Windows sure is slow at copying.

[VirtualLarry]

Backing up my 500GB NAS to a 500GB external FreeAgent drive. Currently have 28GB used. It says it is going to take a day, at 4MB/sec.

external drive is usb 2.0, so that's maxed at around 30MB/sec.

NAS is connected by gigabit ethernet, but it maxes out at around 10-11MB/sec.

So why is the copy going at 4MB/sec?

Should I be using something like RSYNC?

Edit: Now it's going at 8.5MB/sec, not too bad. Says it will take an hour, that's much more reasonable.

 

[Tsavo]

What NAS? Some of the reedier piles of crap can barely pinch out 10-12 MB/s on a good day with a tailwind and going downhill. I can easily see 5 MB/s +/- If you are trying to push through lots of small files and if the NAS has some cobbled together crap OS too.

 

[VirtualLarry]

What NAS? Some of the reedier piles of crap can barely pinch out 10-12 MB/s on a good day with a tailwind and going downhill. I can easily see 5 MB/s +/- If you are trying to push through lots of small files and if the NAS has some cobbled together crap OS too.

The brand is generic, it's called "Gigabit NAS" in the manual. Great, eh?

 

[Tsavo]

The brand is generic, it's called "Gigabit NAS" in the manual. Great, eh?

Yeah, dollars to donuts it's the NAS that's the problem and the fix would be dropping it in the trash and putting a $370 Synology in its place.

Cheap NAS put gigabit parts inside yet couple it with a 800MHz or less CPU that can barely keep the OS off its face much less manage a steady stream of data.

 

[Tsavo]

I was going to grab a NAS, but a decent one with drives is ~ $500. All I did was load up my boxes with mirror drives that I keep updated with SyncBack Pro. Cheap, and any single drive I own has a copy of all my important files. Not to mention faster than any reasonably priced NAS, too. I transferred a 32GB file and the slowest speed over the wire was 98 MB/s.

 

[Anteaus]

Yeah, dollars to donuts it's the NAS that's the problem and the fix would be dropping it in the trash and putting a $370 Synology in its place.

Cheap NAS put gigabit parts inside yet couple it with a 800MHz or less CPU that can barely keep the OS off its face much less manage a steady stream of data.

Agreed. I won't say I don't see the virtue in those ready made plug and play NAS boxes, in many cases you can build a server (without harddrives) for the same money that has far superior capabilities.

I'm not against external hard drives for back up though. I consider them a different class from multidrive external NAS boxes.

 

[bruceb]

It takes about 1 hr for a 40GB file to move over USB 2.0 from my main PC to a WD Elements External USB 2.0 hard drive. Really need either USB 3.0 or Firewire if you want more speed, but on the other hand, they cost a lot more than a USB 2 drive. And then you need the correct interface card in the computer if it doesn't already have it.

 

[corkyg]

If you can't get USB 3 then see about eSATA. I clone my 320GB laptop drive to an external eSATA in less than 10 minutes. USB 2 takes an hour for the same job. Looks like the problem is the NAS.

 

[bruceb]

I agree, all of those interfaces will be quicker than USB 2.0 .. but I weighed the cost as well. A 1TB WD Elements USB 2.0 was $69.99 shipped .. the USB 3.0 models run around $110 or so, probably similar for Firewire or eSata .. and then I would need to add a Firewire or eSata card (next card will probably have USB 3 / Firewire / eSata) all on it and from what I read, a USB 2.0 or USB 1 device works fine on a USB 3 port (but I would need a new USB 3 or combo type hub)

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, dollars to donuts it's the NAS that's the problem and the fix would be dropping it in the trash and putting a $370 Synology in its place.

Cheap NAS put gigabit parts inside yet couple it with a 800MHz or less CPU that can barely keep the OS off its face much less manage a steady stream of data.

Well, price was an issue. It cost me $25 , and the 500GB IDE drive was like $60-70. So around $100 total for a 500GB external NAS HD. You can probably buy a 1TB networked HD these days for the same price.

I've got a WHS build cooking on the back burner (on very low heat thus far). I'll have to see how that turns out. I want to get everything right on that box before I burn a WHS license on it, because you cannot re-use WHS licenses, being that they are OEM.

 

[Modelworks]

It is sad the consumer NAS market has such poor products. It isn't because the hardware doesn't exist to do it better and still keep the prices the same. It is corporate greed at work. Make a product that will sell and don't worry about the performance.

As far as cost. I could put a 400Mhz ARM SOC , 512MB ram , gigabit ethernet, 4 sata ports , on a board for under $80 and have it perform at max speeds for gigabit. That is why I just shake my head at the current home NAS situation.

