QNAP snapshot first replica taking ages

hi all,

I’m having a hard time replicating snapshots with 2 qnap TS435XeU; the sync is running by more than a day for just 5Tb of data.

basic info about the env:

  • direct ethernet connection between the units with a brand new cat.6 cable 1mt long, both units reports a 2.5gb link (using a 2.5g switch in between produces the same result)
  • the source unit has 4x4Tb disks in a RAID5 configuration
  • the target unit has a single 8Tb disk (the volume to be copied is 5Tb, can fit on the target)
  • all the disks are wd nas models
  • both units have the latest firmware available
  • the sync process has no speed limit, no encryption, no compression

math says that 5Tb at 2.5gbps should be somewhere around 5 hours, so accounting for overhead, errors, wizards, lizards and fairy tales I would be good with a 10 hours transfer but after a whole day the progress is a paltry 26,92%

i see that this is a recurring issue…

is there anything obvious i may have missed setting up the process?

i lost my temper and stopped the job: the GUI says that 4Tb have been transferred in 27 hours, that’s not 26,92% but the issue remain, a whole day for 5Tb is too much

What is the CPU usage during to process, these units are notoriously underpowered. What is the disk model used ?

the cpu is mostly idle; it has a spike when i login to check the status but after a few seconds gets back to 10%-20% on the source device and below 10% on the target nas.

the disks are all wd red:

  • 4x WD40EFPX-68C6CN0
  • 1x WD80EFPX-68C4ZN0

the issue that strikes me as extremely odd is that the data transfer on the net is non constant: it has spikes of 500/700 mbps for half an hour and then stops completely for some time and then gets back.

i’ve not been able to understand if there is any logic in the timing, how long compared to speed or data transferred.

it looks like as if most of the time both devices sits idle (no activity on the net and no load on the cpu) and i can’t understand why; i would expect a somewhat constant load of data transfer and some checksum/data verify or constant transfer or something mixed.

as a side note, when i wrote my post yesterday i was just restarting the snapshot replica from scratch (deleted the volume on the target nas, reboot both devices, restart the job) and after 20 hours it is at 17.56%: in this very moment the data transfer speed on the net (direct 2.5gbps link, no firewall, no switch) is 33kbps.

insane.