In my last post Windows 2012 R2 Decommission I mentioned about a problem that would change my whole architecture.

Transfer Speeds

Whilst copying all the data over Samba from my M1 Max Macbook Pro over Gigabit Ethernet and having the Plex server access the files using NFS over Gigabit Ethernet it seemed like everything was going perfect. Transfer speeds of > 100MB/s were achievable in both directions.

However, over WIFI connecting over Wireless AC I was only getting around 10MB/s. Transfer speeds to the old Windows 2012 R2 server over WIFI were about 40-45MB/s. Nothing else in the network had changed.

My NAS/File Server has gone through multiple iterations after the years so it’s interesting to know the reasons for each iteration and the reason why I’m migrating it once again.

First File Server (Ubuntu 11.10)

My first NAS implementation was an old desktop PC running Ubuntu 11.10 that was running samba. I didn’t know about using RAID/mdadm at that time so it used a single 2TB hard drive that would mirror itself with rsync to another 2TB hard drive nightly.

Upon migrating my blog to a Google Cloud Compute Engine VM (this very blog) I had a strange issue where it would freeze and become unresponsive. Only “Resetting” the VM would bring the blog back.

The findings were so interesting I thought I would share them.

Issue

It’s worth noting what the instance is (and importantly what resources it has been allocated) as it probably would not be an issue with a larger (and more expensive) instance. As of writing the instance is set to a “e2-micro” instance located in “us-central1”. The reason for this is you get one free instance in this region when using Google Cloud.