NAS: Transfer Speed Bottle Necks

[Barryng]

My NAS is a newly resurrected (was never used - sat on shelf) 2012 vintage Synology DS212 with two new Seagate IronWolf Pro, 4 TB, Enterprise NAS Internal HDDs in a RAID config that will tolerate a single drive failure. The DS212 has been updated to the latest firmware. My LAN is all 2.5Gb but the DS212 only has a 1 Gb port. Bottom line, the actual transfer speed, when copy/pasting a file from my desktop to the NAS, is only typically 30 MBs. A typical already encoded zip backup file is 1.4 TB so it typically takes the better part of a day to complete this transfer. This is much too long. On infrequent occasions some error causes the transfer to end and that, of course, requires starting all over again, usually the next morning. So, where are the so-called bottle necks and which is the most significant?

I want to replace the DS212 with a UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Plus 4-Bay NAS. It not only has a much more powerful CPU it also has 2.5/10 Gb ports although the intervening switch (between my 10 Gb desktop port and NAS) is only 2.5 GB. I would like to get some sort of feel for the actual copy/paste transfer rates I would then achieve. I would also like to understand if replacing the switch with a 10 Gb switch will give some worthwhile bang for the buck (all intervening cables Desktop to NAS are Cat 8).

Also, would replacing the HDDs with SSDs or M.2 drives provide any consequential increase in transfer times?

In other words, 30 Mbs is painfully slow. I don't not mind spending the money for new hardware if that will provide a substantial improvement. The upgrade cost is too much for only an incremental improvement. It would be helpful to have some real-world experience by others to better make this decision.

 

[Woomack]

The DXP4800 has a maximum combined bandwidth of 1250MB/s (the specs say it's on two separate ports). In reality, you will probably be limited to about 500-800MB/s (sequential) if you use one of them, and it doesn't matter much which one you use.
I had TerraMaster 10GbE NAS, which couldn't make more than 800MB/s with SSDs in RAID0. The same SSDs in RAID1 could also make about 800MB/s.

Everything depends on the files you use and if it's more of a sequential or random read/write. In random operations or many small files, it may still be 30MB/s. Larger files may give better results.

In theory, the 10GbE connection offers much higher bandwidth. However, if NAS is not used for backup or moving larger files, 2.5GbE won't be much slower. If there are more connections (like 5+ users simultaneously, multiple volumes, or something), then 10GbE can be faster.

The only problem is that you will never know until you test it.

 

[mackerel]

While looking up the specs of the DS212 I found a review saying "54 MB/s write when configured in RAID 1". Whatever is in that unit, it sounds like it is just slow. Raid 1 is not computationally intensive as you just write something twice so I don't get why it can't max out gigabit. I have come across CPU limiting in my oldest NAS but that's an ancient dual core AMD CPU from 2010 and even that manages to saturate gigabit while doing parity calculations, although struggles at times on 2.5G. Something like a 10 year old quad core should suffice for that. Don't know how much might be needed for 10G.

If you get something more modern the speed will also depend on how you configure the disks. It will be a trade off between performance, redundancy and power efficiency. Probably some cost, capacity and expandability considerations in there somewhere too. Is what you're doing particularly bandwidth hungry? Or is there a point of diminishing returns? IMO having a single 1.4TB file isn't a great idea anyway so splitting that could help with any unexpected interruptions. Alternatively, backup software I use only copies over files that have changed since last backup. No point copying identical data over and over again.