WRT160NL - Slow copying to Samba shared NAS

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buddee
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 18, 2012 0:07    Post subject: Reply with quote
Oh i'm not saying i don't believe that your speed improved, im just not letting this kinda statement..

"So it appears it is NTFS that causes the slowdown "

Steer out the belief that the router architecture is what limits USB speeds.. Cool

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Detection
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 18, 2012 0:08    Post subject: Reply with quote
buddee wrote:
Oh i'm not saying i don't believe that your speed improved, im just not letting this kinda statement..

"So it appears it is NTFS that causes the slowdown "

Steer out the belief that the router architecture is what limits USB speeds.. Cool


I know I'm 100% with you on the router being a major bottleneck, didn't mean it to sound as if NTFS was the only issue, just a heads up for anyone wanting a nice boost Smile

Sorry, should have worded that a bit better Wink

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rseiler
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 18, 2012 23:53    Post subject: Reply with quote
Detection wrote:
Copying another 700MB avi to it and I`m getting 7-8MB/s now over my 2.5MB/s using NTFS

Which is roughly 1/3 the typical real-world speed writing to an external USB2 drive (~25MB/s). I wonder what router CPU you must have before it approaches that?

buddee wrote:
And yes i know what you mean about the USB 1.1 speeds, it does seem like that, but get an older router that only has USB 1.1 support, like say a WL-520gU and you wanna talk about turtle slow.

I think that's DD-WRT's longstanding problem though, since the port itself is 2.0. It's a little surprising that this problem is still with us.
buddee
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Joined: 06 Feb 2010
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Location: Little Rock

PostPosted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 1:00    Post subject: Reply with quote
rseiler wrote:
Detection wrote:
Copying another 700MB avi to it and I`m getting 7-8MB/s now over my 2.5MB/s using NTFS

Which is roughly 1/3 the typical real-world speed writing to an external USB2 drive (~25MB/s). I wonder what router CPU you must have before it approaches that?

buddee wrote:
And yes i know what you mean about the USB 1.1 speeds, it does seem like that, but get an older router that only has USB 1.1 support, like say a WL-520gU and you wanna talk about turtle slow.

I think that's DD-WRT's longstanding problem though, since the port itself is 2.0. It's a little surprising that this problem is still with us.


Not really surprising to me, even with USB 2.0 support on a wl-520gU it wouldn't matter.. Its the router architecture..

And its not only the CPU that would cause this bottle-necking performance, its also the bus architecture, simply put the consumer router's of today won't ever really do true USB 2.0 speeds, if you want something like that, i'd look into an Alix board or x86..

http://pcengines.ch/alix.htm

Which is pretty much a PC based router, you buy your own wireless cards for it and use what you want, and there are many choices of OS's to run on it such as dd-wrt supports them or linux or BSD. Cool

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rseiler
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 16:10    Post subject: Reply with quote
Thanks. When you referred earlier to the WZR-HP-AG300H, which is certainly on the high end of anything people here are apt to have, and the E3000, you placed them in context with each other, but I'm curious where they fall numerically in terms of writing to NAS. How much better do they do than the 8 MB/s you get with a low-end router?
hiazle
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Joined: 13 Feb 2011
Posts: 22

PostPosted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 22:40    Post subject: Reply with quote
Detection wrote:
Just an update for anyone else with this problem

I formatted another 80GB laptop drive to EXT3, plugged it into the router via the normal USB to IDE adapter I been using and it mounted fine

Copying another 700MB avi to it and I`m getting 7-8MB/s now over my 2.5MB/s using NTFS

So it appears it is NTFS that causes the slowdown

Drive can still be seen on the network as a normal shared drive and can still be written to and read from via Win 7 x64


Thanks for the heads up! Mine is a FAT32 600GB drive and the performance is WAAAY worse. I'm now considering copying my media out of that drive and formatting it to EXT3.

buddee wrote:

For the broadcom units, there are WAY to many to choose from.. but right now i been eyeing the E3200 and Rt-N66U, i have a WNDR4500, which is a very nice router, but has no dd-wrt support currently.


