That’s what I figured was probably happening if the Synology NAS really wasn’t able to auto-negotiate – which appears to be the case. I think the NAS is probably defaulting to full duplex mode.
However, this part is disappointing:
If changing cables and/or a reboot of the NAS doesn’t improve things, I’m guessing that the network driver probably isn’t working correctly.
One other thing. Did you try to enable/disable auto-negotiation (and check its state) using ethtool?
If it makes you feel any better, I contacted a friend who has a DS210j. He tells me that, although it also has a gigabit interface, it too no longer supports auto-negotiation.
Yes I tried enabling auto negotiation but it doesn’t change anything, ethtool still shows it’s off afterwards. Replaced the cable, rebooted the damn thing, nothing.
Is there anything else to explore here or is that basically it?
I’m thinking, since my PC is always on anyway and everything works fine between the PC and the NAS, would there be a way to play the videos via the PC somehow?
The fact that the Windows 8 PC is not affected in the same way as the V4K+ might help us to identify a workaround.
I think the next step should be (assuming you’re still using the Cisco router) to set the router port manually to full duplex and reboot the NAS. Then provide iperf3 figures both ways for both the V4K+ and the PC.
Well this is interesting. I set the port to full duplex 100M, rebooted the NAS and now the NAS tells me it’s half duplex
root@DiskStation:~# ethtool eth0
Settings for eth0:
Supported ports: [ ]
Supported link modes: Not reported
Supported pause frame use: No
Supports auto-negotiation: No
Advertised link modes: Not reported
Advertised pause frame use: No
Advertised auto-negotiation: No
Speed: 100Mb/s
Duplex: Half
Port: MII
PHYAD: 8
Transceiver: internal
Auto-negotiation: off
Supports Wake-on: d
Wake-on: d
Link detected: yes
I would be 100% happy to accept that this NAS is just not suitable/broken/whatever it wasn’t working at full speed with the PC. But it does. V4k+ does not.
If all your network gear (router, switches, etc.) support gigabit, you can try and force gigabit speed on the Synology, since it does have a gigabit interface.
I’ve had some older network cards like this…they work fine at gigabit, but just don’t negotiate correctly with newer hardware.
what about to take your NAS out of the equation and just verify the bandwidth between your Vero and the PC? With that (running “iperf3 -s” on Windows) you’ll know whether the issue is located on your NAS or your Vero.
In post #9 you gave iperf3 reverse-mode figures that showed the throughput to be 94.7 Mbits/sec.
Now you have provided figures in response to @JimKnopf’s request for iperf figures “between your Vero and the PC” that are very bad – but the IP addresses used are different. This could be explained by the fact that you’ve changed your router in the meantime, so could you confirm that both sets of figures are between the Vero and the PC.
That’s because in the meantime I started trying the Cisco router and in order to do that in the first place i had to change my PC’s settings to DHCP and never had a reason to change it back to fixed address. Yes the x.x.x.100 device is the same PC, x.x.x.237 is still V4k+.
Ok, so post #9 wasn’t between the V4K+ and the PC. From that point onwards, I’d been assuming that the V4K+ was working correctly but it might, in fact, be faulty.
Thanks for taking time to guide me through tests nonetheless. Perhaps I didn’t label these runs clearly enough but until I was specifically asked to test the PC with the V4k+ I never did it, all previous tests were between the NAS and the other two devices.
I managed to get an old Raspberry Pi, installed the latest Raspbian and performed the same tests with all devices previously tested:
Pi -> PC 42Mb, 0 retr, speed consistent
PC -> Pi 66Mb, speed consistent
Pi -> NAS 42Mb, 0 retr, speed consistent
NAS -> Pi 78Mb, 0 retr, speed consistent
Pi -> V4k+ 19Mb, 636 retr, speed 9-28Mb
V4k+ -> Pi 77Mb, 204 retr, speed 62-85Mb
