Hi everyone I need a quick sanity check. I already wasted hours of my life trying to figure this out.
I have a NETGEAR R7800 with the latest OpenWrt and I'm trying to use it as a mini NAS. I connected an external enclosure with 2 HDDs through the eSATA port and max transfer speeds I'm seeing is somewhere around 37 MB/s. Pretty disappointing not gonna lie. When connected directly to my PC I can reach as high as 180 MB/s which is pretty reasonable for two 3TB drives running in RAID 1. I'm 100% sure my ksmbd setup is configured properly and the resaon for this lackluster performance is a hardware bottleneck. When transfering files htop is showing 70%-95% CPU utilisation on both threads.
So why am I even posting this? I've seen R7800 users here and on other forums bragging about saturating the whole gigabit bandwidth and getting 100 MB/s when transferring files which seems impossible. I clean flashed my router many times and tried different configurations and ksmbd yielded the best outcome - 37 MB/s which is like three times slower compared to what other users had achieved.
So back the the original question. Am I really hardware limited (and other guys were bullshitting about their speed) or is there something wrong with my setup? Any input will be appreciated, I can't sleep at night because of this.
How fast is time dd if=/dev/sda bs=100M count=100 of=/dev/null ?
1 Like
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
real 1m 35.41s
user 0m 0.00s
sys 0m 19.24s
That is ~100MB/s, close to saturating gigabit. Lets see your /etc/config/ksmbd .
Just in general, this is still a router - not a NAS. Routing is a different workload than acting as a fileserver and cifs has quite a bit of overhead on top.
Yes, modern ARM is turning the tables somewhat, but the typical NAS still has more CPU, more cores and more RAM at its disposal - and it doesn't have to care about routing at the same time.