Network Drive

lostsoul62

lostsoul62

Member
I have a network HD and data transfer is in theory 1 Gb/s. My external WD passport Hard Drive is in theory 5 Gb/s and it is FAST. Is there a way to have one hard drive (SATA 3 or USB 3 ) to support two computers so each computer can have the 5 to 6 Gb/s transfer rate and share data? If I map a SATA3 Hard drive from my 1st computer so my 2nd computer can us it, then wouldn't my 2nd computer be getting the 6 Gb/s in theory? If so then a network drive for the home is not very productive.
 
The drive itself can't sustain the bus speed unless it's an SSD. Gigabit nets you 125 MB/s before protocol overhead.

What specific drive is it?
lostsoul62 said:
If I map a SATA3 Hard drive from my 1st computer so my 2nd computer can us it, then wouldn't my 2nd computer be getting the 6 Gb/s in theory? If so then a network drive for the home is not very productive.
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That's not how any of this works.
 
Lets make a long story short. My WD passport drive is 5 times faster than my network drive but that is on one computer so my question is can 2 computers share the same drive and be as fast as a WD passport drive?
 
lostsoul62 said:
My WD passport drive is 5 times faster than my network drive
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We are trying to tell you that is false. 5 gbps is simply the bus speed.

Just tell us what model you have and what you're trying to do and we can help you.

Trying to speculate numbers that don't mean what you think they do will just confuse you.
 
A Network drive cannot go faster than your network which should be 1 Gb/s. WD Passport drive USB3 is 5 Gb/s. Your internal drive top speed is 6 Gb/s (SATA3). So my question is can you take a Hard Drive (Not a Network Drive). Put 2 computers on them and have both computer access the drive at 5 to 6 Gb/s? This is what I think and the answer is NO but I'm posting to see if anyone has an idea of how this can be done. I think you would need a hard drive with 2 USB3 connections which they done make. I'm just trying to learn more and that is why this post.
 
lostsoul62 said:
A Network drive cannot go faster than your network which should be 1 Gb/s
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Depends on your network card, but for arguments sake, sure.
lostsoul62 said:
WD Passport drive USB3 is 5 Gb/s
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That's the bus speed, the internal drive speed is much lower.
lostsoul62 said:
Your internal drive top speed is 6 Gb/s (SATA3)
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Again, bus speed. Mechanical drive speeds don't approach 6 gbit.

lostsoul62 said:
Put 2 computers on them and have both computer access the drive at 5 to 6 Gb/s?
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No, what you have in mind isn't feasible with what you have.

For all intents and purposes you aren't being limited by the network interface since the actual drive data rate is around that speed (~1 Gbps).

That's why we're asking 'what you're doing' and the 'specific drive'. Just speculating interface rates without any sort of use case (like transferring a few KB of data) is a waste of time. You're also wasting your time worrying about it unless you have a couple hundred gigabytes and for whatever reason cannot wait on ~110 MB/sec transfers.

lostsoul62 said:
I'm just trying to learn more
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Do some research on bus speed vs hard drive performance.
http://www.tested.com/tech/pcs/457172-why-storage-drive-speeds-dont-hit-their-theoretical-limits/
 
lostsoul62 said:
I have a network HD and data transfer is in theory 1 Gb/s. My external WD passport Hard Drive is in theory 5 Gb/s and it is FAST. Is there a way to have one hard drive (SATA 3 or USB 3 ) to support two computers so each computer can have the 5 to 6 Gb/s transfer rate and share data? If I map a SATA3 Hard drive from my 1st computer so my 2nd computer can us it, then wouldn't my 2nd computer be getting the 6 Gb/s in theory? If so then a network drive for the home is not very productive.
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Keep this in mind, network speeds are rated in GigaBits not GigaBytes so whatever you think you network speed is, you'll need to divide by 8 then account for overhead. So a 1 GiB ethernet connection is theoretically around 125Mb/s, but in reality is usually more like 50-60Mb/s after overhead which is about half the speed of having it directly connected to the computer.
 
I guess it's really more related to latency than overhead per se. The time it takes to request a file or block of data, transfer it, confirm the transfer, and then request the next block takes much longer than a direct USB or SATA connection. USB actually is much slower than SATA in this regard. Which is why despite the rated speed being plenty high enough to max out a drive's transfer speed, SATA is usually faster by a good margin.
 
Intel_man said:
Yea.. I get 110Mb/s sustained speeds to my NAS.
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Sure, if you're transferring just a single big file over a good router you'll get that. Try transferring a lot of little files through a home router (like I suspect the OP is) and see what type of speed you get.
 
