[Help] F4-425 Plus slow transfer speeds; especially m.2 drives

[AGiLiT]

My new F4-425 Plus is configured with four Seagate 12TB IronWolf Pro 7200 rpm SATA III 3.5" drives and three Crucial 1TB P310 NVMe in the m.2 slots.

• The four 3.5" drives are in one storage pool configured with TRAID, which contains one volume configured as EXT4.

• The NVMe drives are currently set up as individual storage pools with a single volume each. I had intended to use two of them in a RAID configuration set up with Hyper Cache, but until I can get the speed issue resolved, I've left them as is for testing.

• I am seeing poorer than expected transfer speeds from the SATA drives (about 10% slower than WD Red 5400 RPM drives in the NAS I am planning to replace).

• I am seeing rediculously slow transfer speeds from the NVMe drives. Their speeds are matching what I am seeing from the SATA drives.

I have tested with the NAS connected to either a MAC computer or a Windows computer. The results are the same on both. Depending on the tool used (Blackmagic on a MAC and CrystalDiskMark on a Windows PC, I am getting only up to 90-100 MB/s read/write speeds on all the drives; SATA and NVMe. When I tried a direct connection of the NAS to my MAC, I was write speeds about 10% faster and read speeds up over 300 MB/s. Again, the NVM3 ssd speeds matched the SATA drives.

Edit: Forgot to mention that I've tried connecting the NAS both directly to my 1GB gateway and to a switch, either with one LAN connection from the NAS or two.

What am I missing? Is there some magic setting that's not correct somewhere?

[TMbuddy]

Hello, this behavior is likely a normal result of network bandwidth limitations, rather than a performance issue with the HDDs or NVMe SSDs.

In a 1GbE network environment, real-world transfer speeds are typically around 90–110 MB/s. As a result, both SATA HDDs and NVMe SSDs will show similar read/write performance, and the performance advantages of NVMe SSDs cannot be realized under these network conditions.

This also explains why the NVMe SSDs perform the same as the SATA HDDs, why the results are consistent on both macOS and Windows, and why there is no noticeable improvement when changing switches, directly connecting to the gateway, or using single or dual LAN connections.

To fully take advantage of NVMe SSD performance, we recommend using a 2.5GbE or faster network, or deploying NVMe SSDs for caching, small-file workloads, or high-concurrency scenarios.

[AGiLiT]

OK; I guess I have to reset my expectations. I'm used to seeing high speeds on SSD drives connected to USB or Thunderbolt ports and I guess I was in that mindset. I did connect the NAS directly to the MAC and was seeing 5x speed increases, so I guess that is consistent. I'm waiting to be able to install the Speedtest from the community site to test the speeds internally to put the final nail in this.

Thanks.

[crisisacting]

… What am I missing? …

All the NVMe slots are limited to only PCIe Gen3 ×1 because the N150 has just 9 PCIe lanes, so they'll never even get to ~1 Gbps.