Slow transfer speed over network

1st Official Post

    Hey guys.

    Just installed libreelec on an asrock beebox nuc which has a Intel Celeron n1350 with 8gm ram and 60gb ssd msata hard drive, with a powered usb external sata hard drive 1.5tb.

    I can access the external hard drive from my Windows 10 laptop to view files but the problem is transferring files to the hard drive from the laptop. The speed is 150kb/s which goes up and down. I have the laptop connected to network with Ethernet cable. Libreelec nuc is wifi. I know wifi is not ideal but I had Windows 10 on nuc and transfer speeds were 25mb/s.

    Is this normal?

    • Official Post

    Normal of course it is not. I take it you mean a N3150 NUC, which should be more than capable of doing a proper network connection. But as you said, wifi is a totally different can of worms, Linux driver support can be flaky. Is there a chance that you can use ethernet on the NUC as well, just to double-check?

    Yeah it's n3150. I will try with ethernet cable tomorrow and see if that is any better. Would a bios update help?

    Edited 2 times, last by avd (February 8, 2020 at 9:55 AM).

    • Official Post

    You need to remember that anything wifi is not equal. Your Beebox wifi antenna is hidden inside a box (metal or plastic), probably behind a TV and probably at a point as far from the router as possible. If you're using 5Ghz then the range is not as good as 2.4Ghz but speeds are greater.

    For these reasons, I use 5Ghz with an external wifi adapter (with a large antenna) attached to an extension cable, so as to get the best reception possible.

    iwconfig wlan0

    That will show you the link quality and signal strength. If it's not around 40/70 and -60db then you're going to have issues for large files.

    As a test, I placed my wifi adapter next to the router and got 70/70 -31db. Moving a metre away gave 67/70 -43db. Placing an anti-static bag over it gave 54/70 -56db. So even small things can affect the performance of wifi.

    Tested with laptop connected via Ethernet and beebox connected to homeplug transfer speed is 8mb/s.

    Tested with a rpi 3b+ connected to homeplug speed is 16mb/s.

    I can only assume that there is driver issue with beebox I know homeplug is not ideal.