Network Hard Drive Write Speeds

I recently hooked up my 2 TB Western Digitial HDD to my Linksys EA 4500's USB port. It's been working pretty well until I tried to transfer some files onto it. The speeds are 4-5 mb/s, that is horrendously slow. What can I do to speed it up?

 

Are you using Ethernet or Wireless?

If Ethernet, the speed depends on the size of file you are transferring to the hard drive. Also, the Ethernet link you're connected may not be a Gbps speed Ethernet connection (i.e. 100Mbps Ethernet = 10 MB/s max speed). Large files such iso or movie files will transfer much faster than a bunch of small files such as a bunch of office documents because large files have large queue depth while a bunch small files have small queue depth.

If wireless, are you using Wireless-AC? If you're using Wireless-N? Does your WiFi adapter have 2x2 or 3x3 streams and 5 GHz band?

If you have 2x2 stream WiFi adapter and a 20 MHz channel width at 2.4 GHz band, the maximum link speed is 144Mbps which will result to a maximum of 4 - 5 MB/s throughput.

 

I'm using Wifi, I'm not that knowledgeable in networking so for the other questions so I'll try to answer the questions the best I can. I know that my router is capable of 2.4 ghz and 5ghz bands and I think it using them and Wireless N as well

 

What does Windows say about the reported speed? You can find it by looking up the status of your WiFi connection.

Also, to know which band are you using, download inssider and if the channels are shown between 40 and 160 then you're using the 5 GHz band. If it's between 1 and 13, it's 2.4 GHz band.

 

Windows says that the speed is 144 mbps and inssider indicates that it is the 2.4 ghz band

 

inssider shows my network 4 times, the one I'm connected to is on the 11 channel and the other 2.4 ghz is on channel 6. Two on the 5ghz band are on channels 161+157 and 157+161

 

That means you're using the 2.4 GHz band which is more prone to WiFi interference that reduces speed. Try to connect to the 5 GHz channel which is 157+161 or 161+157. You should get about 300 Mbps connection which results to 10 - 12 MB/s maximum speed. To really get extreme WiFi speed, you have to upgrade your router to EA 6500 (Wireless-AC) and your WiFi adapter to Wireless-AC such as the Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC and this will give you 35 - 45 MB/s throughput on an 867 Mbps connection.

 

Not much you can do, even if the connection is unlimited, you are cap by the router usb. Typically highest speed would be around 10MB/s on Ethernet if you have everything set up and format properly.

 

It usually is the fault of both Wi-Fi and router's main chip that is to slow to deal with pretending to be a NAS.

As luck would have it - in this case you have the only router that does have this problem as EA4500 is simply E4200v2 which is based on a NAS-grade Marvell chip and can achieve write/read speeds of 20MB/s with NTFS formated drives.

So in this case it's all Wi-Fi's fault and as posted above you need to move to 5GHz to gest as much as possible in terms of throughput.