I don't get why anyone would even choose to purchase an Atheros unit. If I knew what I know now, I'd have NEVER bought the WRT160NL. One of my biggest frustrations is lack of swap. I ran out of memory so fast by just mounting multiple drives and sharing them via samba (approx 3MB per share). I dreamt of running miniDLNA and asterisk on that unit as well, but they all complain about lack of memory. Life is never fair, so... Sad

buddee wrote:

And its not only the CPU that would cause this bottle-necking performance, its also the bus architecture, simply put the consumer router's of today won't ever really do true USB 2.0 speeds, if you want something like that, i'd look into an Alix board or x86..

http://pcengines.ch/alix.htm

Which is pretty much a PC based router, you buy your own wireless cards for it and use what you want, and there are many choices of OS's to run on it such as dd-wrt supports them or linux or BSD. Cool


Another suggestion is the Sheeva Plug http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug. It houses a lot more performance for just $99. I read a lot of good reviews about it and purchased one from Global Scale https://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-46-sheevaplug-dev-kit.aspx.

If I remember correctly, you can run DDWRT on it, among other numerous options.

Problem is, Global Scale is notorious for 1 month long waits - I'm still waiting for mine to ship. Sad


Last edited by hiazle on Thu Apr 19, 2012 23:23; edited 1 time in total
rseiler
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Joined: 01 Oct 2007
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 22:57    Post subject: Reply with quote
hiazle wrote:
Thanks for the heads up! Mine is a FAT32 600GB drive and the performance is WAAAY worse. I'm now considering copying my media out of that drive and formatting it to EXT3.

FAT32? I happened to do some searching on that earlier, and the best I could find were several people hitting a dead-end with it for various reasons, so I'm surprised that you have it working with Optware. I guess this confirms though that any non-Linux file system is out for performance reasons. It's unfortunate, since using ext3 hurts drive portability (using something like Ext2Fsd is far from ideal).
hiazle
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Joined: 13 Feb 2011
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 23:11    Post subject: Reply with quote
rseiler wrote:
so I'm surprised that you have it working with Optware.


I'm not sure what you mean here, but for Optware I had to use a separate EXT3 partition. The FAT32 partition only contains media and is mounted to /tmp/mnt/sda_part3 and shared via Samba.
rseiler
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Joined: 01 Oct 2007
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 23:31    Post subject: Reply with quote
hiazle wrote:
I'm not sure what you mean here, but for Optware I had to use a separate EXT3 partition. The FAT32 partition only contains media and is mounted to /tmp/mnt/sda_part3 and shared via Samba.

Right, I just saw comments regarding that being problematic with FAT32 (something about automounting, I don't recall now), and people just ended up resorting to using ext3.
Detection
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Joined: 19 Jan 2012
Posts: 403
Location: UK

PostPosted: Sat Apr 21, 2012 21:56    Post subject: Reply with quote
OK, another strange discovery affecting upload speed to Samba NAS

I was playing around with IP Filter Settings in Administration > Management and changed it from Vegas to Westwood

My upload to NAS speed dropped from 8MB/s to 4-5MB/s

Tried a few different AVIs and speed remained 4-5MB/s

Changed it back to Vegas and Im back up to 8MB/s again

Not sure how or why that affects it, but it seems to

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buddee
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Joined: 06 Feb 2010
Posts: 7401
Location: Little Rock

PostPosted: Sun Apr 22, 2012 1:12    Post subject: Reply with quote
Detection wrote:
OK, another strange discovery affecting upload speed to Samba NAS

I was playing around with IP Filter Settings in Administration > Management and changed it from Vegas to Westwood

My upload to NAS speed dropped from 8MB/s to 4-5MB/s

Tried a few different AVIs and speed remained 4-5MB/s

Changed it back to Vegas and Im back up to 8MB/s again

Not sure how or why that affects it, but it seems to


I've always wondered why or how the TCP congestion control algorithms affect performance, you are not the first person i have read where they change the algorithm and it affects their performance. Curious info though..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_congestion_avoidance_algorithm

