WHS transfer speeds across network

[Angry]

Those of you with gigabit networks and WHS...

...What are your average and max transfer speeds from your WHS to local drive and vice versa..

 

[Mathemabeat]

Obviously depends on a lot of factors, hard drive speed, quality of the nic, cpu speed (though less important than the NIC for just file transfers) etc...


However, you should be able to see at least 70 or 80 megs a second or more across gigabit with regular consumer hardware assuming modern SATA drives and at least a Realtek NIC.

You can buy one of the Intel Atom boards with onboard Realtek gigE NIC and see those speeds providing you are using decent drives. Once you start adding in multiple drives, folder duplication and Drive Extenders process those numbers are going to drop unless you have more cpu and disk bandwidth to go around.


In my experience lots of drives and folder duplication = more cpu power required on tap to keep from having your gigabit performance dragged down into 100 megabit territory.

 

[[LYL]Homer]

My setup is all gigabit, with dual NICs from WHS to the switch. Numbers are just the Win7 transfer speeds I observed. Moved a 6.4gb folder of a DVD rip there and back.

System 1, media pc w/500gb Maxtor drive
WHS -> System 1 = 64MB/s avg.
System 1 -> WHS = 51MB/s avg.

System 2, 2x80gb Intel G2 SSD in RAID 0
WHS -> System 2 = 86MB/s avg.
System 2 -> WHS = 64MB/s avg.

Of course I have no control which drives are being accessed in the WHS box. Here is my WHS setup.

 

[No1451]

Wish I knew what was wrong with my box, I'm lucky if I can break over 20MB/s

 

[Angry]

Very nice, My setup will probably be along these lines of my current server hardware (with just plain Win7):
Biostar 785g board
Athlon X2 5400+ 2.8ghz (brisbane)
2gb DD2 677
120gb SATA (main WHS drive)
4x 2tb greens w/ Dell Perc5i
Dual Intel gigabit NICs.

Not sure when Ill get it together, kinda waiting on the next release of WHS...and a deal on a Cisco 24port gigabit switch.

Are the expensive Adaptec controllers worth it? Or will the Perc5i be enough?

Hoping for good speeds as it will probably get fed alot of TV rips from my Main rigs TV tuner card as well as streaming to 2 diff HTPCs.

 

[ghost6303]

hard drive speeds are going to be the limiting factor for anyone using a gigabit connection without RAID or SSDs. 1Gb ethernet is good for up to 125 megabytes /sec, but your average single hard drive cant read/write faster then 50-100 megabytes /sec (maybe 200 for the top end physical hard drives).

streaming a bluray movie takes 80-150 megabits/sec, for comparison, on my network atleast. (10 to 20 megabytes/sec)

 

[pjkenned]

hard drive speeds are going to be the limiting factor for anyone using a gigabit connection without RAID or SSDs. 1Gb ethernet is good for up to 125 megabytes /sec, but your average single hard drive cant read/write faster then 50-100 megabytes /sec (maybe 200 for the top end physical hard drives).

streaming a bluray movie takes 80-150 megabits/sec, for comparison, on my network atleast. (10 to 20 megabytes/sec)

So newer generation spindle disks range from a 125MB/s for the low end (Hitachi 7K2000 although the specs are out for the new, supposedly faster 7K3000s) to 150MB/s for the high end (WD Caviar Black/ Samsung F4).

The inner portions of the disks (slower) can usually sustain 70MB/s or more. Some drives tail into the 60MB/s range at the very inner portions of disks from what I have seen in 1.5TB/ 2TB models.

Another factor to keep in mind is that you are also transferring to another disk. If you try transferring compressed video files to a Sandforce SSD you will likely see in the 50-60MB/s range. One Intel X25-V will give you about 44MB/s and a X25-M 80GB gives about 88MB/s. And those are some of the best SSDs around at the moment. Indilinx and C300 based drives can handle 100MB/s read/ write of large files pretty easily. Spindle disks on the client are again going to range from 60-150MB/s.

