[kami]

Hello
I've been working on a NAS now instead of a local folder and it seems much much slower ...
Is this normal, or did I buy a crappy NAS?
Has anybody else had good or bad experiences with working on a NAS?

cheers, kami

[polynurb]

this is my personal experience:

i run a zyxel Gb switch and i use an older dual xeon as file server ( dedicated intel pro/1000 MT server adapter) with raid6

.. it will always be slower than working on local folders, but concerning maxwell/netrender you should be able to see in the taskmanager at what speed the workstation/node is accessing files over the lan... and in my case it is much slower than it "could" be, compared to the pure "filecopy" performance, which is about 25-40 mb/s.

why that is .. i don't know.. maybe a windows limitation (x64 in my case) or something like a "secure" mode, so that in case of a bigger render farm when many nodes access the same files, no data gets corrupted or lost...

if you work with a central folder for textures, you could use low res proxies until the final render, to keep the data transfer as low as possible.

[N&B]

Hi,

I know that this post is pretty old, but for the ones still interested by this question I built one fileserver recently out of cheap parts and I nearly saturate the Gigabit ethernet connexion with it (around 96 to 110 Mb/s). Thus it is slower than what you would obtain locally with an SSD or Raid setup but it is by no means slow for a NAS.

Protocol used: CIFS/Samba
OS: Linux Ubuntu server 9.10 x64
File System: Ext4

Parts: Intel board with Pentium Dual Core E5300 (2.6Ghz), 2gb DDR2, Adaptec RAID3405, 4x 400Go SataII drives in RAID5 configuration. Gigabit Ethernet controller is on the PCI-express bus, this is important as a controller on the PCI bus would be much more bandwith limited.

hope this helps .