Building or buying a NAS/Homeserver

[fioxwithoutx]

Dear community i am looking for a bit of help.

I currently have a Dell Poweredge T20 server with a Xeon processor and 16 gigs of ram used for Network Storage (Editing Photos With Lightroom etc.), Webserver and Plex server.

I am using 2x WD red 3TB drives configured in Ubuntu software raid 1.

Currently i am getting a transfer speed of 35-48mb/s, and i aim to be at least above 100mb/s 

Also the search time is very slow at times.

 

So my question is - where is the first bottleneck and what can i do to get some more performance out of my network storage.

Will a dedicated NAS work, is it the drives - maybe i should go full SSD... thoughts?

[PeachyUwUSenpai]

i'm getting 150 megabytes out of a similar setup using two 3tb red drives. are all your networking 10/100/1000 do you have any faulty wires is the nic in the t20 a 10/100/1000?

[Mr.Meerkat]

1. You mean MB/s right? 

mb=microbits

Mb=Megabits

MB=Megabytes

 

2. those hard-drives should be able to easily do over 100MB/s of transfer speeds so...something is bottlenecking it.

 

3. As mentioned above, can you check what speeds your system is syncing to the server/router/switch (and server to switch/router if you have one of those inbetween the server and pc)? Do you have a switch/router between the server and your computer? Are you using only using cat 5e and above cables?  NICs? All 1Gbps capable network interface controllers? 

 

IMO, you don't need to upgrade your current setup. Its just something within your network setup is bottlenecking the transfer speeds. 

[zbeegniev]

What kind of data are you copying? If it's a bunch of smaller files (like photos) 35 - 48 MB sounds about right. But if you're getting this kind of speeds when transferring a single large file (a few gigs), then something is definitely wrong...

[Jarsky]

I would start by checking the interface speed. Something like ethtool is really good for this.

 

So find your interface name using ifconfig usually eth0 on a physical install.

Then install ethtool and run it

sudo apt-get install ethtool
ethtool eth0 | less

 

Then I would bench the array for large contiguous files. 

 

Something like  this for write test

dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/share/write.test bs=1M count=10240

and something like this for a read test

dd if=/path/to/share/some-file.mkv of=/dev/zero

 

Then you might want to check your network speed using something like iPerf

[fioxwithoutx]

It is both when transfering smaller files 25-50MB and larger files of a couple og GB.
 

@Jarsky i'm getting read speed of 133MB/s and write speeds at 133MB/s.

Ethtool confirms Speed: 1000Mb/s

 

I am currently using CAT6 cables.

The router is an Asus RTAC87U, it should be able to handle the speeds, right?