OpenWrt Forum Archive

Topic: SpeedTest: Downloading from a USB drive

The content of this topic has been archived on 5 Mar 2018. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.

How much download speed do you get from a USB hdd (or stick) connected to your router?

I searched the forum and I can't find any reference, so I am very courios to see how well is your router behaving with USB disks in OpenWRT.
To test the dl speed just copy a file in linux/windows and post the results, and also your configuration.

My configuration is a Asus WL500gP with WhiteRussian (sorry Kamikaze, I need working wireless...)
I use a NFS share on a Corsair 1GB Usb 2.0 Stick.
The download speed is ~2MB/s (varies between 1.9 and 2.1).
The test was done in TotalCommander.

Thank you,
Ovydake

UPDATE:
Using vsftp i get 2,6MB/s

(Last edited by Ovydake on 21 Sep 2007, 19:09)

That sounds about right.

It depends on the rated speed of your USB drive. Most cheap drives will average 2 to 5 megabytes per second. If you spend a little more you can get faster rated sticks that can reach up to 10 or 15 megs a second.

Ovydake wrote:

My configuration is a Asus WL500gP with WhiteRussian (sorry Kamikaze, I need working wireless...)

Wireless does work in Kamikaze, might want to read the release notes a bit more carefully.

Well, AFAIK your download speed is not limited by the used usb-Stick but by your cpu.
My wl-500gd with 200Mhz can only handle around 1,8MB per second with 100% CPU usage (normally is't around 0% ^^)

with best regards

p90

So, the limitation is from the CPU. Last night I ran some test and I found out that the raw data rate of my USB stick is ~8MB/s, I used:

time cp file.big /dev/null

and the CPU usage was ~40% (the kernel module was using >35%). But when I try to transfer data over the network I get 90% CPU usage. With only ~5-10% by the kernel module, so the 90% of the processor is used by the transfer protocol (Samba/NFS or vsftp), probably with non DMA memory copy operations (reading from drive then writing to eth) and IP encapsulation.
So the solution is to use a low overhead protocol, but which one?
Maybe TFTP?

(Last edited by Ovydake on 22 Sep 2007, 09:53)

Bartman007 wrote:
Ovydake wrote:

My configuration is a Asus WL500gP with WhiteRussian (sorry Kamikaze, I need working wireless...)

Wireless does work in Kamikaze, might want to read the release notes a bit more carefully.

Almost all of these platforms are based on 2.6 kernels
    with the exception of Broadcom -- Sorry; we couldn't get a stable wifi
    connection on 2.6.

If there is no 2.6 (with improved multitasking) then I don't see the point of switching to Kamikaze, I'll wait for the next release, maybe the wireless will get fixed and I'll make the switch.

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