USB Hard Drive Transfer Rate Testing! Come Get Some!

[DoesItMatter]

OK...

Wanted to do some USB hard drive transfer rate testing on 1.3.10

Base-line system test equipment

Older PC running Fedora 13, 1 GHz processor, 512 MB Ram

External USB 2.0 external hard drive case with Raid 0/1 capability.

2 - 500GB WD hard drives in the external, setup as Raid 0 striping.
Not going for the mirror, just want to make sure I get good speeds.

Completely wiped the external, and did some testing under Fedora

Average Write rates were about 20 MB/sec, reads about 35 MB/sec

Not the greatest, but again, need to set a baseline.

For doing the speed testing - the drive had to be blank,
so no file system was on the drive during testing.

---------------------

Test Router - WZR-HP-G300NH - Running Gargoyle 1.3.10

CPU Atheros AR9132 rev 2 (0xb9)
CPU Speed 400 MHz
Flash ROM 32 MB
RAM 64 MB
Radio 2.4 GHz
WLAN Support B/G/N
WLAN Max Speed 300 mbps
Antenna Location 2x fixed external
Switch 4x GigE + 1 WAN
USB 1x USB 2.0

------------------------------------

[DoesItMatter]

Performed 2 tests with the above setup

NTFS file system on the drive, and EXT4 file system on the drive

Data transferred was 3.3 GB, 3 large - 1.1 GB movie files.

Router was setup for full read/write access to the drive.
No passwords/login required for the drive

Options were Read/Write full and CIFS+NFS capabilities.

Windows 7 Ultimate 32bit was used for the testing on this.

I have a GB ethernet port/cable from the PC connected to
a GB ethernet LAN port on the router - 1 GB connection reported.

-----------------------------------

Testing with EXT4 file system on the external - WRITING to drive

3.3 GB data - 3 - 1.1 GB files, I was getting the following

Started around 11 MB/sec transfer rate, ended around 8 MB/sec
So - looking at around 88 Mb/sec down to 64 MB/sec transfers
Writing only - reading is usually faster, will do more testing.

----------------------------------

Next test - completely formatted drive, again WRITING to drive

Formatted under Windows 7 - NTFS format drive

3.3 GB data - 3 - 1.1 GB files, I was getting the following

Started around 3.5 MB/sec transfer rate, ended around 2.5 MB/sec
So - looking at around 28 Mb/sec down to 20 Mb/sec transfers
Writing only - WOW - BIG difference on file system!

-------------------------------

[DoesItMatter]

Also - some quirks I noticed when doing the testing on 1.3.10

When using the NTFS file system format drive, all I had to do was
setup the USB share under the System tab, and hit SAVE a couple
of times on the GUI config, and I had full read/write access
to the NTFS external drive - no reboot of the router required.

----------------

When using the EXT4 file system format drive, I setup the share for
full read/write access - CIFS+NFS style, saved a couple of times,
no access yet. I actually had to reboot for the permissions/setting
to take effect on an EXT4 format drive, but - for the performance
gains - it is definitely worth it to use an EXT4 format drive instead
of using NTFS file system for the external USB 2 drive setup.

--------------------

I have not done read testing, but from baseline, read testing was
way faster than writing to the external. I also suspect that once
again, EXT4 will perform faster than NTFS does.

Sort of makes sense since the router is running *nix base

Please do some testing of your own and add some of your
test results to this thread!

I know some of you do a lot of torrenting and or huge file
transfers - you know who you ARRR mateys! LOL!

[caeci11ius]

That's interesting to see DoesItMatter. You might also like to test the ext3, and perhaps even ext2 filesystems...on my old NAS, ext2 was significantly faster than ext3 (though obviously slow to recheck if it's not unmounted cleanly). On a system with a relatively limited CPU, using a simpler filesystem can make a very big difference...

[DoesItMatter]

That's interesting to see DoesItMatter. You might also like to test the ext3, and perhaps even ext2 filesystems...on my old NAS, ext2 was significantly faster than ext3 (though obviously slow to recheck if it's not unmounted cleanly). On a system with a relatively limited CPU, using a simpler filesystem can make a very big difference...

Tried formatting the drive as EXT3 - It does seem a bit faster than
the EXT4 formatted drive, not a whole lot, but probably around
1-2 MB/sec faster on the writes.

Read speed on the EXT3 drive - copying the same files back to
the computer - is looking at about 12-14 MB/sec - not bad!

