WHS Speeds

T

TechieSooner

Supreme [H]ardness
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Seems to be alot of folks with WHS slow transfer speeds.

Can everyone do a quick file copy on their WHS (Those that have them) and see what the active speeds are?
Also include wether you're on 1Gbps or 100Mbps network.
 
That's not going to get you a very good metric. The main things limiting most WHS's transfer speeds are the hard drives. I'm running mostly WD Green drives on a gigabit network. My speeds range from 30MB/s to 80MB/s, depending entirely on the drive, both how full it is and how fragmented it is. I generally hover around 50 to 60MB/s with my WHS about 40% full.
 
epimetheus said:
That's not going to get you a very good metric. The main things limiting most WHS's transfer speeds are the hard drives. I'm running mostly WD Green drives on a gigabit network. My speeds range from 30MB/s to 80MB/s, depending entirely on the drive, both how full it is and how fragmented it is. I generally hover around 50 to 60MB/s with my WHS about 40% full.
Click to expand...

That's exactly what I was getting at :D I'm wondering, on average, how much impact the facts that WHS A) Not very powerful hardware and B) Frequently changing data, play into the speed.

On Ethernet I can get about 80Mbps...

My wireless flat out sucks (4Mbps), looking at adding N.
 
I get 90MB/s transfer to my WHS using Seagate 2TB LP drives.
 
I'm getting roughly 52MB/s transfer speed of a 1.4GB file with the below setup:

WHS:
Intel Pentium D 820
ECS GF-7050VT mATX Motherboard
Intel PCI Gigabit NIC
2GB DDR2 800 RAM
Earthwatts 500W
Windows Home Server

My Gaming Rig (see sig)

DLink DIR-655 Router

Screenshot of the storage drives and how full they are:
WHSstt.png
 
my house is all gigabit, WHS has a mixture of drives but most are WD blacks, emptiest drive is like 80%, transfer speed to my desktop with raid 0 SSD's is about 40MB/s
 
You two confirm that even on a Gigabit network with halfways decent hard drives, it's not a very speedy system...
 
60-70MB/sec for me. epimetheus is correct though, there are multiple factors that affect transfer speeds.

This is with an underpowered HP Mediasmart EX470, no jumbo frames enabled.
 
TechieSooner said:
You two confirm that even on a Gigabit network with halfways decent hard drives, it's not a very speedy system...
Click to expand...

my guess is that its a crappy onboard NIC

Has obsolutely nothing to do with WHS.
WHS is just an application that runs on Server2003
 
nitrobass24 said:
my guess is that its a crappy onboard NIC

Has obsolutely nothing to do with WHS.
WHS is just an application that runs on Server2003
Click to expand...

This would be my guess as well; my experience with WHS has been that with a good switch/router and NICs, it doesn't bottleneck the hardware much, if at all.
 
nitrobass24 said:
my guess is that its a crappy onboard NIC

Has obsolutely nothing to do with WHS.
WHS is just an application that runs on Server2003
Click to expand...

True, however I think once you'd take WHS off (The replication and all the other extra features) you'd net faster speeds as well.
 
TechieSooner said:
True, however I think once you'd take WHS off (The replication and all the other extra features) you'd net faster speeds as well.
Click to expand...

it would be marginal at best.
Data running through the DE filter is really just one more layer an cannot account for the vast discrepancies we see around here.

2003 SMB implementation still sucks compared to Vista+
 
nitrobass24 said:
it would be marginal at best.
Data running through the DE filter is really just one more layer an cannot account for the vast discrepancies we see around here.

2003 SMB implementation still sucks compared to Vista+
Click to expand...

2008 goes a very long way in improving SMB. I sure hope they come out with a WHS based on a 2008 core
 
TechieSooner said:
You two confirm that even on a Gigabit network with halfways decent hard drives, it's not a very speedy system...
Click to expand...

