Slow transfer speed - help needed

Posted by: Toon59 on 07 November 2015

I am new here (first post). After 40 years of hi-fi addiction I have bought my very first Naim component - a NDX network player/streamer. Being new to the concept of streaming I set about ripping my CD collection to FLAC using dbpoweramp to a Synology DS215j NAS. All cabling between PC and NAS and Streamer is CAT 5 - no wireless. 

 

Ripping CD to PC hard disk is OK. Problem is.............transferring the newly ripped FLAC files to teh NAS - I only get 1 mb/sec and it's taking all night to upload a batch of CD's. I have tried everything I know to identify the bottleneck with no success.

 

I'm sure I'm not the only person on the planet to experience this - any bright ideas welcome.

 

Router is a EE Brightbox and the Ethernet cable is connected to the WAN socket with gigabit capability. Broadband speed is around 7 mbps.

 

Once the files are on the NAS the NDX plays them perfectly. It's getting them on to the NAS that's the problem. Tidal also working faultlessly.

 

Thanks in advance

Posted on: 08 November 2015 by Toon59
Originally Posted by Simon-in-Suffolk:

I really think it's unlikely to be your Network.. It sound likely an issue with your NAS.. as said above what is the NAS and what sort of disks does it have, although I can't think of any disk that would be so slow..

When you read from the NAS is it faster? Are there any stats on the NAS such as bad data or packets? 

Have you tried connecting to your NAS from a different PC, is it at all different?

On the NAS can you change the file protocol to something different like SMB or AFP.. then reconnect the PC, is there a difference?

Simon

The NAS is working really well now - access to the files is much faster since I installed the switch. But the file transfer from PC to NAS is still painfully slow at 1 mb/sec. The NAS is only 2 weeks old and it contains 2 x 2TB WD Red disks. Very fast. I connected to a laptop and same thing : 1 mb/sec. As I said in an earlier post the CDs are all transferred now - it was painful (took over a week) but it's done. I shouldn't need to transfer any more digital music to the NAS other than any High Res files I buy/download but they will be few and far between I think.

Posted on: 08 November 2015 by Simon-in-Suffolk

Do I take it the read time is a lot quicker than the write time? If so it won't be network related, but does sound like a NAS issue.. Possibly not enough memory or a fault of some sort. I would raise a support call with the NAS manufacturer if it's so new.. A write speed of 1mbps does not sound correct, and I can't believe that is the expected performance from the device.

Simon

 

Posted on: 08 November 2015 by sjbabbey

Looking at your Netgear switch, it seems that your router is limited to 100Mb/s (port 5) as is the device connected to port 1 on the switch (only 1 green light showing on the switch for these ports). 

 

if you have RAID enabled on your NAS it could slow down the transfer speed since the files would effectively be being written twice on the NAS. However, even so the transfer speed you report are way below what you'd expect even for a RAID array.

 

Is there any other traffic on the network while you've been ripping your CDs?

Posted on: 08 November 2015 by dayjay

I've only seen speeds this slow when there has been a problem the network card or its driver.  On my card if certain settings in the advanced options are enabled it will not move data around a network where the files are large and slows down where they are small.  May be worth making sure the latest drivers are installed and googling the card to see if there are any known issues.  the other thing I would do would be to change the Ethernet cables just to make sure they are not faulty. 

Posted on: 09 November 2015 by Toon59

Good news – my problem is solved.

Guess what???....................faulty wall socket – I methodically swapped out every cable in the chain and isolated the problem down to a faulty wall socket between the PC and the network. Changed to another socket and all’s well. Transfer speeds now between 50-100mbps

 

I only wish I'd found it about 2 weeks ago.

 

Thank you for all the help you have provided - I can now upgrade my conversation and questions to Naim-related music matters.

Posted on: 09 November 2015 by garyi

coolio.

 

When I was putting ethernet in every room way back when I learnt very quickly that the difference between a £5 Socket and 99p Socket was simply put vast. Better to spend a bit at these points.