DOUBLE YOUR Performance - (new feature) SMB Multichannel Synology

all right how's it going you know so today we're going to be going over the number one feature coming out in DSM 7.2 and that is SMB multi-channel I genuinely think SMB multi-channel is going to have the largest effect of all the new features on DSM 7.2 for home users and even a lot of businesses because it can give you two to four times the overall throughput of copying files to your Nas in most cases without actually having to buy any additional Hardware whatsoever it means that even if your Nas does not support 10 gig of it you can still very easily get four gigabit which is a massive upgrade from one gigabit which you were normally stuck at so first off what is SMB multi-channel so SMB multi-channel is actually what a lot of people think link aggregation does a lot of people think that link aggregation can give you faster throughput to a single client but they actually cannot but SMB multi-channel can so SMD multi-channel allows your computer and your Nas when they're using SMB so if you're copying files from Windows File Explorer Macos finder the most common way you're copying files to your navs it allows them to talk on multiple physical connections so if your Nas has four one gigabyte ports on the back of it and your computer has two 2.5 gigabit ports on it you are going to be able to combine all of those together to get in this case four gigabits of throughput this is huge and it has been something that has been in beta for a very long time for Samba but has now finally been released full and can genuinely get you those speeds I'm going to show you how to set it up here and it is incredibly easy so the way this works is very simple right here in the past SMB was only ever going to be going over one stream and so it only ever took one physical connection which was inefficient if you had multiple connections and just one client trying to communicate but with multi-channel now it actually uses multiple streams and as you can see right here it actually allows you to mix match speeds and get the fastest of them and so this is a great diagram right here that really helps show how it works so this is actually from the announcement that it was coming in and essentially what it previously did without regular SMB multi-channel even if you had link aggregation on this nasp every single client would only be communicating over one network connection and so even if you had four one gigabit streams over here and had one 2.5 gigabit or two one gigabit streams on this guy right here it was only ever going to be talking on one of those connections so whichever is the slowest of these two connections would be the bottleneck and be limiting the overall throughput of the nas but now with SMB multi-channel it is actually allowed to use multiple simultaneous network connections all at the exact same time and it's very easy to set up so this is going to be great for people who have two one gigabit ports on the back of their Nas and it will just instantaneously double their performance if they have two one gigabit ports on the back of their computer or a 2.5 gigabit port on the back of their computer it allows you to get that mix match speeds and is great so this really helps kind of show it and it is going to be a massive massive upgrade I think a lot of people are going to use it and so before we go into how to set this up and everything I do want to go over the fact that this is not for everyone so from my testing it's been out for a long time so I've been testing it for a while with trunass and things like that it is not for every single use case the biggest one I do not recommend people use it for are going to be very small reads and write with random reads and rights that require very low latency so the vast majority of people who are going to have that are going to be video editors and so if you're a video editor and you're actually editing video on the nas so you're actually using the nas as the file server for editing your videos and you have enough throughput to actually play back whatever video you're playing back so for people who are using h264 one gigabit is totally fine but for prores you normally want at least 2.5 gigabit if you're going to be having multi-streams especially but as long as you've got that connection as long as you can smoothly Play Back video from my testing you will actually get a worse experience because is when you enable SMB multi-channel the packets do not come in as quickly it does add a bit of latency because maybe one packet takes one route and one packet takes the other and it takes a little bit to kind of fix that in the end and so I've noticed from my testing that scrubbing through a timeline if I had a two 10 gigabit connections set up in SMB multi-channel when I didn't need it scrubbing through the timeline actually was significantly worse because randomly I would get freezes which I did not have with just the one 10 gigabit connection so that is the real case where I found that it might not be for everybody so I do not recommend it for video editors now if you're already having choppy playback with one stream it cannot hurt it'll probably help but just know it can lead to a bit of choppier playback when you're scrubbing through a timeline specifically but other than that it is phenomenal for massive file transfers to the Nas and we're going to go ahead and show how to set it up my lab environment right now is completely and totally chaotic I think I'm gonna have some b-roll right here that's just showing it basically all I did and I can also show it over here so I just hooked up two ethernet cables into the nas with no custom configuration at all this is a 923 plus this is actually the 10 gig adding card I'm not using it these are just two one gigabit connections and if we go into info center we will see that they are in fact both at just one gigabit and they're plugged into a simple one gigabit switch as well currently I only have one connection to my computer so we're gonna look at that in the beginning and kind of show you where you're at right now and then we're going to add the second connection and this is all going to be over one gigabit stuff but from my testing I have been able to get faster than one gigabit speeds with two 10 gigabit connections I actually got 1.6 gigabytes per second pretty sticky and in some cases it was even up to two gigabytes per second which was insane and so first off we've got to get a baseline where we're just going to do a copy to the nas with the standard one gigabit connection and I have not yet enabled SMB multi-channel so I'm going to go into my terminal window over here and execute the command SMB util multi-channel Dash a all this does on Mac OS is list SMB multi-channel and so we can see right here this is my SSD this is the 923 plus and if we look in right here we can see that SMB multi-channel is not on so it is disabled on the server and we only have the one gigabit connection I'll even add the second one in right now just to prove that this is exactly how it worked before SMB multi-channel was out so I've not enabled it over there and so we can see that even though I have two physical connections hooked up right here to my laptop we are only using one of them and so essentially this is back before SMB multi-channel