Slow Network Transfers - Fixed! (At least for Me)
I've been fighting this issue for awhile, and have tried some of the great ideas posted in this forum, but nothing had improved my miserable network transfers. They maxed out at ~2.4 MB/s.
Also, as tried by others, I moved to a gigabit switch, cat 6, and added a gigabit nic to my WHS. Still, remained at the same speed, proving it wasn't bandwidth. (Although the gigabit stuff is cool - don't tell my wife it didn't fix it.)
Ultimately, I found a driver for my SIS 964 chipset. Originally, my HDD controller showed as a "Standard PCI IDE Controller", driver provided by Microsoft (included on the WHS/Server 2003 install disc), circa 2002.
After updating the driver, it indicates an SIS RAID controller (although I'm not using RAID). Speeds now peak at ~26.0 MB/s, which is certainly acceptable.
Just wanted to pass this along in case if helps someone else, especially if you've built your own WHS box on slightly older hardware.
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Thanks for sharing your results - good to hear you got such an improvement.
Just to clarify my point: if your HDD controller shows as "Standard...", you might as well seek out an updated driver specific to your chipset. Chances are you can find a driver newer than 2002 and reap some performance gains.
Of course, backup your data first.
If your switch (hub) supports jumbo frames, don't forget to turn them on on your WHS and your other PCs / Macs that have gigabit ethernet. You can do this in the Device Manager entries for your network cards.
This enabled me to get 45 MB/sec copy (download) of files from the HP Mediasmart to both a PC and my iMac. Be careful though, some switches (like the SMC8508T that I had) and some network cards claim they support jumbo frames up to 9000 bytes, but it is false information. Try combinations of 7000 byte jumbo frames or 9000 byte jumbo frames. I get the best speeds when my HP Mediasmart is set to 7000 byte jumbo frames, the iMac set to 7000 bytes, and the PC to 9000. (Strange, setting the PC to 7000 makes it slower...).
Sending files back to the server is slower, something like 25 - 30 MB/sec, to a non-duplicated share.
Odi
Yeah, my problem isn't with download speeds, it's upload speeds. Downloads are acceptable, writing large data to WHS most certainly not acceptable.
Let's keep things in perspective here.
If you are saying that 25 MB/sec writes through gigabit ethernet to an inexpensive backup/file server device like the HP MediaSmart is not acceptable, I disagree. This is excellent for a $500 pre-built plug-and-play device. Sure beats my Buffalo terastation. Heck, on my 2.4 Ghz work machine, just copying a 1 gigabyte file from C:\ to C:\ takes longer, without going through the network at all...
If you are saying that 25 MB/sec writes through gigabit ethernet is generally not acceptable, ok. Gigabit ethernet can do a little more (theoretically it caps off at about 80 MB/sec with packet overhead), so perhaps you can hope for 50-80 MB/sec, though I didn't research this, please feel free to correct me.
What kind of speeds do you need, so that it is acceptable. I'm sure there are configurations that will do it. There are faster machines, 10000 rpm or 15000 rpm SCSI drives, fibre-channel cards, etc. What's your budget?
- Odi, the complaint that many users have with write speeds are that they are seeing throughput below 10 MB/s, sometimes as low as 2-4 MB/s, when writing to the storage pool. This only occurs on servers with multiple disks, and is a (known, at least as far as effects go) result of the way Drive Extender works. Writes to the same physical hardware running another OS, such as Windows Server 2003, are much faster.
I see the same issue, but I don't think it's a big deal, because almost all my file operations against the server are reads, not writes. I'll see what I get on my HP MediaSmart when writing to a duplicated share. I have it loaded with 4 internal SATA drives (3 x 500GB + 1 x 1TB) and the free space is about 35%.
What are we hoping for, say, 10 MB/sec would be acceptable? (Considering that it is writing the data to redundant hard drives, and that this isn't hardware RAID 5 but rather an all-software solution... keeping in mind the costs)
Wait a sec
I just realized I can remote desktop to any computer at home now thanks to WHS. I can run a test right now... Sending a 1775 MB file to a share with duplication... Uh, it's pretty slow so far, it says it is going to take 8 minutes... Dang, not at all like writing to a non publicated share... anyway, the results are: 5 minutes, 29 seconds, for a transfer rate of 5.25 MB/sec. I agree that's frustratingly slow.I'll try it with my 2 or 3 year old Terastation (4 x 250 GB configured Raid 5, about 35% free on that too). Results: 10 MB/sec write, or less than 3 minutes for the same 1775 MB file. The difference between the Terastation in Raid 5 and WHS is that the Terastation isn't as flexible (the drives have to be the same size otherwise the extra space on some drives is unused, and they have to be internal, and you can't just add drives though you can swap them one at a time for larger ones) but also it only loses 25% due to redundancy with 4 drives. The Terastation, an old device, seems to be 2 times faster, though. WHS on the other hand is more flexible (add drives as needed, any size, even through USB, option to duplicate certain shares and not others) but wastes 50% space for redundancy and is 2 times slower when writing to the duplicated shares, though is much faster when writing to non-duplicated shares.