DEFINITELY see a difference compared to an NTFS formatted drive
though - but this is just 1 drive and 1 router - need some others to
test this theory out and report their results as well.

I suspect the EXT3/EXT4 drives perform better just because its
a Linux native file system, compared to NTFS formatted drives.

So - if you're planning to stream share videos off a hard drive
connected via USB port to Gargoyle - you better be running
an EXT3/EXT4 formatted drive - I think the NTFS format will
be way to slow for performance - probably get stuttering.

[SVoyager]

Great post there! Here is my data. Didn't have time to do extensive tests tho, only NTFS for now.

Started a 8gb .mkv file transfer and 5 minutes into it, its holding at 4.25MB steady (+/- 0.05MB variation). NTFS file system, read/write access, CIFS only. Gargoyle 1.3.10.

Single WD 250gb sata drive.
DIR-825 Rev B, USB 2.0 port on it.

Cheers!
SV

[DoesItMatter]

I did some more testing with this

Same drive setup, copied my MP3 collection from a wired LAN
computer to the router USB drive

250GB of MP3's, thousands of files and directories

Took a while, but router handled it without issues - never crashed
A while meaning... about 10-12 hours for 250GB of transfer
Don't know the exact time, as it took long enough where I just let
it run over night and checked that it finished the next morning

Average rate copying over (writing) was about 9MB/s
according to the Windows 7 transfer speed reporting.

[vplessky]

XChesser did test of all available filesystems for OpenWrt.
Results are here

As Gargoyle uses OpenWrt backend, all this is applicable to Gargoyle as well.

I did testing for ext3, ext4 and xfs using Transcend USB Flash drive.'
xfs was fastest on reading, ext4 - best for writing.

[robnitro]

A tweak I posted on the openwrt forum helped a bit:

echo 1024 > /sys/block/sda/device/max_sectors
OR
add
/sys/block/sda/device/max_sectors=1024 to /etc/sysctl.conf file and then run sysctl -p or reboot.

[powerlogy]

Hello guys, i'm updated my tp-link wr1043nd gargoyle version to 1.5.8 and having slow speeds on reading data from usb harddrive from my pc over lan.

at 1.5.6 i got 11MB/s transfer speeds with ext4

but with 1.5.8 i'm getting 7.5MB/s transfer speed with ext4

Tried with vsftpd and smbd , same results.Can you guys please test too ?

Here my top while 4.5MB/s

Code: Select all

Mem: 28584K used, 720K free, 0K shrd, 568K buff, 5200K cached
CPU:   4% usr  81% sys   0% nic   0% idle   1% io   0% irq  12% sirq
Load average: 4.29 2.73 1.89 5/64 25819
  PID  PPID USER     STAT   VSZ %VSZ %CPU COMMAND
14992 14339 root     R     3576  12%  40% /usr/sbin/smbd -D
  597     2 root     RW       0   0%  18% [usb-storage]
14324     1 root     S    18316  62%  10% transmission-daemon -g /mnt/.config/t
  235     2 root     SW       0   0%   8% [kworker/0:1]
  608     2 root     SW       0   0%   5% [kworker/u:2]
   96     2 root     DW       0   0%   5% [kswapd0]
    5     2 root     SW       0   0%   2% [kworker/u:0]
  179     2 root     SW       0   0%   2% [mtdblock2]
    3     2 root     SW       0   0%   1% [ksoftirqd/0]
 3326     1 root     S      828   3%   0% qosmon -a -b 800 24.133.132.1 3078 36
25762  5193 root     R     1504   5%   0% top
 1731     1 root     S     1344   5%   0% httpd_gargoyle -c cgi-bin/**|**.sh|**
 5099  1666 root     S     1216   4%   0% /usr/sbin/dropbear -P /var/run/dropbe
  865     1 root     S     3324  11%   0% hostapd -P /var/run/wifi-phy0.pid -B
14341     1 root     S     3204  11%   0% /usr/sbin/nmbd -D
14339     1 root     S     3116  11%   0% /usr/sbin/smbd -D
  651     1 root     S     1516   5%   0% /sbin/netifd
 2344     1 root     S     1508   5%   0% /usr/sbin/crond -c /etc/crontabs -l 9
  627     1 root     S     1508   5%   0% /sbin/syslogd -C16
^C710   651 root     S     1508   5%   0% udhcpc -p /var/run/udhcpc-eth0.2.pid