Network transfer bottleneck

[DedSec_97]

So I have a bit of a problem... 

I recently bought an old server machine off eBay hoping to have a centralized storage solution for my house. It is a poweredge 2950 by Dell, with two 2.33ghz Xeons (they are kinda old), 8GB of fully buffered RAM, and a perc 6/i RAID controller. In it, I have 6 Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 250GB drives. In order to achieve better reliability and speed, I decided to set up Raid 50 (a combination of RAID 5 and RAID 0). I was hoping for some decent speeds, at least so I wouldn't have to wait hours for my computers to transfer their data. Unfortunately my speeds are a terrible 15 Mb per second transfers. I got very disappointed and I decided to test my transfer speeds with RAID 0 and I got the same! My biggest suspect here is the fact that I have to transfer my data through wifi, but I think that it is still very low, EVEN FOR WIFI! So I come to my fellow brothers here in the forums for help. WHAT IS MY BOTTLENECK????!!! I'm almost sure everyone is gonna say its the wifi, but I really feel like there is something else...

 

Btw the server is connected over ethernet to the router

[DnFx91]

as long as your spinning drives arent super old and shit, it probably is thew wifi, but to rule it out, what wifi are you using ? as in which band ? which revision ?

[You_are_a_cunt]

15Mb/s seems about right for wifi. That's your bottleneck point.

It has a gigabit NIC, so I'd suggest you use that

[DedSec_97]

I'm transferring on a 5GHz. The router is a WNDR4500v2. The hard drives are used, but they don't seem too old. And if it was the hard drives, the RAID 0 would probably have produced better results

[You_are_a_cunt]

1 minute ago, DedSec_97 said:

I'm transferring on a 5GHz. The router is a WNDR4500v2. The hard drives are used, but they don't seem too old. And if it was the hard drives, the RAID 0 would probably have produced better results

Transferring on 5GHz means nothing in therms of speed. You're probably using a b/g/n solution, with n being the highest of the standards, which has a transfer rate of roughly 15mb/s

[DedSec_97]

8 minutes ago, revsilverspine said:

Transferring on 5GHz means nothing in therms of speed. You're probably using a b/g/n solution, with n being the highest of the standards, which has a transfer rate of roughly 15mb/s

Okay, then yeah its probably he wifi. Any suggestions as to how to improve the speeds?

[You_are_a_cunt]

Just now, DedSec_97 said:

Okay, then yeah its probably he wifi. Any suggestions as to how to improve the speeds?

cheapest would be using the wired connection

[mariushm]

The router you have ( WNDR4500v2 ) is capable of maximum 450 mbps on 5 gbps, IF your network card also supports that speed.

With WiFi you basically have half of that maximum bandwidth for download and half for upload, so your actual upload speed is limited to 225 mbps or around 28 MB/s

 

Your network card probably can't do 450 mbps in the first place and secondly, you only get that maximum speed in ideal conditions.. with distance between the router and your wireless card, the speeds go down.

 

Look in your "network and sharing center" at "local area connection status" and see at what bandwidth the network card actually connects to the router.

 

Then... you may have raid 50, but the hard drives are still crap. I'd be  surprised if you'll get a sustained write speed of more than 50 MB/s even with the raid. Best would be to connect your computer to that server using a gigabit ethernet cable.