Port wearing out on switch?

[porina]

I was going to copy a bunch of files (100+ GB) from an old system to a new file server. Estimated time 8+ hours. That's not right. Transfers were 10MB/s which was an immediate red flag, was it connected at 100Mbit? Yes it was, confirmed both on system and switch light. I standardised on gigabit as minimum so that was not expected. Ok, turn it off and on again. No change. Tried replacing the cable with another cat6. No change. The old cable was also cat6. Plugged cable into different port on switch. Gigabit!

 

Is the port failing? I haven't the chance to try an alternate device on the suspect port to confirm it. Is this failure mode a thing? Switch is an ancient consumer grade Netgear 8 port so nothing special. Had it for countless years. First time I've seen something like this happening. Maybe time to check out pricing of 2.5G switches now as I've partially upgraded already.

[da na]

It could be a failing port issue, could just be a firmware issue though. Hard to determine without having the switch in question though. Are file transfers the only thing throttled? Do you notice slowdowns on anything else?

[porina]

1 minute ago, Mel0nMan said:

It could be a failing port issue, could just be a firmware issue though. Hard to determine without having the switch in question though. Are file transfers the only thing throttled? Do you notice slowdowns on anything else?

It's on an old system which is primarily used for watching Youtube, but I have a ton of old files on it when I used to use it more. So, 100Mbit would not be a limitation in normal use to make me notice it.

 

Again, it is a consumer grade switch. There is no management of any kind on it. The only management control I have is pulling power on it.

[Naijin]

5 minutes ago, porina said:

It's on an old system which is primarily used for watching Youtube, but I have a ton of old files on it when I used to use it more. So, 100Mbit would not be a limitation in normal use to make me notice it.

 

Again, it is a consumer grade switch. There is no management of any kind on it. The only management control I have is pulling power on it.

Check the datasheet of the switch, some might have a set of ports at 1Gb while the others are 100Mb.

[porina]

31 minutes ago, Naijin said:

Check the datasheet of the switch, some might have a set of ports at 1Gb while the others are 100Mb.

I know I said it was old, but it isn't that old. As stated in my original post my home network has been gigabit at minimum for a long time.

[mariushm]

Contacts in the ports can oxidize (rub them with some isopropyl alcohol if needed), and contacts in the ports can also pop out of their dedicated channel and short out with other contacts in the jack. make sure all the 8 contacts in the ethernet jack are in their own channels. 

Visually inspect the ports, use a needle or something to press on each contact inside and make sure it springs back and that it aligns well. 

 

Cables can go bad over time, the pins biting into the wires in the ethernet plugs can loosen over time. I've seen it with manually crimped solid core ethernet cable, in a room that were poorly cooled, over the course of around 6-12 months the manually made patch cables started to break due to pins no longer touching the wires properly. 

 

Also as a tip if there's lots of small files , spend a couple of minutes and set up a ftp server on one computer ... filezilla ftp server literally takes a few  minutes to set up as a service, then set up a user and map the drives to that user. 

Then you can start a ftp client on the other computer and transfer multiple files in parallel (each filezilla client can do up to 10 simultaneous transfers)

 

If you do use filezilla ftp client to connect to the other computer's ftp server just make sure to go in options and set all transfers to binary and set the maximum connection to 10 and you're all set.

 

[HanZie82]

2 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Contacts in the connector can oxidize, and contacts in the connector can also pop out of their dedicated channel and short out with other contacts in the jack. make sure all the 8 contacts in the ethernet jack are in their own channels. 

Visually inspect the ports, use a needle or something to press on each contact inside and make sure it springs back and that it aligns well. 

 

Cables can go bad over time, the pins biting into the wires in the ethernet plugs can loosen over time. I've seen it with manually crimped solid core ethernet cable, in a room that were poorly cooled, over the course of around 6-12 months the manually made patch cables started to break due to pins no longer touching the wires properly. 

 

Also as a tip if there's lots of small files , spend a couple of minutes and set up a ftp server on one computer ... filezilla ftp server literally takes a few  minutes to set up as a service, then set up a user and map the drives to that user. 

Then you can start a ftp client on the other computer and transfer multiple files in parallel (each filezilla client can do up to 10 simultaneous transfers)

 

If you do use filezilla ftp client to connect to the other computer's ftp server just make sure to go in options and set all transfers to binary and set the maximum connection to 10 and you're all set.

 

I was about to say about that oxidation good call.

 

As for the FTP, inside the network that can be a lot slower for smaller files, yet faster for bigger ones.

[Sir Asvald]

What switch do you have? is it a dumb switch or an enterprise switch?

[porina]

9 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Visually inspect the ports, use a needle or something to press on each contact inside and make sure it springs back and that it aligns well. 

I think horizontally bent contacts is unlikely but I'll give it a check for dirt/oxidation at some point.

 

9 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Cables can go bad over time

Swapping cable made no difference.

 

9 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Also as a tip if there's lots of small files , spend a couple of minutes and set up a ftp server on one computer

I didn't mention, source is a HD so that will be the limiting factor for small files.

 

4 minutes ago, Sir Asvald said:

What switch do you have? is it a dumb switch or an enterprise switch?

I had stated it is a dumb consumer grade switch.

[mariushm]

You can make connection directly between computers, you know. 

ust use regular cable between the two cards and if they're both gigabit, they'll do auto pair detection and just work. 

 

Set a unique IP to each computer ( ex 192.168.0.100 and 192.168.0.101  and same subnet mask 255.255.255.0 ) and you're good to go. 

 

Yes, ftp connections will be slow for INDIVIDUAL small files because the client has to request or specify a port, and then send the command to get the file (so there's an extra back and forth between computers) and then the connection is closed BUT while the client does this exchange, the other 9 connections will be busy transferring other files. 

So it beats regular windows sharing which isn't multithreaded. 

The 10 simultaneous connections are not a problem even with large files, as the drives will sustain 50MB+/s ... I had no problems doing 110 MB/s transfers for 30m+ with 1-2 TB drives (old and slower than modern drives)

 

I guess you could try robocopy or some alternatives like let's say TeraCopy : https://www.codesector.com/teracopy

 

See also (but note it's 5 years old article) : https://www.raymond.cc/blog/12-file-copy-software-tested-for-fastest-transfer-speed/

 

I got "unstoppable copier", out of that article,  great tool to copy files from old dvds that have bitrot and have random read errors... good for skipping sectors or retrying multiple times to read stuff. 

 

[porina]

57 minutes ago, mariushm said:

You can make connection directly between computers, you know. 

The source and destination are not physically close to each other, and I have no intent to move either. That's the point of the existing network. They don't have to be close.

 

57 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Yes, ftp connections will be slow for INDIVIDUAL small files

I don't know what problem you're trying to solve here. With the bad port, I was limited by network speed to 10MB/s. With that resolved, I'm now limited by the destination write rate which is uncached unraid at a practical speed around 50MB/s. I'm doing on average 5x the speed which makes things taking a day go down to hours. Read speeds are not a limiting factor. Time spend implementing any potentially faster method would not be made up by faster transfers. It is practically done since I started this thread.

 

I'm planning on upgrading unraid with cache disks, which will help for normal use but not right now as I'm moving a lot of files.