Slow Samba share speeds

[Calamity1911]

Hello everyone.

On Black Friday this year, I decided to treat myself to a 4TB external drive for use as a NAS. I have an old laptop (6th gen core i3 mobile, 12GB RAM) with a bad battery that I converted into a "home server," basically just installed Lubuntu on it. I also had to get a USB3 to Gigabit Ethernet adapter since the onboard LAN port was only 100Mbit, and speeds were initially 12MB/s because of it. 

I should also add that the external drive I purchased was capable of around 200MB/s when connected directly to a Windows 11 laptop. Over my houses 1Gbit networking, I am only getting ~40MB/s peak read and writes. That still is faster than my actual plan from my ISP, but it still is a good chunk slower than gigabit speeds.

I also have it configured using Samba, as the desktops in the house use Windows. From the little bit of research I did, I found out that Samba can be pretty limited in terms of speed, but I was wondering if there is anything I could do to help with that bottleneck. I know there are other protocols for NASes, but I don't know which ones can be hosted on Linux and be used by a Windows client. Ideally I would be able to use Windows' "map a network drive" feature so I can have the NAS show as a Z:\ drive or something.

Thanks for any input.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Is this over a usb 2 connection? 40mbit seems like usb 2.

 

Id try using iperf to test network speeds.

 

Yea samba isn't that fast, but I can basically always get full gigabit with no configuration on modern systems.

[Calamity1911]

4 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Is this over a usb 2 connection? 40mbit seems like usb 2.

 

Id try using iperf to test network speeds.

 

Yea samba isn't that fast, but I can basically always get full gigabit with no configuration on modern systems.

It's 40 megabytes, not bits. Sorry for any miscommunication. I made sure to connect both the gigabit ethernet adapter and the external drive to separate USB3 ports.

[Electronics Wizardy]

12 minutes ago, Calamity1911 said:

It's 40 megabytes, not bits. Sorry for any miscommunication. I made sure to connect both the gigabit ethernet adapter and the external drive to separate USB3 ports.

USB 2 speeds is about that limit, so id make sure its actually running at usb 3 link. lsusb -vvv should tell you this

 

 

ALso give iperf a shot.

[Calamity1911]

5 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

USB 2 speeds is about that limit, so id make sure its actually running at usb 3 link. lsusb -vvv should tell you this

 

 

ALso give iperf a shot.

I verified that the hard drive is indeed connected over USB3 by using lsusb -vvv and verified the gigabit connection to the local network.

[Kilrah]

But did you check the Ethernet adapter is connected to USB3?

If it's in a USB2 port it'll still say gigabit since that's the speed the ethernet link runs at, just that since there's the USB2 bottleneck you won't get more than about 40MB/s through. 

[Calamity1911]

7 hours ago, Kilrah said:

But did you check the Ethernet adapter is connected to USB3?

If it's in a USB2 port it'll still say gigabit since that's the speed the ethernet link runs at, just that since there's the USB2 bottleneck you won't get more than about 40MB/s through. 

When I ran lsusb -vvv both the external drive and the gigabit adapter reported being connected over USB3. If I remember correctly, they actually reported USB3.10 but still, basically the same.

[SVThuh]

I had an issue similar to this with my G14 and TPlink USB3.1 gigabit adapter, but only on one specific usb port.   

 

I don't remember exactly what I did, but I believe there was a setting in the adapter properties limiting the speed.  I made some changes there and it began working fine.. It was a weird one.

 

Ive since freshly installed windows 11 and didn't have to deal with it again, so....

[Calamity1911]

I'm gonna have to eat my words here a bit. It turns out that on Linux, the adapter was only using a USB 2.0 link. My testing methodology for the Ethernet adapter was flawed.

Either way, I tried the same dongle on a windows laptop, and it legitimately got gigabit speeds. I ensured that by setting up a windows folder share on the network and it got ~100MB/s. 

So I then looked into possibly updating the drivers for it on Linux, and I did find some Linux drivers but there were some compilation errors for the drivers.

I gave up on Linux all together and then tried windows on the server. Still 40MB/s limit. No idea why at this point. I tried the Ethernet adapter in both of the laptop's USB3 ports to no avail. I have one more thing I can try tomorrow after my college classes.

[Calamity1911]

Alright new issue. I got a new ethernet adapter and it definitely reports using USB3 instead of USB2. However, I determined that using lsusb -vvv on a ubuntu install. I switched over to TrueNAS Core to give it a shot, and now it seems like it's back to USB2 speeds. Give me a break.

 

**EDIT**

Now it seems to do 40MB/s writes but it can actually do 80MB/s reads to/from the NAS now? Sure, man. Good enough for me.