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[mcduarte2000]

I've been testing the performance of DNS-323. And I believe I've a problem...

Between the firmware 1.03 and 1.04 the performance seems to improve around 20% on the latest firmware. But the unit seems slow.

My tests were using 35 files (PDF's and ZIPs), with a total of 105 MB. For this little test, the drive took around 4:30 minutes to transfer (read) on a 100 Mbit network (Linksys WAG54G Router), which seems to me a very slow speed (I did the test with 2 Win XP computers, with the same results). Actually if instead of Samba I use the FTP (FileZilla) to transfer the exact same files between the unit and my computer, it only takes 2 minutes!

I also made the exact same test between two windows XP computers (using the same network), and it took less than 30 seconds to transfer all the files...

Actually, when I write to the drive (instead of reading from the drive), the operation takes less than 15 seconds!

What could I check/change to try to improve the situation?

[fordem]

You need to be aware that read & write speeds are not determined by the DNS-323 alone. 

Each of these operations is going to be affected by the source device (where the data is coming from), the network and the destination device (where the data is going to) - and the speed is going to effectively be limited by the slowest of the three.

Something else you need to be aware of is that transferring a large quantity of small files will always be slower than transferring a small quantity of large files, even when the total amount of data transferred is the same.

Personally I have found that the DNS-323 is good for appoximately 60~70 mbps (megabits per second) roughly equivalent to 8MBps (megabytes per second) on a 100 mbps network and around double that on a gigabit network.

You mention that when writing to the drive the operation took 15 seconds - this suggests that the bottleneck on a read is the destination system - try defragmenting the disks in the PCs and see what happens.

For what it's worth I would suggest you use a larger quantity of data for testing, I created a 2GB test file, which I think takes somewhere around four minutes to transfer - I don't remember the exact time because my tests were not done based on file size divided by time taken, but based on the bandwidth numbers reported by SNMP (I have a managed switch).

[mcduarte2000]

I've been doing a lot of tests and got some positive results. Basically:

- Upgrading my Windows XP to SP3 reduced the read transfer time of my test files to around 60 seconds;
- Upgrading my Realtek RTL8139/810x driver, reduced the read transfer time to 50 seconds.

I still have a problem, as reading still is more than 3x slower than writing (around 15 seconds), but it is much better now.

Any other ideas would be appreciated...

[mcduarte2000]

A last update.

I bought a switch and put the switch between the DNS-323 and the PC. Problem solved. Now it takes only 12 seconds to transfer my test files!!!