Ranting to /dev/null

Linksys routers aren't that good

So I'm in the middle of backing up some files over the network. A lot of them actually. I'm upgrading from RAID 1 with an extra disc on JBOD to a full-on RAID 0+1, and am storing my data elsewhere while I reconfigure the array. Don't want to lose any data.

This means that I've almost 200GB of stuff to move. No problem, I'm on a 100mbit institutional network, right?

Well, not exactly. I like to be able to use both my laptop and desktop from time to time, especially transferring files between them, and I also like the additional security of an honest-to-goodness hardware router between me and the internet. So I've got a Linksys WRT54G set up.

For most purposes, it works just fine. I can get 1.5M/s down, which is pretty good for my purposes. I'm already using third-party open-source firmware which fixes some of the glitches I ran into with Bittorrent, and until now I've had no complaints.

But now I'm transferring a lot of data and for some unknown reason my NIC is maxing out at 25% utilization, only 3M/s up. Which means that transferring 200GB of data will take... 20 hours. That is no good at all.

I looked around online to see if there was some Windows setting that was holding things up. I went and forced full-duplex mode just to see if it would make a difference, but no dice.

So I unplugged the router and jacked straight into the network port in my room. Instant increase in performance. I'm now running at around 80% of capacity, which is about what you can expect. I'll go back to using the router once I finish, because I don't really need that much speed for surfing the web, but I'm disappointed that the product doesn't work as advertised. 3M/s is not 100Mbit or even a reasonable approximation thereof.

Posted by ryan at March 31, 2007 11:07 AM | TrackBack