What transfer speed do you get with your media server?

Using old Intel desktop board SATA or eSATA via GB network if single BD 40G about 40-50 MB/s. When I do multiple files, it will drop to 2X MB/s and once it complete the remaining will ramp up to 40-50 MB/s again.

from an intel D975XBX2 board on board gig port via 50' cat 6 cable to netgear16 port gige switch (http://slickdeals.net/?sduid=65774&s...82E16833122139) then via 10' cat 6 cable to another intel D975XBX2 board.

these are from a RAID 0 array of four sata drives to another RAID 0 array of four SATA drives.

the nics on the board are intel pro1000 PL nics.

the size buffers are set to 256 for the receive buffer and 512 for the transmit buffers.(defaults) and jumbo frames are supported and auto enabled.

this are both vista ultimate 64bit computers.

this was an 7.8gb file (movie rip)

Here is the same file, from and to the same computers, going from a single IDE drive to a single IDE drive.

as you can see, the drives are the limit.

@eklee
What operating system are you using? Mine averages 25MB/s (200 mbps) using Windows XP (32-bit) file sharing. Testing using iperf with window size 64k tells me the NIC can handle 75+ MB/s (600+ mbps). I'm tempted to install Vista to test if I'll see improved file transfers. Seeing that the NIC itself can handle 600 mbps, is it possible to test Vista network performance within a virtual machine?

Network transfer from my workstation to the new server. The source drive on the workstation is a 3 drive RAID-0 array, and the target drive on the server is an 8 drive RAID-5 array. All onboard gigabit ports, Nvidia 680i onboard gigabit on the workstation side, and Intel onboard (with I/OAT) on the server side.



"Torture" test to run and see if your storage and network are playing well together. Try reading AND writing to the same storage location at the same time, but from a different machine on your network. (Basically, create a copy of a big file). I ran these tests, after tweaking pretty much everything that I know of, as far as Server 2008 and Vista networking is concerned.

What that will do is, read the data from the storage location, to your test machine, and the test machine will send it back to the storage location. That way, you can see if your storage is capable of sustaining a good simultaneous R/W throughput, as well as this will completely max out your network (even gigabit).

This of course assumes that the underlying storage structure can R/W atleast ~130MBps or so, in order to max out a gigabit network.

WOW... I really need to figure out what's going on, on my network..

Most of my transfer are to my media sever running XP..

From main machine(vista) to server(xp) or HTPC (vista) to server (XP)

and I am lucky to see 12MB/sec... its all gigabit cards and switches.

I am wondering even though everything registers as gigbit, could it be because there might be some cat 5 cables mixed in with the cat 6 or is it more likely a setting issue?

Gigabit cards and switches is only part of the equation. Are you using a hardware raid card, software raid, what bus(PCI,PCIe). If your streaming your HD material without any problems, don't worry about it. So it takes a little longer to transfer files to the server big deal it's not going anywhere.

The storage drives in the XP machine are 6 - 250gig PATA drives on a Promise HW raid 5 card.. (it's crazy in that case as it they EACH have their own dedicated channel) there is also 3 other drives in that system.

streaming seems to run fine but copying over BD rips takes quite a while it would be nice to speed that up a bit and allow me to do more things without worrying about using up all the bandwidth.

btw, on mine the source array is the onboard intel matrix Raid controller (ICH-7R) to another array of four drives which is actually controlled by the operating system only.

poor cables is the number one cause of poor transfer speeds.
home made, poorly shielded, or just simply poor connectors will be the first thing i look for.

are all of your OS's up to date?

there were some initial problems copying between vista/2008 and XP/2003 systems as the tcp stack is all new and were reporting some problems.

these have been corrected on both sides via windows updates.

HTPC (Onboard Nvidia 8200 chipset Raid 0) to HP media smart WHS(2 x 500gb drives, 2gb ram), get 35-50MB/s depending on file sizes pulling from server and about 30-45 pushing to server.