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Detection
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Joined: 19 Jan 2012
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Location: UK

PostPosted: Sun Apr 22, 2012 11:33    Post subject: Reply with quote
buddee wrote:
Detection wrote:
OK, another strange discovery affecting upload speed to Samba NAS

I was playing around with IP Filter Settings in Administration > Management and changed it from Vegas to Westwood

My upload to NAS speed dropped from 8MB/s to 4-5MB/s

Tried a few different AVIs and speed remained 4-5MB/s

Changed it back to Vegas and Im back up to 8MB/s again

Not sure how or why that affects it, but it seems to


I've always wondered why or how the TCP congestion control algorithms affect performance, you are not the first person i have read where they change the algorithm and it affects their performance. Curious info though..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_congestion_avoidance_algorithm


Thanks for the link, does it alter settings for the local network along with the WAN ?

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deathnite
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Joined: 11 Nov 2008
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 25, 2012 21:26    Post subject: Reply with quote
Detection wrote:
Cheers for the suggestions, I would have replied sooner but I fell asleep on my own face, think I might try to find a second hand WZR-HP-AG300H or WNDR3700 v2 on eBay then, they look like good solid choices and the Gigabit LAN is becoming more necessary than luxury as of late

Thanks

I'm planning to upgrade from WRT160NL to a newer model, but for now waiting is the key. I want a router with WiFi 802.11ac, Gigabit Ethernet Switch, better USB support (hopefully USB 3.0, at least decent USB 2.0 speed) and DD-WRT friendly. Otherwise I don't really feel like it's worth upgrading.

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kachro
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Joined: 15 Oct 2009
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 27, 2013 6:27    Post subject: Reply with quote
Detection wrote:
OK, another strange discovery affecting upload speed to Samba NAS

I was playing around with IP Filter Settings in Administration > Management and changed it from Vegas to Westwood

My upload to NAS speed dropped from 8MB/s to 4-5MB/s

Tried a few different AVIs and speed remained 4-5MB/s

Changed it back to Vegas and Im back up to 8MB/s again

Not sure how or why that affects it, but it seems to


hello, I'm kinda lost at that....what do you mean you changed Vegas for the other one? I checked my router's firmware (also wrt160nl) v2.4 sp2 and in the ip filter it only shows numeric values and nothing about tcp congestion methods....btw, I am getting transfers of 1.2 mbytes/sec tops. Razz
Detection
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Joined: 19 Jan 2012
Posts: 403
Location: UK

PostPosted: Wed Feb 27, 2013 13:36    Post subject: Reply with quote
kachro wrote:
Detection wrote:
OK, another strange discovery affecting upload speed to Samba NAS

I was playing around with IP Filter Settings in Administration > Management and changed it from Vegas to Westwood

My upload to NAS speed dropped from 8MB/s to 4-5MB/s

Tried a few different AVIs and speed remained 4-5MB/s

Changed it back to Vegas and Im back up to 8MB/s again

Not sure how or why that affects it, but it seems to


hello, I'm kinda lost at that....what do you mean you changed Vegas for the other one? I checked my router's firmware (also wrt160nl) v2.4 sp2 and in the ip filter it only shows numeric values and nothing about tcp congestion methods....btw, I am getting transfers of 1.2 mbytes/sec tops. Razz



Ah, don't worry about that, I have had it back on Vegas (Default) for a long time now

The main thing to get the good speeds is to format the HDD to EXT4 in Linux before connecting it to your NAS

Windows can still read it once it is connected as it is just a network drive and the router does the reading/writing

I'm running this firmware
ftp://ftp.dd-wrt.com/others/eko/BrainSlayer-V24-preSP2/2013/01-01-2013-r20453/linksys_wrt160nl/wrt160nl-firmware.bin

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