Guruserver plus ESATA bottleneck?

[Rentokill]

I have a guruserver plus clonnected to a 1G WD esata drive. (WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1) I am experiencing some speed problems. I thought it was because of poor network performance so i upgraded to gigabit ethernet. This didnt help. so then i did some testing. I started an FTP session and did two tests. One to "get" to /dev/null (so no actual writing) and one "get" to write in the esata drive. Then i did a put command.
Here are the results:

ftp> get tkol.zip
local: tkol.zip remote: tkol.zip
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for tkol.zip (385744125 bytes).
226 Transfer complete. 385744125 bytes in 123.33 sec. (3054.483 Kb/s)
385744125 bytes received in 122.91 secs (3064.9 kB/s)
ftp>

and

ftp> get tkol.zip /dev/null
local: /dev/null remote: tkol.zip
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for tkol.zip (385744125 bytes).
226 Transfer complete. 385744125 bytes in 14.41 sec. (26147.238 Kb/s)
385744125 bytes received in 14.40 secs (26150.9 kB/s)
ftp>

put command
ftp> put tkol.zip
local: tkol.zip remote: tkol.zip
200 PORT command successful.
125 Ready to receive "tkol.zip" . Mode STREAM Type BINARY.
226 Transfer complete. 385744125 bytes in 18.84 sec. (19991.682 Kb/s)
385744125 bytes sent in 18.84 secs (19994.1 kB/s)
ftp>

what it tells me (noob alert) that network speed is OK (writing to /dev/null ) that read speed is ok ( see put command) but that write speed is very bad.


This is what the bootup text says
ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl F300)
ata1.00: ATA-8: WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1, 80.00A80, max UDMA/133
ata1.00: 1953525168 sectors, multi 0: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133

Can someone help me identifying the bottleneck here?

Kind regards

[sfzhi]

FTP is a strange way to test hard drive performance. Why don't you keep things local? For example, copy a big chunk of data form /dev/zero.

[Rentokill]

Uhhhhh.
Well i presumed my problem lay in slow network speed so that was my 'way in' to investigate. But can you give me some tips in how to do a better test? I can imagine copying to a /dev/null but not from /dev/null (Newbie here).

Kind regards

[sfzhi]

You are right, you can't copy much of anything from /dev/null. That's where /dev/zero comes in. It produces infinite sequence of zero bytes.
You could use something like this:

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/wherever/you/want/it bs=1M count=256

This will copy 256 (count=256) MB (bs=1M) of data from "/dev/zero" to "/wherever/you/want/it" and will also show you a short summary of the number of copied bytes, elapsed time and average speed.

[Rentokill]

Ok i tried what you suggested and found the following


dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/esata/test bs=1M count=256
256+0 records in
256+0 records out
268435456 bytes (268 MB) copied, 34.1654 s, 7.9 MB/s

bad!!


i experimented with the  dd command (with wich i am not familiar) and tried the following:

from the esata to /dev/null

dd if=/mnt/esata/test of=/dev/null bs=1M count=256
256+0 records in
256+0 records out
268435456 bytes (268 MB) copied, 0.845523 s, 317 MB/s

better!!

it looks like writing to my esata drive is verry slow and from my esata is much faster. I have no what rate i should find, but 7.9 MB/s write speed seems too slow to me.

kind regards

[Rentokill]

I found the problem. in /etc/fstab i had used 'sync' instead of 'async'. the disk is up to speed now @approx 50MB/s

[UnaClocker]

Ok i tried what you suggested and found the following


dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/esata/test bs=1M count=256
256+0 records in
256+0 records out
268435456 bytes (268 MB) copied, 34.1654 s, 7.9 MB/s

bad!!

Good to see you got your problem worked out. Just for curiosity's sake, I tried the same test on my 2TB USB connected external HDD, here's what I got:

Code:

una@sheeva:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/monster/test bs=1M count=256
256+0 records in
256+0 records out
268435456 bytes (268 MB) copied, 8.86686 s, 30.3 MB/s

Not too bad for USB, I imagine. Mine is set to async.