JaredDM said:
Sure, if you're transferring just a single big file over a good router you'll get that. Try transferring a lot of little files through a home router (like I suspect the OP is) and see what type of speed you get.
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Then that's not due to the ethernet overhead.
 
Yeah, but if you directly USB or SATA connect it and copy the same set of small files it'll move the data twice as fast as it will over the network. My point in posting was to point out to the OP that if speed is what he's going for then his entire approach is wrong. Not to debate the technicalities of ethernet overhead & latency.
 
Believe whatever you want. I move several TB of data every single day doing data recovery and working with full hard drives of data. I've tried going the network route even using high end routers, etc. to assist with centralizing data that we need to work on with multiple systems and it's always a lot slower than directly attached storage is. Most people probably just don't notice the difference because they don't move around the type of data we do.
 
It's not what I believe in, it's what I'm seeing. I've been through a couple of different NAS at home. I went from a basic D-Link DNS-323 NAS to an Asustor AS5002T. It's quite a leap in performance going from that crappy little D-Link.

What I've found and tried out between the two is that if your SATA Controller on the NAS is trash, you'll never reach the ethernet limit. My d-link's transfer speeds with 2 drives in RAID 0 was ~20mb/s through an ethernet connection. My Asustor gives me 100+mb/s in RAID 1.

Once you get rid of that limit, the next bottleneck I found was the actual drive itself and not so much Ethernet vs direct USB 3.0. Sequential read/write from both yields very similar results (+/- ~5mb/s). But when it comes to the random reads/writes, your performance is most definitely limited to the IOPS the mech drive can handle. I've had a WD Passport hooked up directly to computer via USB 3.0 and did a transfer of a large folder with a decent amount of files, and I've had it hooked up to my NAS via USB 3.0 and transfer data via ethernet to my computer. It really does yield almost exact same transfer speeds. Seriously, internal drives in my computer will yield similar results copying files from one hdd to another.

You did mention that you're saying that ethernet vs direct usb 3.0 is a big difference in your environment (TB's of data), but then you went and proceeded to post this...
JaredDM said:
Try transferring a lot of little files through a home router (like I suspect the OP is) and see what type of speed you get.
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So what is it? What are you using as your reference for performance here? I don't have enterprise equipment at home. Now, I'm not saying I have bottom of the barrel hardware too, but it's definitely not enterprise/corporate stuff.

In short, if you're not understanding what I'm trying to get at, a good NAS paired with a decent ethernet switch can give you the same performance as if you had a usb 3.0 drive hooked up to your computer. The only time where I can see substantial bottlenecking with gigabit ethernet transfer is the use of SSD's or multiple drives in RAID 0/5.
 
JaredDM said:
over a good router
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JaredDM said:
through a home router (like I suspect the OP is)
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JaredDM said:
I've tried going the network route even using high end routers, etc. to assist with centralizing data that we need to work on with multiple systems and it's always a lot slower than directly attached storage is
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Transfers in the same broadcast domain are switched, not routed.

In a business environment you would want to use a layer 3 switch anyway.
 
You're both quoting comments I directed at the OP who clearly stated:

lostsoul62 said:
If so then a network drive for the home is not very productive.
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Thus the references to a home router, which is what I'm suspecting he's using.

As to my comments regarding transfers over ethernet being slower, that can be easily proved and I've done it here about a thousand times.

The average home computer has around 500,000 files on it. If it's a Mac there's usually over 1 million files. Using USB 3.0 we can copy that much data in an average of around 5-6 hrs per drive we need to copy. If we try to move that same block of data onto one of our servers or one of our enterprise Synology NASs (which have 4 Gigabit ethernet connections, SAS drives, and connected through a good quality switch) it takes 8-9 hours to copy. We've even copied the same set of data both ways and confirmed the difference in speed.

Just copying one big file to see the maximum throughput is little more than a synthetic benchmark. Actual data which usually consists of tons of tiny files is a different story. If you just look at maximum sequential read speed of an SSD, many early ones were no faster than a HDD in synthetic benchmarks. Yet they could boot a computer 10x faster due to the low latency and instant seek time needed to perform all the tiny reads when booting a computer. It's the same when comparing ethernet to USB. While both have comparable maximum transfer speeds, you'll notice a huge difference when it comes to transferring a lot of smaller files. All those milliseconds between interactions start to add up fast. Now if you're just storing pirated movies on a Plex server, you probably won't see a difference. But, if you're looking to get the fastest overall speeds USB 3.0 is faster. Especially if you've got UASP enabled.

But, as I've said, believe whatever you want. If you want to believe that the sky is red, more power to you.
 
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