Also have a Dlink pci gigabit card installed in HTPC as a spare for restore from server, and it matches to being just slightly less than onboard speed.

Dlink DIR 655 router with Dlink 10/100/1000 switch @ TV for HTPC and Xbox

edit : Vista Ultimate 32 on HTPC

I can sustain 80-85MB/s.

-Media PC OS is Vista Ultimate x64 with individual SATAII discs.
-Server OS is Solaris 10 with a ZFS+ array (12 SATAII discs).
-Using onboard GigaE controller on both machines
-Some inexpensive Netgear Gigabit router
-50' of cat6 cable

Keep in mind if you plug a Gigabit NIC card into a PCI slot you'll never get full Gigabit speeds because the PCI bus is too slow (need PCI-e or PCI-x)

Your slow speed is most likely a combination of harddrive speed 5400 rpm vs 7200 rpm, FSB and CPU speed. Your computer can onlyt transmit the data as fast as it can collect if from the HD.

If you're constantly using the swap/page file, you're slowing down the HD. If you have a lot of non-essential processes, you're reducing cpu time.

Just go through you system and see where things can be turned off / eliminated. You'll be able to double or at least triple your speeds.

~ryan

The Intel Pro/1000 PT is nice. Here is a transfer on my network without jumbo frames, from the system with the Intel card to a laptop with a crappy Broadcom card:



When I was using the on-board ethernet it wasn't quite this fast, so yes, the card will make a big difference.

OK going to start by replacing all the cables with verified Cat 6..

There is no reason I should be seeing 12MB/sec max

from there work on cards..

The vista machines are not SP1 either so going to make that change.. I want to move this 35gig isos around alot quicker.

I haven't even setup my media server yet because every time I try to connect my media center to my gigabit router (DIR-655) and transfer a rip from my gaming machine to it, it starts at 2MB/sec and then trickles down to 1.2MB/sec. I thought it was the cable at first since the outer sheath was punctured, but not the individual wires, but the replacement cable 5e is doing the same thing.

Both computers (Vista Ultimate SP1) report 1000mbps connections, wonder what the issue is? I'm able to get 280mbps minimum out of my Draft N adapter on the same media center box.

when reading or writing to a WHS box, you are only reading or writing from one drive at a time.
WHS uses what is basically spanning to create large drives out of many smaller drives.
unlike raid striping, this means that you are reading from one drive at a time, not multiple drives at one time.

if you look at the spanned image below, you will see that as drive 1 is filled (in the storage pool), the next files are written to drive 2, then when drive 2 is full it moves to drive 3, and so on.

RAID does not do this.

A striped RAID array of 4 drives would have all the same size blocks on each drive, and would read from all four drives at once.
depending on your block size (64kb, 128kb, etc), data is written to drive one in this block size, then drive 2, then drive 3, then drive 4, then back to drive 1, and so on.

this means that unless the file is smaller than the block size, you are reading parts of the file from multiple drives at the same time and thus can utilize the speed of all the drives in reading and writing.

this means that you are not normally limited by the speed of any one drive, as you can add all of the drives speeds together (not really but thats the simple explanation) to achieve higher reading and writing speeds.

this is an advantage of striping raid of spanning, pooling, or whatever you want to call it that WHS does.

you are never going to saturate a gige connection with a single ide drive, and it is doubtful you can actually do it on a single sata drive.

the interface to the drive may support it, but everything else in the computer is slowing it down.

try a different switch
take the router out of the switching picture.

something like this would work for testing:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...2128&Tpk=gs105

probably what makes more of a difference is HOW the card is connected.

most on board cards in older boards are connected to the PCI bus, meaning it shares bus speed with every other device on the same bus.

moving to a separate card on the PCIe bus will have more of an effect than changing brand of cards will.

That's true to an extent, but the brand also matters. For example, an Intel Pro/1000 PT PCI-E was faster than a Yukon PCI-E.

