Transfer speed SAMBA/ethernet/router

[RTD1]

The Pi is 10/100 Ethernet. 100 Ethernet is 12.5 MB/s. This is almost always the first bottleneck you hit.

If the Pi had gigabit E, then you'd be looking at 125 MB/s, and the bottleneck would then likely be USB. If it's USB 2 you're looking at an effective speed limit of 35 MB/s (with USB 3 you're looking at around 400 MB/s).

[battletux]

Don't forget that the protocol overheads of samba will also slow down the transfer speeds as well.
Ideally for the Pi you will want to use a protocol with small overheads so as to get the fastest transfer speeds. I found FTP and NFS to be ok.

[klricks]

How is the USB drive formatted?
NTFS will be quite a bit slower than a Linux format.
Also there is quite a difference in read speed vs write speed to the NAS. Did you test the same way on all systems?

[andrum99]

In my experience using an NTFS filesystem with the Pi is a major source of slowness. The Pi's limited resources are not capable of running NTFS at full speed. If you use a Linux-specific filesystem you will get much better performance. If you need to be able to hook the drive up to a Windows or Mac machine directly, as well as the Pi, then you should probably use FAT32. In all cases, gparted is your friend:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gparted

If you really want NTFS on the Pi, then to enable write support you need to install ntfs-3g.

Cheers

Andrew.