So there are a lot of variables involved in WHS transfer speeds. Bottom line, if your WHS can get data off drives fast enough, your network is OK, and your client machine can receive data fast enough, you won't see horrendous speeds.

 

[[LYL]Homer]

Wish I knew what was wrong with my box, I'm lucky if I can break over 20MB/s

What is your setup - gigabit? CAT5E or CAT6 cabling? Switch vs. old hub? What are the specs for your systems you're transferring to/from, including what type of NIC?

 

[No1451]

What is your setup - gigabit? CAT5E or CAT6 cabling? Switch vs. old hub? What are the specs for your systems you're transferring to/from, including what type of NIC?

-2x sil3124 controllers
-1x sil3132 controller
-ASUS M3A76-CM
-AMD 4400+ AM2 cpu
-Seasonic 420 PSU
-2.5GB generic ram

I'm wired gig the whole way, there are two switches, one at my computer(no longer necessary I suppose since I sold off my xbox and ps3), and one that merges that switch to the rest of the network. Router is a DIR-655.

 

[benogil]

Network transfer is mostly about hard drive speed, but looking at your specs, increasing RAM to 2 gig might make some difference. The early HP WHS's had 512, and could not stream effectively until they were upgraded to 2 gig.
Also, at wegotserved, there is an article on demigrator.exe, and the network settings that give the best throughput, worth a look.

 

[No1451]

Network transfer is mostly about hard drive speed, but looking at your specs, increasing RAM to 2 gig might make some difference. The early HP WHS's had 512, and could not stream effectively until they were upgraded to 2 gig.
Also, at wegotserved, there is an article on demigrator.exe, and the network settings that give the best throughput, worth a look.

Yeah I copied that from an old thread, I have 2.5GB in there now

 

[oplin]

Why not team up a few NICs get better speeds? I'm still playing around but i plan on having 2-4 intel nics teamed up, really helps when copying data, or unzipping a file over the network. Playing movies not so much.

 

[OldSchool]

streaming a bluray movie takes 80-150 megabits/sec, for comparison, on my network atleast. (10 to 20 megabytes/sec)

I dunno what you're watching but the BluRay standard only allows for a combined video/audio bitrate of 48mbit. And you generally only see up to 14mbit on a 1080 x264.

But yes as many people have pointed out the transfer speeds are largely dependent on the drives at both ends. I have seen up to 100MB/s from my SSD to a 4 drive RAID 0 array over gbit, which is about as much as you can expect without enterprise network hardware. Also, that is via FTP as it is faster and more efficient than windows file transfer.

There are small command line utils that you can use to generate traffic instead of relying on a drive to test the actual network speed potential, the one I use is called PCATTCP.

 

[brownkc]

I use the prefab WHS box at the bottom of my sig. For large files I can reach into mid 70 MB/s but I find that moving a bunch of small files is much slower. Like the others have said, the real holdback is your harddrive speeds on each end. The only way to improve that is to have SSD's or RAID several newer/faster drives. Regardless, standard hard drives and one NIC connection at each end should support several HD feeds. I store my blurays on my server and play them from there and still have tons of headroom for my other pc's to transfer files, torrent, etc.

My understanding with networking is to expect 20% overhead so realistically you can only move about 800 Mb/s (100 MB/s) across a perfect gigabit network. I found this chart on Tom's Hardware which shows average read speeds of hard drives just barely breaks 100MB/s. It may be a little dated but at least gives you some idea of what speed to expect from a single drive.

 

[NoxTek]

Wish I knew what was wrong with my box, I'm lucky if I can break over 20MB/s

Same here, sometimes I get lucky and can hit a ~40mb/s sustained speed on a large file, but usually it's more like 18 - 24mb/s.

 

[Forceman]

Are you using Jumbo Frames? I found significantly higher speeds on my gigabit network when I moved to an add-in Intel NIC - I think it helped offload some of the work from the meager CPU I had in there. Now I get 70-80 MB/sec off the WD green drives in the WHS.