acces the router at the address http://192.168.1.1/ but when i try to go to http://192.168.1.1:901 i get IE error page not found...
i saved and reboot and samba is working: i can find the tmp folder in network resources but i can't write on it... tks for your attention
Tamadite
04-09-2008, 23:56
@raas
You are right, the idea of using FTP to measure transmission speed might not be the best. I have repeted the test as follows:
dd transfer rate (Linux)
============
dd if=/dev/extu/abc.bin of=/abc.bin
646680+1 records in
646680+1 records out
331100448 bytes (331 MB) copied, 171.544 seconds, 1.9 MB/s
ftp transfer rate (Linux)
============
ftp> get abc.bin
local: abc.bin remote: abc.bin
200 PORT command successful
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for abc.bin (331100448 bytes)
226 Transfer complete
331100448 bytes received in 174.78 secs (1850.0 kB/s)
It seems FTP has a noticeable but marginal impact on the performance of the transmission.
When comparing this example with example in post #15, it seems MS-Windows XP has an impact on the performance as well.
Do you get a significant better performance when using vsftpd compared to proftpd? I wonder if the USB performance on the unit is lower than the performance of the proftpd FTP server.
NOTE: this test has been performed as in post #15: abc.bin source file is placed on a 8GB pen drive connected to my WL-500gP. The copy has been performed on a wired LAN-to-LAN environment.
Do you get a significant better performance when using vsftpd compared to proftpd? I wonder if the USB performance on the unit is lower than the performance of the proftpd FTP server.
In my experience yes, when I was running vsftpd I could almost get 4 Mbyte/sec transferate, (internal network)
But as I use ftp only for external (=internet) connections and proftpd has more functionality I decided to use proftpd, because even though it's slower than vsftpd it's still a lot faster than my internet-upload.
For file access in my internal network I just use samba which gives me a contant 3.2-3.5 Mbyte/sec which is acceptible for me
can someone tell me how to unistall samba2? i cannot configure it so i want to go back to samba installed in oleg firmware.. thanks
can someone tell me how to unistall samba2? i cannot configure it so i want to go back to samba installed in oleg firmware.. thanks
ipkg remove samba2
@raas
Thanks very much...