What’s wrong with our NAS setup?

[Bob Zelin]

please ask your IT supervisor moron the following question –
” Dear Mr. Supervisor – EXACTLY what is the model # of the Ethernet switch that is connected to the 10GbE port on the Thecus ?”.

Answer this question, and I will answer your question.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Ted Mihu]

There is no need to be insulting. The model is the Netgear ProSafe XS708E.

[Bob Zelin]

Hi –
interesting you should say the XS708E. I have seen two XS708E, including one yesterday, that would choke everyone’s bandwidth when more than one client was pulling. I have used XS708E and XS712T without issue since there release, but there have been a couple of “bad” XS708E. I was able to prove this by bypassing the switch, and plugging two clients into each of the two 10G ports, and getting everything to work normally. Put the switch in line – bang ! – bandwidth issues. Never an issue with the XS712T, however.

So my suggestion is (assuming you have a 2 port 10G card in your Thecus), is try to try direct connect (bypass the switch) and use a utility like AJA System Test or LAN Speed Test to see your bandwidth with and without the XS708E. In my situation, there was never an issue until a second client was connected. Good thing I had the second 10G port on the server.

SO – what is Netgears suggestion –
1) flash the firmware to V1.00.12, and reset the switch. Of course, you need the ProSafe Plus Configuration Utility to do this.
I am going to do this with my problem client on Monday.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Jon Thomasberg]

Ted,

Most 3TB 7200rpm drives operate at 80-100MBps individually (SATA lower than SAS). However when you have 7 of them in a RAID6 (2 parity), and with the parity overhead, you are only looking at a best-case scenario of ~170MBps reads, and your writes will be at ~ 30MBps. To put that into ethernet terms, just over 1.3 gigabits per second, best case on a read operation.

RAID6 is good for having double-parity for Also, it might help you to understand that SATA (making an assumption here) can only do one operation at a time (read or write, not both). You will never saturate the 10Gig port with this RAID config.

Certainly flashing your switch to the latest stable release to fix bugs would prob help optimize the signal path. The 708 doesn’t have a ton of packet buffers, which will cause issues — I would recommend the 712T model at the very least for a 10gig switch. But your real issue is you simply don’t have the spindle-count (# of drives) to reap the full benefit afforded by 10G-BaseT ethernet.

Hope this helps.