Tom's Hardware > Forum > General Networking > Network General Discussions > LAN performance question
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Anonymous   03-28-2002 at 02:26:19 PM

First, here is the setup.

Comp1: WinXPPro on athlon, 512M, 80G HW Raid-1 (2x40 IBM), 3Com 905 10/100
Comp2: Win2kPro on duron, 512M, 20G IBM, 3Com 905 10/100

Connection types:
1. Linksys cable/ethernet switch with newest firmware
2. Crossover cable
On both connections the speed is 100MBit and full-duplex.

All drivers on both computers are the latest (as of yesterday).

Second, the performance question:

The comp2 has older, slower hard drive. But when copying from comp1 to comp2 speed is roughly 55Mbit/s (650M iso image). When copying from comp2 to comp1, the speed is about 17Mbit/s. And when copying from both to each other simultaneously, the speed is totalling to about 35Mbit/s.

Now, is the raid so much slower in writing the stuff than the older single hard disk? I found it hard to believe that the old disk would be 3x faster to write stuff than it is to read it. :)

Microsoft's website or Google didn't reveal any good hints or tips to try to increase the performance. 55Mbit/s is acceptable, but the 17Mbit/s is sluggish. Especially because it happens in direction I didn't expect it to be.

Any ideas / suggestions would be welcome!

-t

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jlanka   03-28-2002 at 02:42:52 PM
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1) I think you mean straight cables, not crossover

2) How is you write performace locally on the box with the RAID 1? can you test it?

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>

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Anonymous   03-28-2002 at 02:46:40 PM
- 0 +

1) I mean.. I have tested it with the Linksys and with crossover cable. And yes, when connecting to Linksys the cables are regular straight cat5 cables.

2) The synthetic HD speed tests locally give appropriate numbers for reading and writing speeds. Also, ripping a CD progresses on appropriate speed. Only when reading from network drive that's on w2k box, it slows down to crawl.

-t

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jlanka   03-28-2002 at 03:11:15 PM
- 0 +

is the poor performance consistant whether you push from 2 -> 1 or pull from 2 -> 1?

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>

Reply to jlanka
Anonymous   03-28-2002 at 03:23:51 PM
- 0 +

Yes performance is consistant. The computer doing the copying doesn't affect the speed.

-t

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jihiggs   03-28-2002 at 05:20:25 PM
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im a bit short on time, forgive me if you answered this, but the raid configuration is software right? if it is software then you could be encountering slow speed maybe because the computer that is running the raid is slow?

i went to the tomshardware forums and all i got was this lousy signature.

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Anonymous   03-29-2002 at 06:12:31 PM
- 0 +

Raid is run by HPT370 (on motherboard), and the processor on that machine is older Athlon 1.4GHz (not MP or XP or...).

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jihiggs   03-29-2002 at 06:22:01 PM
- 0 +

both computers have the same nic card? updated drivers? could be a weak connection on the upload pair. kinked cable maybe?

i went to the tomshardware forums and all i got was this lousy signature.

Reply to jihiggs
wseaton   04-01-2002 at 07:49:25 PM
- 0 +

Quote :

The computer doing the copying doesn't affect the speed.


Uh, that is where you are missing it. Microsoft platforms are horribly inefficient at data transmission which is why Novell and Linux remain so popular. The slightest hardware load such as EIDE controllers and older HD's have a cascading effect on the packet transmission of NT systems. Your bottleneck here is obviously the transmission speed of the older machine. The toy, non-SCSI High-Point controller on Comp1 is going to rape your CPU during data writes and not help much either. However, read speeds from Comp1 with the RAID will be more efficient than read speeds from Comp2 which is showing the problem. If I can get ANY Microsoft system (OS to OS) to sustain half a gig per minute of data-transfer it's a miracle.

Reply to wseaton
Anonymous   04-02-2002 at 07:20:43 PM
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What I meant was it doesn't affect the results whether the W2k machine or the XP machine is the one doing the copying. I do know that there are various operating systems out there that handle these kind of operations much faster. :)

What I don't understand is why the older, slower computer can write efficiently enough to put 55MBit/s load to the network while when it is reading it can only put 17MBit/s. In short, I always thought hard drives are faster to read stuff than to write it.

If the situation was reversed (comp2 being slower to write than to read) I wouldn't even have paid any attention to this "problem".

-t

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