Raspberry Pi NAS R/W Speeds

[milescas]

Hello all,

 

I was following a youtube tutorial to turn an old raspberry pi into a 'nas'. I believe it is a raspberry pi 2B.

Currently running it with openmediavault, and connecting via smb. I am on the same network as my pi, and the pi is using ethernet.

 

The read and write speeds to the drive connected to my pi are currently really bad (10MB/s ish)

The drive is an external ssd with speeds expected well past that. The file system is formatted in ext4.

 

I wanted to ask if this is because of the low processing power of the pi, with the low power cpu and low ram obviously.

Or if it could be other factors such as network speeds or software usage? 

 

Asking this question because I'm hoping to upgrade to a proper nas type setup, and wanted to ensure I won't be experiencing really low read and write speeds when that happens, as this is a topic I am not familiar with.

 

Thanks.

[Electronics Wizardy]

That seems network limited. Get a 1gbe nic and I think your limited to the usb ports on the system giving about 30mB/s speeds.

[Needfuldoer]

The Raspberry Pi 2B only has 100 meg Fast Ethernet. 10 megabytes per second is about all it can muster.

[milescas]

7 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

The Raspberry Pi 2B only has 100 meg Fast Ethernet. 10 megabytes per second is about all it can muster.

Thanks,

 

How much cpu processing is involved when transferring files to/from the pi?

If I got a 1gbe nic will that cpu end becoming the bottleneck, or will the usb port speed of the nic be the limiting factor? Meaning I'd be looking at around 50Mbyte/s?

[Kilrah]

Difficult to know without trying, but it definitely won't go faster than USB2. You can look at CPU usage while doing a 10MB/s transfer now and extrapolate.

[Bersella AI]

6 hours ago, milescas said:

How much cpu processing is involved when transferring files to/from the pi?

If I got a 1gbe nic will that cpu end becoming the bottleneck, or will the usb port speed of the nic be the limiting factor? Meaning I'd be looking at around 50Mbyte/s?

Even a quad-core ARM-based RTL9210 SoC, implemented in various models of pre-built NAS, would not be the bottleneck in Gigabit Ethernet. The real issue here is the I/O capability: this Pi, as mentioned, supports only 100Mbit Ethernet, and only USB 2.0 connectivity -- that is, any I/O would be limited by speeds of USB 2.0, or 480 Mbps (you may get an actual speed of ~40MB/s). Other more powerful ARM boards, or TV boxes, are instead recommended over this Pi.

[Jarsky]

The RPi 2 is quite slow by modern standards. Mine couldnt keep up running OpenELEC transcoding to 1080p due to CPU processing for the DTS audio; I had to either run it as Passthrough audo to my amplifier; or drop it to 720p with audio transcoding (to AC-3). I believe that even though Filesharing (SMB) is not a CPU intensive task it would still be intensive for the age of the CPU; combined with not having an actual PCie link I would probably estimate more like 25-40MB/s 

 

If you want something compact; you'd probably be better getting a CM4. An IO board and a PCI-E SATA card such as this. 

It has a PCIE2 x1 lane giving you 5-6Gbps; and native SATA support. So you should be able to do about 550MB/s locally with SATA SSD's, and saturate that 1gbE ethernet link (e.g 90MB/s)