NAS Network speed explained?

paperclips · 1 Nov 2019 at 20:21

Hello,

If a NAS with 6 gigabit/s HDD's and two Gigabit Ethernet ports connected with Cat6 to a Gigabit switch why does a disc speed checker only show 100 mb/s

With link aggregation you would see 200 mb/s

Why so low?

Thanks

andy_mk3 · 1 Nov 2019 at 20:26

That's not how link aggregation works unfortunately. All it means is if one link is at 100% the other link if free to be used still, it doesn't combine them for double the throughput on a single transfer.

So basically you can have 2x 110mb/s transfers, but not 1x 220mb/s transfer.

paperclips · 1 Nov 2019 at 20:51

andy_mk3 said:
That's not how link aggregation works unfortunately. All it means is if one link is at 100% the other link if free to be used still, it doesn't combine them for double the throughput on a single transfer.

So basically you can have 2x 110mb/s transfers, but not 1x 220mb/s transfer.

Fair enough. Thanks for that. I'm still wondering why even at 220mb/s its so low? when everything in the network is gigabit?

Donnie Fisher · 2 Nov 2019 at 03:07

Gigabits, not gigabytes. So divide it roughly by 8 to get rough max throughput In megabytes per second

So theoretical gigabit speed is roughly 120Megabytes max. If your actually getting 100MB/s that's pretty good considering.

Secondly, just cause the HDDs are connected to 6 gigabit sata connector, the drives themselves don't work at that speed. Most hard drives are in the region of 100MB/s too.

Your setup seems to be working as far as it can.