Slow transfer rate through wired connection

[hehcomputerrock]

Im upgrading my system to windows 7 64 bit and im running 32 bit vista so i needa back up my files. so my dad has a 1TB raid 1 server i believe and i hardwired it to my comp via ethernet cable. My mobo says its transfer speed is about 1gigabit/sec? which my dad says is bout 120 MB/sec so i should be transfering at that speed or like 100 but im transfering at like 8MB/sec... can someone please help me out i dont no why this is. Also when i open task manager and go to networking it says Adaptername: Local Area connection. Network utilization: ~7%. Link speed: 1 Gbps. State: Connected


DONT HAVE TO READ BELOW EXTRA QUESTION***

Also this is just another question i had i used the Windows 7 upgrade advisor and it says im compatible for 32 bit everything except my wireless netword card (its a 802.11g Wireless PCI card made by Texas Instruments, so its pretty old )and in 64 bit it just says compatibility unknown. do you guys think itll work...cause i really dont want to spend money on a new network card=\ Also im running a 2.6 GHz 9950 black edition AMD CPU incase you were wondering and 2gig of ram but plan on upgrading so figured id put 64 bit on now.

Thanks in advance,

John

 

[MU_Engineer]

Im upgrading my system to windows 7 64 bit and im running 32 bit vista so i needa back up my files. so my dad has a 1TB raid 1 server i believe and i hardwired it to my comp via ethernet cable. My mobo says its transfer speed is about 1gigabit/sec? which my dad says is bout 120 MB/sec so i should be transfering at that speed or like 100 but im transfering at like 8MB/sec... can someone please help me out i dont no why this is. Also when i open task manager and go to networking it says Adaptername: Local Area connection. Network utilization: ~7%. Link speed: 1 Gbps. State: Connected

I have a few questions for you:

1. Is your NAS also connected to the network at 1 Gbps? Your computer is conected to the network at 1 Gbps as seen by the output in Task Manager. If your NAS only connects at 100 Mbps, it would easily explain an ~8 MB/sec transfer rate as the maximum transfer rate for an 100 Mbps link is about 12 MB/sec.

2. What NAS do you have? Many NASes are underpowered and bus-choked, so 8 MB/sec write speeds aren't unusual. I used to have an old 1 GHz PIII file server with a PCI gigabit and SATA card, and the best it could do was about 15 MB/sec in write speeds and 25 MB/sec in read speeds. The CPU was choked with managing I/O and everything hanging off the 32-bit, 33 MHz PCI bus wasn't helping. I upgraded to a dual 2.67 GHz P4 Xeon server with three independent PCI-X and PCI buses and the performance jumped up massively as a result. The SATA controller runs on one PCI-X bus at 66 MHz/32-bit and the NIC runs on the other PCI-X bus at 66 MHz/32-bit. The printer and other stuff runs off the controllers hooked to the standard 33 MHz/32-bit PCI bus, so the buses are plenty de-congested. Read speeds are about 90 MB/sec (the limit of my no-jumbo-packets gigabit router) and write speeds are about 60 MB/sec (limits of the HDDs in my RAID5.) Many NASes are more like my old PIII unit than my new-to-me Xeon setup, so they won't perform very well.

3. How are you transferring files to the NAS? If you are transferring files through SFTP, it's very CPU-intensive. Your transfer rates will be pretty poor as NASes don't have all that much of a CPU and you'd see a very limited transfer rate due to the CPU choking on the encryption. Also, if it is a Linux NAS and you're using Windows filesharing (Samba), your transfer rates will also suck. Vista plays nasty with Samba and transfer rates are very poor- my wife's laptop generally manages about 15 MB/sec to my Linux file server on a GbE connection using Samba, but the same machine using NFS for the file transfers pushes 60 MB/sec in write speeds.

That should give us a good idea as to what may be responsible for the poor performance.

 

[hehcomputerrock]

to be honest i dont no what half that means but my dad who built the server is very computer literate and is actually a software engineer and said it should be running at 60MB/s so im guessing that the box runs fast as well i am running vista and also im guessing NAS means server so it is linux ran. is there anyway that i can alter the priority to make it go faster in vista? im sorry bout the limited knowledge and if my dad was home he could speak on my behalf =( sorry bout being a nub xD

 

[TechnologyCoordinator]

The limiting factor will probably be the hard disk write speed, not the network speed.

 

[MU_Engineer]

to be honest i dont no what half that means but my dad who built the server is very computer literate and is actually a software engineer and said it should be running at 60MB/s so im guessing that the box runs fast as well i am running vista and also im guessing NAS means server so it is linux ran. is there anyway that i can alter the priority to make it go faster in vista? im sorry bout the limited knowledge and if my dad was home he could speak on my behalf =( sorry bout being a nub xD

Perhaps you can have your father come and look at this thread and weigh in, and then have him explain to you what we're talking about. It should be a good learning experience for you as this is a bunch to take in all at once.

@TC: HDD write speed is commonly the limiting factor, but it's not going to be limited at 8 MB/sec. Something else is going on here.

 

[vladtepes]

Just install Windows 7, DONT format.First rename your Windows and documents folders and everything will be fine