Well to be fair, my router does not support jumbo frames above 4000k and I am using the onboard Realtek NIC in my gaming system. So despite being a Gigabit network, it's not a GOOD gigabit network.
 
nitrobass24 said:
my guess is that its a crappy onboard NIC

Has obsolutely nothing to do with WHS.
WHS is just an application that runs on Server2003
Click to expand...

idk, my network has a 2821 for router, dell 5324 for switch, and the server and my desktop both have intel pro/1000GT adapters in them.
 
moose517 said:
idk, my network has a 2821 for router, dell 5324 for switch, and the server and my desktop both have intel pro/1000GT adapters in them.
Click to expand...

That's strange, perhaps try using a direct connect and see if the speeds increase to rule out network issues?
 
moose517 said:
idk, my network has a 2821 for router, dell 5324 for switch, and the server and my desktop both have intel pro/1000GT adapters in them.
Click to expand...

pro1000/GT = FAIL
I had terrible performance on mine.
 
What did you switch to from the GT? I've had good luck with the 1000/GT myself, but curious what you changed to?
 
Neb said:
2008 goes a very long way in improving SMB. I sure hope they come out with a WHS based on a 2008 core
Click to expand...
Ditto...

I'm with moose here, he's got a good network and he's not seeing anywhere near Gigabit speeds, heck he's not even seeing good 100Mbps network speeds.
Hence the point of this whole thread, hopefully to get some handle on what may cause WHS to run like a dog.
 
TechieSooner said:
Ditto...

I'm with moose here, he's got a good network and he's not seeing anywhere near Gigabit speeds, heck he's not even seeing good 100Mbps network speeds.
Hence the point of this whole thread, hopefully to get some handle on what may cause WHS to run like a dog.
Click to expand...

Uh....40MB/sec is 320Mbps. That's better than the theoretical maximum speed of a 100Mbps network. Are you thinking he's getting 40Mbit/sec? I'm getting 60-70 Megabyte/sec.

I just transferred a 3gig iso from my WHS, posting it here with both Mbps and MB/sec tables so there's no mistake :) :

Code: 
DU Meter Stopwatch - #4
Start time       12/21/2009 3:03:18 PM
Stop time        12/21/2009 3:04:02 PM
Elapsed time     43.5 sec
                                             Incoming         Outgoing
------------------------------------ ---------------- ----------------
Total of data transferred                      2.7 GB          17.6 MB
Maximum transfer rate                      667.0 Mbps         4.3 Mbps
Average transfer rate                      536.8 Mbps         3.4 Mbps

DU Meter Stopwatch - #4
Start time       12/21/2009 3:03:18 PM
Stop time        12/21/2009 3:04:02 PM
Elapsed time     43.5 sec
                                             Incoming         Outgoing
------------------------------------ ---------------- ----------------
Total of data transferred                      2.7 GB          17.6 MB
Maximum transfer rate                       79.5 MB/s       527.3 KB/s
Average transfer rate                       64.0 MB/s       414.7 KB/s

WHS:
HP Mediasmart EX470:
CPU: Sempron 2ghz
RAM: 2GB
NIC: SIS191 Gbit with Jumbo frames off

Switch:
D-Link DGS-2208

Client:
NIC: Intel 1000GT
 
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when i first start a transfer the speed is at like 70MB/s then quickly drops to 35-40. i have 9k jumbo frames enabled on both my server and my desktop, flow control is disabled as well, both server and desktop + switch are 1gb full duplex manually set.

EDIT: or maybe not, how the heck do i get the ability to do anything on the server? under the network card the only thing i can do is specify IP address, and whether to turn off device to save power, i swear at one point i was able to set duplex and what not.
 
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Did you update your nic drivers with the ones from microsoft accidentally?
 
not sure, but i just installed the newest ones from intel. looks i need to do some unisntalling hmmmm
 
Seems to me the larger the file, the slower the overall transfer rate is. If I am transfer a 1.5G file I avg close to 50M, but if I am moving a file that is closer to 10G I am lucky to get 20M..
 
i agree with arailis, it seems the larget the file the worse it does, if i move one movie to my WHS its pretty quick, but if i have one of those marathon movings of upwards of 500gb from my destkop to server its lucky to average 5MB by half way through.
 
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