WHS, VMC and MCE performance over gigabit

CtrlAltDel · **12th February 2008, 12:05 PM**

I have a gigabit LAN set up at home - an el-cheapo Wiretek 8-port gigabit hub, and onboard gigabit on my two media centres and one home server. The hub connects to a Netgear DG834GT router for ADSL and wireless, with three laptops hooked up to the wireless, all of which support 11g (and not just 11b). The WHS storage consists of an internal SATAII 250Gb drive and 4 SATAII 500Gb drives in a SoHoTank ST7610-4S-WBC, hooked up via a pair of USB2 cables.

I started moving all my files from the two media centre boxes to the server using TeraCopy, but hardly ever got transfer rates greater than 1MB/s, which was a bummer when I had about 0.5Tb of data to shift. To my mind, this is very low for a notionally-1000Mbps network.

Can anyone suggest any places to start looking for performance bottlenecks? For instance, should I get a better hub, one which can do full duplex? Or make sure that all cables are Cat-6? Or use the Firewire interface on the SoHoTank to hook up the drives on the WHS rather than USB2?

GlenR · **12th February 2008, 12:19 PM**

Is it a hub or a switch? Hubs do not have the performance of switches as they suffer from collisions.

CtrlAltDel · **12th February 2008, 12:31 PM**

Pretty sure it's a hub. It doesn't appear on Wiretek's site, and cost me all of $30. That said, there's not really a lot going on elsewhere on the network, so there shouldn't be that much contention.

I'm currently looking at a TP-Link 16-port gigabit switch, which handles full-duplex. Might make difference. Anything else obvious?

coma · **12th February 2008, 05:19 PM**

You might wanna try Vista SP1 - supposed to provide a 'dramatic' improvement in network transfer speed.
There are many posts/hotfixes on the net about network transfer problems with Vista - assume the fixes have been rolled into sp1.
I have a similar setup and have the same issues.
I will be getting sp1 off technet this weekend.
Coma.

CtrlAltDel · **12th February 2008, 05:40 PM**

Is SP3 for XP going to do anything similar?

krypto · **12th February 2008, 05:59 PM**

Just did a quick test between my PC and WHS on my new TP-Link ($59) Gigabit switch.

2 GB in approx 60 secs = approx 30MB/sec

edit: That soshotank is a serious bit of gear. Makes my $80 Coolermaster case look very average

CtrlAltDel · **12th February 2008, 09:31 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by krypto

That soshotank is a serious bit of gear. Makes my $80 Coolermaster case look very average

It's pretty sweet. I really wanted the eSATA variant for the extra bandwidth, but there was something like a 6 week wait so I went for the USB. Maybe when I use that 2TB up and I need more expansion, I'll get the eSATA version.

CtrlAltDel · **12th February 2008, 09:43 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by krypto

Just did a quick test between my PC and WHS on my new TP-Link ($59) Gigabit switch.

2 GB in approx 60 secs = approx 30MB/sec

Now those are more the sort of numbers I want to see! OK, time to give my new improved credit limit a good workout

. I'll report back in a week or two.