Hey fellow homelabbers! I’m on a quest for knowledge, and I must admit, I’m still a bit of a noob in the homelab and networking realm. So, please, be gentle with me as I embark on this journey of discovery. Big thanks in advance for any pearls of wisdom you can share.
Now, let’s get to the nitty-gritty. I’ve got a couple of machines playing the role of file servers, getting decent transfer speeds on GbE - sometimes hitting 500 Mbps+ on spinning rust in a RAID5 array. However, there’s this ancient Dell E521 that I dug up from the computer graveyard. I slapped on a GbE PCIe card and turned it into an additional backup for my family photos and videos. Here’s the kicker: when I’m trying to transfer files to a HDD over the network, it’s crawling at a pace that makes snails look like speed demons - maxing out at a whopping 15 MB/s. Is this speed to be expected from this machine?
Now, it’s not like I desperately need this machine to break any speed records, but my curiosity is on overdrive. In the spirit of learning more about homelab sorcery and because it’s bugging me, I need your brains on this. Why is this old Dell acting like it’s stuck in dial-up mode? Could it be something like SATA port or PCI lane bandwidth? I stumbled upon this gem on the DELL Community Page, and if my detective skills are on point, this shouldn’t be the culprit, right?
“Dimension E521 has PCI Express slots of version 1.0A. The single-directional speed of the x1 port is 250 MB/s, and as the port is bi-directional, the speed supported is 500 MB/s. The system supports SATA 1.0 (1.5 Gbps) and SATA 2.0 (3.0 Gbps) storage devices via the SATA ports.”
Now, for the star of the show, let’s give the Dell E521 its moment in the spotlight:
DELL E521 SPECS:
Windows 10 Pro
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5600+
8GB DDR2 800MHz RAM
250GB SSD
2 x 4TB WD Blue HDD (JBOD configuration)
TP-Link Gigabit PCI Express Network Adapter (TG-3468)
https://amzn.eu/d/1nbMptG
Cat5e to the GbE Port
So, dear lab wizards, lend me your wisdom! Why is my Dell E521 playing hard to get with the fast file transfer speeds?🕵️♂️💻
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I admit I skimmed through the technical part of the post, but I have had a similar bottleneck because I didn’t need more and used a 100Mb switch for my NAS.
So copying the rare stuff (I really didn’t use it much) was like that speed.
Maybe it’s not that at all, but if you do scrunch your ethernet through some other old equipment, or your box has only a 100Mb slot, or the old drivers max out at that speed … well it might be that.
Cheers & good luck!
Which protocol are you using to test file transfer? If it’s anything involving encryption, that CPU will be hurt real bad, with no AES-NE.
Thanks for replying 😊 My main copy program is TeraCopy. I drag and drop from my main server to the Dell, so no encryption. I’ve also tried letting good old Windows Explorer do the transfer but the speeds are the same.
I downloaded LAN Speed Test recently and it shows similar slow speeds the the Dell. I also set the network card to 1Gb full duplex incase, for whatever reason, it was resorting to a slower protocol but that didn’t make a difference either 🤦♂️😂 Pretty stumped
Tried a different cable, just in case you’re capping out at 100Mbps?
That’s a great shout, I’ll give that a try later on today and get back to you with some stats 🕵️♂️😁
I really appreciate your help
Okay, so I got some time to do some tests and this is what I found.
I also changed the ethernet cable but the speeds were no different 🤷♂️ So it’s not the cable, especially as I can transfer out of the Dell. I just can’t transfer into the Dell at anything higher than around 25MB/s to the SSD and around 15MB/s to the 7200RPM drive.
Do we have any other ideas? Thanks again in advance