I'm not enabled in DSM and we're just going to do a very quick very simple test by dumping data to it I'm currently dumping it to an internal nvme volume so it's going to be about as fast as we can possibly get so we do not need to worry about through it there but I'm just going to go on over and this right here is that SSD folder on the Nas and I'm just going to go ahead and copy it and select a large file to copy we got it in here and we're going to pull up activity monitor with the network right here so we can more easily see what is going on so I'm just going to take this large file and copy it on over and we're just going to look and see what kind of throughput we get so we should get about 125 to 120 megabytes per second that is the limitation of a one gigabit connection you divide by eight to get from gigabit to bytes so you can see we are sticky right at 125 megabytes per second but technically we could do twice that we have two one gigabit connections to the Nas and two one gigabit connections to our computer but it is simply not using them it is only using a single one of those streams and if we go back to NAS we can actually see that in action right here by looking into the network Center and we can see that Land one is the only one receiving any data whereas Lan 2 is not receiving any data whatsoever so that is where we were previously now I'm going to go ahead and kill this transfer and eject the volume and let's go ahead and enable SMB multi-channel so you need to be running DSM 7.2 I'm currently on the release candidate and we just go into file services SMB advanced settings others and enable smb3 multi-channel and that is it and so the other thing to note if you have currently set up link aggregation on your Nas I would actually recommend disabling that if you're using SMB multi-channel I have found that it's worst performance and it's kind you can kind of get it to use multiple streams but I would not recommend enabling it so I would recommend disabling link aggregation and just having them as two separate network connections just on the NASA so you can see right here there are two network connections just on the same network technically this is not how you're supposed to do it but as long as you've got the two connections and they're the same speed you're not going to run into any issues whatsoever technically this breaks the recommendation for how ethernet is supposed to work but because Windows has been doing this for such a long time this is kind of how Windows said hey this is how we're going to do networking everything's just kind of supported it even though it's a kind of unofficial by the IEEE standard so all I need to do right here was I've just got two connections and I've got two connections into my computer right here no custom configuration whatsoever I'm just going to go ahead and remount that share and now go back into that terminal window and re-execute SMB multi-channel and we can see that this has worked if you have ever disabled SMB multi-channel on your Mac you may have to re-enable it there's terminal command for that I'll let you look it up because you enabled it the first time but we can see that the way it's worked is SMB multi-channel on yes we can see that the servers IP addresses as well as our Max connect IP addresses and connections right here and we can see that we've got two one gigabit connections now in some cases Wi-Fi may say it's like 1.2 gigabit but by default Mac OS will say all right I'm not going to use Wi-Fi even though it claims to be faster and so the way that SMB multi-channel works is each computer picks its fastest network connection and then we'll multi-channel any other connections that are of the same speed so if I had a 2.5 gigabit connection and a one gigabit connection both on the exact same Nas it would only use the 2.5 gigabit connection and so you can't combine multiple network connections that are different speeds in SMB multi-channel but we can see right here that it is successfully negotiated and effectively we are going to have a two gigabit connection to the nas because we can see that the server has two one gigabit connections and our computer has two one gigabit connections and that is all we had to do I am planning on doing a much more in-depth video for how you set this up on both Windows and Mac and really kind of going into the nitty-gritty of this once the actual full version comes out so that way I can get full performance testing and show it with two 10 gigabit connections even and things like that but for now this is where we are working and it's been incredibly easy to set up I did nothing custom here except hit one button and plug in two ethernet cables into both my laptop and my Nas now let's go ahead and do the exact same transfer we just did but this time we've enabled SMB multi-channel and you can see immediately we are getting 250 240 megabytes per second we have instantaneously doubled our performance for large file transfers just like that no extra configuration all we needed was the two one gigabit connect cables to both the Nas and the computer so as long as you have the ports on the switch and adapters you can get these speeds and it does not take any finagling or custom configuration that's one thing that's been really cool to me about SMB multi-channel is it really just kind of works because it's able to use these multiple streams it really does not take much custom configuration whatsoever all I did was go into file Services advanced settings and enable SMB multi-channel we can also come in here and we can see that it is in fact using both connections so we look at Lan 1 and land two they're both receiving 114 megabytes per second in this Frame and so it is just sticky working on there let's also just go ahead and see what happens if I pull one of these connections and see if it continues to transfer well that was certainly not correct it decided that I went infinite but once it actually figured out what was really going on we can see that the transfer has continued on completely fault tolerant as well which is really really cool so you're getting all the benefits of Link aggregation and fault tolerance and everything like that without having to run them I was able to pull out the cable and still get my full transfer speeds on the one cable that is still remaining the transfer did not fail or anything like that SMB multi-channel is a savior for a lot of setups and it's just going to be a no-brainer in a lot of cases now once again if your primary focus is video editing and you don't currently have any issues except maybe when you're copying files in the ass it can feel a bit slow enable it but know that if you get some weird Behavior with your frames dropping you should probably disable it because that's probably the reason why you're having these issues and that is really all there is to it we were able to incredibly easily set this up and it just really works right out of the box it's also awesome that it has that built-in fault tolerance and it's always just kind of operating the background if you have any other questions for me go ahead and leave those and down in the comments below and have a good one bye [Music] thank you

Channel: SpaceRex

Views: 51,620

Keywords:

Id: qtGSFbibf5o

Length: 15min 14sec (914 seconds)

Published: Mon May 01 2023