Very slow performance of D4-320 via F4-423 (TOS 6)

[jollino]

Hello all,
I've been using an F4-423 with 4x 8-TB Ironwolves in a RAID5 array ("TRAID") just fine. I recently got a D4-320 as I was under the assumption that it could be used to "expand" the F4; or at least, I saw multiple mentions of it by TerraMaster, with the caveat that the D4 only shows disks individually so any RAID must be handled on the host. However, I spent the better part of yesterday trying to figure it out and I'm very close to just sending it back.

Note that:
1) at this time I only have one additional 8-TB Ironwolf to use in it, and no other disks I can spare just for tests;
2) the F4-423 runs TOS 6.0.555;
3) the D4-320 works perfectly if connected to my Macs.

When I connect the D4 to the F4, the new disk shows up as a USB disk. If I format it as EXT4, I get the (common?) issue of TOS crashing when the shares are listed. This is something that I already reported (viewtopic.php?p=40424) as soon as I updated to TOS 6 a few weeks ago, using a standard USB disk. At least another user reported the exact same problem on a different machine (viewtopic.php?p=40762&hilit=refcount_t% ... low#p40762).

Fair enough, my goal is to eventually add more disks to the D4 so I created a storage pool on it, and then a volume, and a shared folder on top of that. However, whether I create the pool as TRAID or as a single disk, the SMB speed is awful and it ultimately dies. This is different from the well known woes of using macOS's Finder; this happens even when bypassing the Finder entirely, e.g. using `cp` directly: I get a burst of a decent speed for the disk (around 120 MB/s) for a few seconds, then it grinds to zero, then it has another burst, and so on. After a handful of bursts, the SMB mount is lost. It's been so bad that I haven't even had a chance to try downloading from the D4 via the F4, as I have never been able to upload more than around 800 MB (!) to it before it became unstable.

The F4-423 does list the D4 as connected at 10 Gbit (`lsusb -tvv`), but then again at this point even a 5 Gbit connection would be enough. I am using the original USB C cable that came with the D4, however with a USB C to A adapter to fit the F4; not sure if that could possibly make a difference, though. I'll order a proper USB C to A cable in the meantime, but if anyone has any idea about how I could address this, I'd be most thankful. It's truly frustrating and it's making me question how reliable this would be in the long term.

Thanks!

[TMroy]

The issue might lie in the quality of the USB connection. Since the F4-423 does not have a USB-C port, while the D4-320 comes with a USB-C to USB-C cable by default, I'm wondering how you connected the D4-320 to the F4-423. It is recommended that you purchase an original USB-A to USB-C cable.

[jollino]

Hi TMRoy, thank you for your reply. I used two different adapters that I had (one by Hama and one by Duttek) and both show that the connection is at 10 Gbit by running lsusb -tvv. I just ordered a 10 Gbit, USB-IF certified USB A-C cable from Amazon, will report back as soon as it's delivered and I can run some tests!

[jollino]

The new cable definitely helped.
I'm not sure why it created "Volume 3" instead of "Volume 2" (is there any way to rename it?) since I had disconnected the other disk and rebooted it, but it seems to be working well so far. Thank you TMroy!

[TMeric]

Regarding the issue of volume names not being in order, you can try restarting your NAS and then recreate the volumes.

[TMzethar]

It is possible that you had created Volume 2, but Volume 2 was not formally deleted, so the system retains the Volume 2 configuration. In this case, the new volume you create can only be named backwards. Changing the volume name is not supported.