Only 100Mbps on Gigabit LAN

[rmog2133]

I setup  a home network to allow access to my NAS. Hardwired connections from two computers to a TPLink Gigabit switch, then to the xfinity Gateway. NAS is plugged into the second ethernet port on the Gateway. The Gateway is rated for Gigabit throughput as well.

I used all Cat6 cable, longest cables are 50 ft, so shouldn't have significant enough signal loss to be a factor.

NAS is a re-purposed gaming machine running Asus Z270 mobo and i5 7600k, running from the stock ethernet port (also gigabit).

On paper every part of the system is gigabit...when I went to transfer all my media to the NAS this morning, I am only getting a combined 100Mbps throughput to the NAS. 

 

Any ideas? I would really like to have the bandwidth since this is going to be used by multiple devices to stream 4k content and music simultaneously. 

 

Thanks!

[Catsrules]

6 minutes ago, rmog2133 said:

On paper every part of the system is gigabit...when I went to transfer all my media to the NAS this morning, I am only getting a combined 100Mbps throughput to the NAS. 

 

 

 

Thanks!

You sure the transfer is 100Mbps and not 100MBps.

[BrinkGG]

3 minutes ago, rmog2133 said:

I setup  a home network to allow access to my NAS. Hardwired connections from two computers to a TPLink Gigabit switch, then to the xfinity Gateway. NAS is plugged into the second ethernet port on the Gateway. The Gateway is rated for Gigabit throughput as well.

I used all Cat6 cable, longest cables are 50 ft, so shouldn't have significant enough signal loss to be a factor.

NAS is a re-purposed gaming machine running Asus Z270 mobo and i5 7600k, running from the stock ethernet port (also gigabit).

On paper every part of the system is gigabit...when I went to transfer all my media to the NAS this morning, I am only getting a combined 100Mbps throughput to the NAS. 

 

Any ideas? I would really like to have the bandwidth since this is going to be used by multiple devices to stream 4k content and music simultaneously. 

 

Thanks!

If you're using mechanical hard drives, you're limited by the speed of those drives. If you want to test this, try creating a RAM disk or enabling Memory caching on your NAS. You should see spikes up to whatever your system can handle. 

 

TL;DR, you're limited by the slowest link here. My guess is it's an HDD somewhere.

[Catsrules]

2 minutes ago, BrinkGG said:

If you're using mechanical hard drives, you're limited by the speed of those drives. If you want to test this, try creating a RAM disk or enabling Memory caching on your NAS. You should see spikes up to whatever your system can handle. 

 

TL;DR, you're limited by the slowest link here. My guess is it's an HDD somewhere.

That is a good point as well, it will even get worse if you have multiple files copies going at once, and/or are copying many small files. 

For file copy test I usually pick a single large video file. 1GB or bigger and measure my speed based off that.  

[UrbanFreestyle]

I had issues with my Buffalo and my Seagate NAS. was getting 15-25MBp/s however i setup a spare windows machine with a share and it was saturating my gb link.

 

So now i'm building my own ITX Freenas box.

[mariushm]

Look at the actual connectors and make sure those pins in the jacks aren't shorted between them.  Those pins inside the jacks are somewhat springy and rarely they can get out of their channel and touch other pins inside the jack.

 

Look in your control panel at your network card (network card status) and see if it connects at 100mbps or 1 gbps. Sometimes, if there's a few transmission errors, your network card will fall back to 100 mbps until you manually reconfigure it to 1 gbps from Device Manager (from network card's advanced options)

Rarely, cables can get damaged or wires inside the ethernet jacks no longer make proper with those pins... for 100 mbps only 4 wires out of the 8 wires in the cable are needed, for 1 gbps you need all 8 wires. 

 

Mechanical drives can achieve more than 100mbps ... 100 mbps is only 12.5 MB/s (approximately), and a lot of modern drives can sustain over 125 MB/s (1gbps) ... ex a 6-10 TB drive these days can reach 260 MB/s.

 

While you have Cat6 ... some cheap cables and lie about the rating or use copper clad aluminum wires (CCA) instead of regular quality copper wires,  because those CCA wires are cheaper (they're aluminum core with some thin copper plating on them) .. These cheaper wires have higher resistance and require more power to transmit over long distances. 50ft is not really a long distance but who knows.

Some onboard network cards have "Energy saving" features enabled by default, which reduce transmission power so in very rare cases it can happen that the power used by network card is too weak for the device at the other end and the device at other end may force down the speed to 100mbps for higher signal strength.

Again, you can disable those features in the Advanced tab in your  network card properties, in Device Manager.

[rmog2133]

Thanks everyone for the responses! 

 

Turns out...I'm as forgetful as my wife says.

 

The last poster reminded me of the differences between bps and Bps....

 

Was moving about 3TB of movies, smallest at 800MB, and showing speeds of about 110-120MBps, or approximately 1Gbps.

 

Wow.

 

Thanks again for all the responses! Only two more drives to copy and it's all moved!