So a few weeks ago I installed IPFire on my router primarily to enable me to put in an NTFS drive and share it via SAMBA.

I’ve only now got around to actually measuring how fast it actually transfers; not so good.

But first I did an IPerf test to check my actual throughput, with interesting results:

When the Router was Client I got 476Mbps or 59.5MB/s
Now with my Windows 7 machine as the client I got 268Mbps or 33.5MB/s

There’s something weird going on there.

Anyway on to the SAMBA results:

Source of file: /tmp (ext4 drive)

Router -> Desktop I got 20-21MB/s
Desktop -> Router I got 15-17 MB/s

Source of file:  /mnt/media (ntfs drive)

Router -> Desktop I got 15 MB/s
Desktop -> Router I got 8-9 MB/s

Funny thing about all this: I have no idea what conclusions I can draw from the data provided. It appears that the slowest transfer occurs when I try copying a file from my desktop machine to the media drive on the router. Why? Not a clue. It really doesn’t make much sense to me. Possibly it’s the NTFS driver, maybe the HDD has something wrong, perhaps the mount point isn’t configured right.
One thing I can be sure of is that the problem happens primarily when transferring from my desktop machine, to the router. Guess it’s gonna be trial and error