Slate 7 GL-BE3600 Painfully Slow Samba/SMB Speeds

Technical Support for Routers
1

Hello, I just got my Slate 7 and finished setting it up... unfortunately I am seeing really poor performance out of the USB 3.0 NAS functionality and was hoping someone would have some idea on how to improve performance.

  • Firmware v4.7.1
  • No Adguard nor VPN enabled
  • USB mode set to 3.0
  • USB Drive is a 4TB SP A55 SATA SSD in a USB 3.1 enclosure connected to the Slate 7 with a USB-C to USB-A 3.0 (5gbps) cable... drive is reaching max speeds when directly connected to any of my computers (350-450MBps)
  • Drive is formatted in EXT4
  • Protocol is Samba (SMB)
  • Only getting approximately 8MBps through SMB whether via my M3 Macbook Air connected to 5ghz wifi or with my NUC connected directly over 2.5Gbps ethernet (uplink speed confirmed 2.5Gbps full duplex).
  • Checked the Samba Server version in Luci and it is running Samba4
  • I did a network test using iperf3 between my nuc and my macbook and I am getting 750-900Mbps bandwidth so network connectivity is confirmed good... it's something to do with the NAS functionality specifically.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated as this is painfully slow... I did the math and if everything was working properly I should be getting approximately 70-95 MBps not 8 MBps... so it's about 10x slower than it should be. I would be happy with 30-50 MBps though, but 8 MBps is unusable.

2

I tried it on my Slate 7 and it averaged 26-28 (read). Did not try writing as I don’t have any space on the USB drive and it’s also formatted in FAT.

Are you sure you have it set on the router for USB 3 (there’s a new setting somewhere, my device is not online to check)?

Edit: the setting is under System > Overview

Edit 2: Now I see that you’ve already mentioned that you’ve set it to USB 3. Sorry, ignore my reply (time for a new pair of glasses).

3

Yea the toggle is set to USB 3.0 and yes this is read we are talking about :slight_smile: ... I just don't understand what the problem is, it should be a lot faster than the 8MBps I am getting.

4

Hi,

Could you please check it out if change others USB drive?
Or re-format to NTFS or exFAT, etc. to check one more time.

5

I have ordered a powered USB 3.0 hub just in case the drive is not getting enough power from the Slate 7's USB port so I am going to try that, if that doesn't work, I will try reformatting it to NTFS. I will let you know how it goes.

6

Ok I have now tried with both a powered USB hub and reformatting the drive to NTFS... speeds are still about 8MBps...

7

Hi,

What is the read and write speed rate if this USB drive is connected to a PC?
What brand/model is this USB drive?

Could you please try to change another USB drive to compare test?

8

I provided answers to all of these questions in the original post.

The drive is a Silicon Power 4TB SATA SSD in an SSK USB 3.1 Gen 2 Enclosure connected to the Slate 7 using a 5gbps USB C to USB A cable (USB 3.0 spec cable)... when I directly connect the drive to my computer's USB port I get reads in excess of 350-400MBps (MegaBytes not megabits) and writes in excess of 220MBps (MegaBytes not megabits)... there is absolutely nothing wrong with the drive as far as I can tell, the problem lies somewhere with the Slate 7's SMB implementation, that or the USB port is not actually USB 3.0 and even though the USB port's mode is set to USB 3.0 it is only running at USB 2.0

9

Hello,

You can use the plugin lsusb to know whether the connect protocol is USB2.0 or 3.0.
If the device shows 5000M, it is USB3.0:

opkg update
opkg install usbutils
lsusb
lsusb -t

Btw, use the plugin hdparm to quickly know the USB reading rate:

opkg update
opkg install hdparm
hdparm -t /dev/sda1