Conclusion: If you have duplication on, it is slow... I still much prefer the HP MediaSmart to the Terastation for all that WHS provides and flexibility. But this gives Microsoft something to work on for v2, I guess
Anyway, back to work.
Odi
The flow control on the NIC in my Dell XPS 410 was set to disabled. I read an article on smallnetbuilder.com and turned it on and receiving pc controls. I have an intel 82566dc gigabit adapter with the latest drivers from intel. In device manager, properties for the NIC, ADVANCED tab, PERFORMANCE OPTIONS (click propeties button), FLOW CONTROL, ENABLED RX.
I now have duplication on all shared folders and I am now in the 18-20MB/second range consistently. Before doing this I was in the 2-5MB/second range for duplicated shares and 10MB/second or so for the non-duplicated shares.
I have an HP MediaSmart Server EX470 (500GB and upgraded to 2GB RAM) with an extra 750GB internal drive and 2 external 500GB drives attached.
Walkabt,
That's strange, can one explain that with the same network settings, I get 25 MB/sec write speeds to non duplicated shares, but only 5 MB/sec write speeds to duplicated shares? (Edit: Not strange at all, now that I read a bit about how DriveExtender works...)
If you are getting the reasonable 18-20 MB/second write speeds on duplicated shares, how much are you getting on a non-duplicated share? (would you be willing to create one to try?)
Is the flow control enabled on your HP MediaSmart, and did you upgrade the drivers of the HP MediaSmart to the latest version? (What is the driver version of your SIS191 on the HP MediaSmart?)
Thanks,
Odi
Update... after reading walkabt's comment above, and other threads, blog posts, etc. and experimenting this evening, here are the best results I have achieved with the HP MediaSmart EX470 (3 x 500GB drives, 1 x 1TB, 65% full)
I guess it is close to walkabt's results.
Setup on the EX470: Turned off Media sharing, updated SIS191 network driver to the latest version, set Jumbo Frame size to 7000 bytes, enable flow control, use gigabit ethernet switch that supports jumbo frames, cat 5e cables and junction boxes.
Setup on the iMac: Using the built-in gigabit ethernet, set to 7000-byte jumbo frames and flow control enabled.
Transfer 3.07 GB file to iMac from EX470 took 61 sec, so about 49 MB/sec read speed, great!
Transfer 3.07 GB file from iMac to EX470 on a duplicated share took 135 sec, so about 22 MB/sec write speed, great!
For the record, when I tried the above test sending the 3.07 GB file to a non-duplicated share, it still gave me about 22 MB/sec.
On my pretty powerful XPS 600 PC running XP, I couldn't find settings that would go that fast. 9000-byte jumbo frames, flow control enabled, optimize for throughput. The best read speed I could muster was with those settings, which gave 40 MB/sec read and about 10 MB/sec write speed.
Odi
- I always get much better transfer speeds to WHS from OS X than i i do from Vista SP1 RC. I guess the unix TCP/IP stack in OSX is better than vista's, oh the irony.
Although i was able to get vista's speed more competitive by installing SP1 and also making sure every driver on the server was the latest from the chip manufacturer rather than the microsoft own brand drivers as per the OP. Glad to hear the chipset drivers helped a bit for you Almonde, but I haven't seen any other posts re the HDD Controller driver specifically.
Has anyone else seen improvement by upgrading their hard drive controller driver?
- 1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\Tcpip\Parameters
3. Right-click EnableTCPChimney, and then click Modify.
4. In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.
5. Right-click EnableRSS, and then click Modify.
6. In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.
7. Right-click EnableTCPA, and then click Modify.
8. In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.
9. Exit Registry Editor, and then restart the computer.
From smallnetbuilder, worth a try -
Ben
Ben Ogilvie www.hdtvtoyz.com