I've got the same router and can easily get 65MB/s. (I can't hit 100MB/s due to an issue with a crappy Gb NIC on one end of the connection.) But that's not to say that you don't have a problem with your specific router. I'm just saying that in general that model works just fine.

From my HTPC running Vista and a NetGear Gig card to my media server running unRAID and the same NetGear card, I get right around 50MB/s.

Network throughput between two machines (especially large contiguous file transfers) is very....well...individualistic and dependent on the hardware/software combo.

On the hardware side, there's LOTS of things that affect the throughput, but most of all:

- amount of memory on the machines (because any memory caching depends on it)
- NICs (even if they are onboard, HOW are they wired? PCI? PCI-e?)
- I/O controller (Is it an add-in card? Onboard SATA controller? hardware RAID? )
- Disk(s) (How good are the individual spindles? The new Seagate 1.5TB drives have some very good transfer speeds, but the same cannot be said for older drives. If you are running JBOD, your network throughput is dependent on the target drive, 1 gigabit can do 100MBps easy, but if your disk can only write at 65-70MBps max, that's what you're gonna get. The buffers fill up fairly fast)
- Switches (Switches are not created equal, although any of the new(er) switches, i.e. less than a year or so old, should be more than capable)
- cabling (good cables are a must)

On the software side, things are actually better. There's not a whole lot you can screw up. As long as the system is correctly configured for gigabit, you should get gigabit speeds, hardware permitting. Jumbo frames keeps coming all too often, but understand that jumbo frame support is all about "efficiency" i.e. lower CPU usage at the SAME throughput rates, it doesn't magically make your transfers any faster.

Bottomline, look at your hardware first. That's the bottleneck 9.9 times out of 10.

Try using 2 gbps links aggregated together to increase your network transfer speeds.

You may opt for fiber ethernet as well... again requiring special hardware.

For the people with ludicrous amounts of money ... you can opt for a Cisco ME 4924 - 10GE switch using fiber.

Thanks,

I actually solved the problem last night. I realized that I hadn't tried transferring a large file in the OTHER direction (MC to gaming machine). That file transferred at full speed (~60MB/s), but the other direction was only doing 2MB.

Realizing that it was no longer a cable/hardware issue, I remembered changing some settings for the network adapter with the old cable to no avail, but decided to try it with the new one. After setting the speed/duplex mode to "1Gbps - Full" instead of "Auto", file transfers were going full tilt even though under "Auto" it was still connecting at 1000mbps. Go figure.

So you are getting 60MBps write speed to RAID5? I have server environments that can barely achieve that with SAS drives and hardware RAID. My home server has an Adaptec 3805 hardware raid controller with 5 7200RPM 1TB drives in a RAID5 configuration. That server will saturate the 1Gbps connection when reading files, but writing runs at around 6MBps. I have eliminated the network from the problem by transferring files from the non-RAID OS drive to the array and found similar results. Copying from the array to a destination drive is limited by the speed of the destination, but copying to the array is limited to 6MBps or so regardless of the source drive. I haven't been able to find a solution, do you have any ideas?

It could be various problems. I would eliminate the network itself first since it's the easiest. How far is the patch cable run between devices? If it's a long run are you using solid or stranded twisted pair? Remove the switch and the NAS from the equation and see what happens between two hosts. I would also recommend switching to Intels Server NICs for better performance over motherboard NICs. What NIC is in your nas? The 3805 seems like a decent card, I use the 52445 in my servers.

When it comes to the NAS it has a chance for more issues. First is the raid stripe clusters. You could have a drive that is under performing. It could be a power issue (enough current and voltage under load). It could be a poorly constructed interface cable installed between your RAID and SAS drives. I would google your brand drives to see if other people experience "slow" or misrepresented performance numbers. In my experience; typically slow write speeds means it's in the NAS. It could be a configuration problem (not in the array config) of the NAS in general. It's tough to say.