Powerline Adapter Upgrade

[#1]

With more and more stuff being added to our LAN I thought it was time to see if I could upgrade my power line adapters, so I went on to Amazon to see what was available and I ended up buying 4 of these TP-Link TL-PA90XXP. As I had been using TP-Link’s TL-PA40XX and they’d proven 100% reliable for me and with Amazon’s returns policy I’d nothing to lose.
 
After taking a few minutes to install them I did a transfer from my iMac to my remote NAS with an image size of 182GB where it took all of 15m 31s to complete giving an average speed of 1.55Gbit/s which to be fair is very impressive. So needless to say I’ll be keeping these.

Just thought I'd mention this as for me it's money well spent.

[#2]

These excellent results show what can be achieved presumably with the powerline devices plugged into the same reing and with little background noise on the line. My experience with powerline is somewhat different. I know it's not always practicable but my first choice would always be to try and find a way to run an Ethernet cable. It's a lot cheaper as well.

One further thought, how did you get speeds greater than 1Gbps out of your mac and into the NAS?  I may be showing my ignorance but I thought that these and powerline device Ethernet ports were only normally capable of 1Gbps, let alone pull data off a disk and rewrite it to another at these speeds?

[#3]

@Baldrick1 - I’m no network expert, and as the iMac interface is 1000baseT running full duplex with an MTU 9000K Jumbo frame (as supported by the NAS) I can only assume that this is a factor in it.

[#4]

I wondered about that - maybe there's some compression going on?

File transfers are dependent on transfer protocol.

Try transferring a large video file (which is virtually incompressible) for a speed measurement.

[#5]

I was hinting at compression being in play. Unless @Anonymous is using top of the range SSDs both in his Mac and NAS I can't see how he's getting the data off and on disks at this speed let alone through 1Gbps Ethernet adapters at each end..

[#6]

You would be surprised at the speeds you can get for sequential access on a HDD - I got a constant 50MB/sec from SATA HDD writing to a HDD external drive via a USB3 connection - which was rather unexpected!

[#7]

FWIW the HDD in the iMac is a 1.2TB Fusion and the disks in the NAS are 4 x 3TB WD Reds in RAID 0.

P.S. This is a rack mounted NAS, not a desk cube type device.

[#8]

RAID 0 - if one disk fails, you lose all your data on all disks.

Why not RAID 5?

[#9]

The honest answer @VileReynard is (or was) lazyness, I couldn't be bothered tweaking it when I got it, but it is something I should sort out before it bites me on the bum, as it will, no doubt about that.

[#10]

Phew, maybe it wasn't laziness after all, I have had the device for a while, but in actual fact it is fault tolerant using the following:

[#11]

Is that RAID 10?

Plus BTRFS is an excellent file system and it supports transparent file compression (unless you switch it off).

So that would explain the high performance of your NAS disk writes.

Still think you didn't exceed around 100MB/sec though.