Need help speeding up my office network

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LSDC

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I have a small dental office with a small network of Windows 7 (32-bit) computers. In total there are 4 workstations. One of the workstations is a wireless laptop and the other three are directly wired into a router (each about 25 feet apart in different rooms). In addition to the workstations, I have 3 wireless printers and a wired in Western Digital MyBookWorld external drive connected to the router.
My router is a Belkin Wireless Play Router (F7D4302). Also worth mentioning is that my internet service provider is Comcast/Xfinity cable.
Each of the workstations has dental office management software that accesses data which is stored on the MyBookWorld external hard drive. This is the life force of the practice – the data going back and forth between the hard drive and the workstations.
My problem is that the connection speed seems quite slow when reading and writing data to and from the workstations. I do not want to make any changes to the actual workstations. How can I boost the read/write and data transfer speed to my workstations? If I need to reconfigure my setup or upgrade my router or external drive, or internet provider - I am up for that.
Please help.
 
Solution
abailey
It looks like you may have at least 2 bottle necks in your setup. The major one I see is the WD hard drive. The model you use is not really made to do what you are doing with it. It is made to store files. It does not do well at serving up data for an application to use or process. This is especially true if you have multiple machines accessing the data. I would agree with others that a dedicated file server would be best, but another option could be a NAS storage device. You would want one that supports RAID 5 (at least 3 disk) so you could get a performance boost from multiple drives working together, plus reliability of being able to continue if you have a drive failure. You may get away with one that has 2 drives in a RAID 1...
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Each of the workstations has dental office management software that accesses data which is stored on the MyBookWorld external hard drive. This is the life force of the practice
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To me, that is a huge red flag. One bumped table, the drive falls to the floor.....poof, all data is gone.
That central data would be much better served by being in it's own PC, not an external drive connected to the router. Quite possibly having multiple PC's trying to access that one drive, through the router, is slowing things down.
 
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pauls3743

pauls3743

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1) get a file server (even if it's a microserver) to replace the external drive and back it up regularly. I'm assuming you're external drive doesn't have a backup plan, if it fails you've lost your lifeblood. I'd also have to ask just how the external drive is connected to your network, right now I'm thinking the Belkin router is hosting it.
2) if you can hardwire the printers then do it (it doesn't matter if this is through the network or direct pc connection), it will cut down the contention of your wireless network.
3) get a simple network switch (8-16 port, I would suggest Netgear or D-Link), move as much of your network cabling to this switch as possible and only uplink to the Belkin router. remove as much as you can from the Belkin router

for the future I would look at replacing the Belkin router with something better, they're not that good
 
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LSDC

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I do have the DATA folder backed up regularly to one of the PC workstations (in case of a failure)

I am considering replacing the Belkin Router - any suggestions?>

Currently the WD MBW hard drive is connected to the router via ethernet cable. However, there is a USB port on each device. Would hooking the hard drive up via USB help to increase transfer speeds? There are only 3 computers wired to this network so I didn't think a separate network switch was necessary (the router has 4 ethernet ports which acts a the switch). Any more workstations, then I would consider the switch idea.
 
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abailey

abailey

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It looks like you may have at least 2 bottle necks in your setup. The major one I see is the WD hard drive. The model you use is not really made to do what you are doing with it. It is made to store files. It does not do well at serving up data for an application to use or process. This is especially true if you have multiple machines accessing the data. I would agree with others that a dedicated file server would be best, but another option could be a NAS storage device. You would want one that supports RAID 5 (at least 3 disk) so you could get a performance boost from multiple drives working together, plus reliability of being able to continue if you have a drive failure. You may get away with one that has 2 drives in a RAID 1 configuration if they were 7200RPM drives. The second place there could be a bottle neck is that it appears that your router has a built in 10/100Mbit switch (I could be wrong about that). You may see some performance increase by getting a switch that can do Gigabit speeds if your storage device and computers can also support Gigabit speeds. Not sure that will really help though. At my company we support over 200 clients and all the desktops and laptops connect at 100Mbit and we have our servers connected at 1Gbit. We don't see bottle necks to the clients as very few applications need more than 100Mbit speeds to run well.
 
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bill001g

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I would think your network is ok 100m should be enough to do what you need. I also suspect the router will make little difference. Most routers have a small switch chip to do the LAN ports so the CPU of the main router is not involved. You should be able to look at the resource monitor on the various pc and see how much traffic they are trying to run on the network. I suspect it will be very low.

This leaves pretty much the drive itself as the source of your slowness. Some of these systems are not really designed for multiple users. I would have to defer to those who know more about how file sharing is done to these devices since my background is mostly network. If it were that easy to make a file server large companies would just use bunches of these rather than spend the huge money they do for file servers.
 
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LSDC

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I see. So the bottleneck, so to speak, seems to be the WD MyBookWorld Drive. So what is available today that will enable me to plug a drive into my router via USB and enable my 3 workstations to access the data on that drive?
Thanks
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Have that shared data live in its own PC/server.

Doesn't have to be anything massive/expensive, but pretty much anything would be better than multiple workstations trying to access a single drive shared out via the router.
 
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