LenovoEMC (IX4) Windows 8.1 impossible backup times
...or any NAS? estimates in days, not hours. I dropped 2TB second (hard drive) and just tried 256 GB SSD (C drive), and that was running a day. Both NAS & PC on gigabit router. Hardly any cpu or Ethernet activity while the NAS accepted about 100 GB in a DAY of running. Shut everything down but the backup, still ran like a turtle with 4 broken legs. 4 core, 8 processor 4 Mhz AMD 8350, 24 GB memory, SATA 6, generally very high end PC.
So either I did something wrong operationally, or I bought the wrong product. Hoping someone smarter than me has a suggestion.
MTU default on most gigabit routers (I have d-link dir-655) is 1500. Even if the setting was a bit off that, performance should NOT move from hours to days.
I will mess a bit with Jumbo Frames, but don't see how a buffer can make that much difference on a nearly idle system connected to a gigabit router with NO conflicting ip packets running around. I put my PC and NAS on the router, there is no hub/switch in the way.
If you type the search word "SLOW" into this web site, it lights up like Las Vegas.
There is either something wrong with Acronis, or something wrong with my Lenovo IX4. My network runs like a scalded dog for everything else, whether local copies/backups or internet downloads/streaming. I usually get >25 mbs down and > 5mbs up from Comcast.
I do appreciate your response, just hoping there is something that makes this work, or at least tells me to forget Acronis and try something else. The money I spent for Acronis is nothing compared to wasting time on a hopeless cause (if that is the situation.)
You did not indicate any information about your NAS which is fine however, are you using CIFS/Samba to access shares on your NAS? I would think you are given most NAS Servers are running some form of Linux which is probably using an ext3 or ext4 file system which Windows cannot read unless using the CIFS mentioned above. Do a search on transfers speeds over network using the CIFS/Samba protocol and you will find that these speeds are traditionally horrible. This I believe is part of where your problem lies. In addition to this fact if your backup contains many small files which most do, that also translates into slow. Any compressed files that you may be backing up will add to the slow as well. All told there are a number of reasons that slow is part of the equation in doing backups to an NAS and not all of them are mentioned here. If you can or care to, you can try ftp or rsync to which should increase overall speed. There may be other tweaks that you can implement as well to increase speed but be advised any thing gained will probably be minimal at best. The use of jumbo frames can help in any case if in fact all your hardware supports it.
Here is a link where there are some suggested tweaks you might wish to try although these fixes generally apply to OSX and XP.
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/46898c7f…
Here is another link that my be helpful covering Samba Performance Tuning.
https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/speed.html
Again, thanks for ideas. I have made one change and will test tonight. Here is what I "know" for now.
My NAS (sorry I didn't include more in initial post, I guess I was just assuming the hardware worked and the software was the problem.) I come from the software world, so am used to getting the blame :-)
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Lenovo ix4-300d, 4 Seagate Barracuda drives, 2 TB, 7200 RPM, 64 MB, SATA 6Gb/s RAID 5, Write Caching enabled with UPS.
Network File Protocols Supported – CIFS/SMB/Rally (Microsoft), NFS (Linux/UNIX),
AFP/Bonjour (Apple), FTP, SFTP TFTP, HTTP, HTTPS, WebDAV, Windows DFS, SNMP.
The OS seems to be LenovoEMC LifeLine (of iomega fame) -- I assume Unix based?
...
D-Link says Dir-655 can handle 9K Jumbo frame size but NAT performance will be degraded, since it only handles 4K frames.
It was also suggested you would not see any LAN performance increase since the IPOS only deals with 1,500 frame size.
OTOH, there were comments on their forum of noticeable improvement of large file transfers.
So I will split the difference and will try 4k frames.
Sounds like a good start, trial and more trial is all you can do realistically to get your hardware happy with each other. No magic ,no easy fix, and you may end up not gaining much in the end.
Posters to this thread whom are experiencing slow transfer rates over a network connection and are using Win 7, 8, 8.1 should try this:
Open Device Manager in Windows
Expand Network Adapters and right click on the NIC
Choose Properties then Advanced tab
Choose Large Send Offload in the list and then disabled from the drop down box on the right. Do this for each instance in the list.
Looking further down the list if you find Receive Side Scaling choose this as well and disable.
If you are connecting to an NAS make the same changes to the NIC in your NAS device.
did everything suggested except I found no way to change the NIC in the Lenovo NAS (except to setup jumbo frames).
I think I will take my 4 good Seagate drives out of the Lenovo and send the useless NAS back.
Unless someone has a good idea, it is time to throw the towel in. I do appreciate the attempts to help.
I am posting a link which may prove useful.
http://www.sysprobs.com/windows-7-network-slow
Disabling the Large Send Offload shifts the cache buffers for data transfer directly to the CPU which increases CPU cycles during data transfer. This is not an issue however because modern processors are great at load balancing and with multiple cores you have a lot to go around. With cache shifted to the CPU now it may be necessary to enable Direct Cache Access (DCA). You could also benefit from disabling Remote Differential Compression (RDC). The link above shows how to disable RDC. I am attaching another link that covers DCA as well as some other tweaks that might help.
http://betanews.com/2011/01/20/use-hidden-windows-tweaks-to-speed-up-yo…
Give these a try before throwing in the towel, often times it requires quite a bit of trial and error to tweak your hardware to the point where all the parts will play nice together.
I tried as many of the suggestions that I could. I am running Windows 8.1 Pro64 and things such as NetDMA are not applicable. I was ready to write a response that with all the years of experience I've had (my first computer was a CDC 3100 in 1966) that I didn't expect tweaks of a NIC to have any significant effect. I have a very high end configuration (AMD 8350 Eight-Core, 24 GB DDR3 memory, C drive is SSD 6GB SATA, etc.) a gigabyte router, and the NAS (Lenovo Iomega Ix4-300d) should handle a lot of data, also a gigabyte Interface.
Meanwhile, I had started a backup of my C drive (about 190 GB of a 240 GB SSD) which never finished before, as the time estimates kept increasing to days, not hours.
So, if Acronis True Image 2014 is telling the truth, I am half way through the backup in just under an hour, and it is estimating 1 hour to complete.
Running Acronis before, the network traffic was a trickle, varied around 2 Mbps. I ran a straight file copy using Lenovo included copy and the network ran a pretty steady 5 Mbps (until it bombed.)
It is now running a very steady 10 Mbps. Clearly there is still something clogging the gigabyte path in my PC, the D-Link Dir-655 router, and the Lenovo NAS.
But the improvement is worthwhile, maybe I will continue working with it. If the above gives any new ideas, love to hear them. And I really do appreciate the help. As a senior citizen, I can use all the help I can get :-)
There are many parameters that a network utilizes in the transmission of data. There are also machine hardware limitations that have an impact on performance. Even though you are running a gigabit connection gigabit speeds are often not achievable due to these many factors. Theoretically, a gigabit connection should be able to move data at a 125MB/s speed. If you attached your NAS directly to your PC using a crossover cable your speeds would probably increase simply because your Dlink router and it's built in switch are not in the path. You must also be using good quality CAT 5e cabling in order to achieve good speeds and that cabling needs to be as far away from other electrical cables as possible although loss due to EMI is usually minimal. Your HDD read functions can also be a limitation, if files are fragmented that can slow the process down. If you are transferring a good number of small files that will slow things down quite a bit at times. Compressed files also slow down the transmission rate.
So the best thing is to research all you can about your particular hardware to find out what others have done to increase performance, use that as a guide to make changes in your configuration until you achieve some sort of balance.