 

[JackMDS]

Well, price was an issue. It cost me $25 , and the 500GB IDE drive was like $60-70. So around $100 total for a 500GB external NAS HD. You can probably buy a 1TB networked HD these days for the same price.

I've got a WHS build cooking on the back burner (on very low heat thus far). I'll have to see how that turns out. I want to get everything right on that box before I burn a WHS license on it, because you cannot re-use WHS licenses, being that they are OEM.

Ok, given this and the rest of the thread, you should now apologize to Windows. - - :hmm: - :thumbsup:

Quote: "Windows sure is slow at copying".

This is not slow - http://www.ezlan.net/Win7/giga.jpg (3GB file transfer between my work station and WHS, using simple onboard RealTek Giga NICs and Trendnet 5 ports $24 Giga switch).

 

[jsedlak]

Ok, given this and the rest of the thread, you should now apologize to Windows. - - :hmm: - :thumbsup:

Quote: "Windows sure is slow at copying".

This is not slow - http://www.ezlan.net/Win7/giga.jpg (3GB file transfer between my work station and WHS, using simple onboard RealTek Giga NICs and Trendnet 5 ports $24 Giga switch).

That is one file.

Try copying thousands of really small files. I am restoring a manual backup on my Minecraft server. It will peak around 100KB/sec. I am copying the files from /backups/folder to /folder.

Windows can be slow at copying.

 

[lsv]

That is one file.

Try copying thousands of really small files. I am restoring a manual backup on my Minecraft server. It will peak around 100KB/sec. I am copying the files from /backups/folder to /folder.

Windows can be slow at copying.

Eh you never mentioned multiple thousands of small files. That's normal even under perfect fragmentation scenarios. Zzz.

 

[Modelworks]

If you do a lot of copying over the network don't use explorer. It is terrible at file transfers, especially large amounts of files. Use teracopy instead. Explorer tries to determine metadata for files, what type of file it is, what are the properties, album, author, video size, is the content searchable, camera used, frames, resolutions, etc. It will do that every time you click on a file or the directory is read. Teracopy just moves the files without going through all that.


http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php

 

[Fayd]

Eh you never mentioned multiple thousands of small files. That's normal even under perfect fragmentation scenarios. Zzz.

no, that's not normal.

when i used to transfer thousands of small files (think pictures, 150k+ at once) it'd go at between 1.5 and 4 MB/s.

 

[DarkUltra]

no, that's not normal.

when i used to transfer thousands of small files (think pictures, 150k+ at once) it'd go at between 1.5 and 4 MB/s.

Was that to/from a USB or NAS drive, or was it internal connections or esata? USB and NAS is very slow at tons of small files, and poor access times. Check out USB 3.0 reviews, usb 3 is fast but eSATAp will beat it in access time and small files. This is the nature of the usb bus compared to a direct sata connection. At least the usb 3 review i read



- The new USB version is obviously superior to the old one. The maximum data-transfer rate with USB 3.0 is as high as with SATA 300 whereas USB 2.0 is limited to 33.5 MBps. Thus, the new interface is enough for today’s HDDs. However, it is still not free from high latencies as you can see by checking out the results of the drives with small data blocks where USB 3.0 is inferior to SATA 300. Interestingly, we get the same speed when we install the SSD into the external enclosure, so there is indeed some performance limitation. We don’t know for sure if this is due to low performance of this USB controller or some fundamental limitation of the new bus architecture.

We are also surprised at the results of the SSD in terms of maximum speed. We rechecked them and even tried other SSDs, but had the same speed of 160 MBps. Yes, this is much better than the speed of 35 MBps we have with USB 2.0, but nowhere near the promised tenfold performance boost. Hopefully, this is only due to some imperfections of early USB 3.0 implementations and we will see data-transfer rates closer to the declared 4.8 Gbps in the future.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/usb-3_4.html

 

[HexiumVII]

try out teracopy, its amazering

 

[MadScientist]

If you do a lot of copying over the network don't use explorer. It is terrible at file transfers, especially large amounts of files. Use teracopy instead. Explorer tries to determine metadata for files, what type of file it is, what are the properties, album, author, video size, is the content searchable, camera used, frames, resolutions, etc. It will do that every time you click on a file or the directory is read. Teracopy just moves the files without going through all that.


http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php

Great program, decreased significantly the time it takes to copy files to and from external hard drives.

 

[Arkaign]

Anyone have experience with FreeNAS? Wondering if it might be a good way to put a couple old PCs to use (generic Dell w/915 chipset, pentium D, gbit intel lan).

 

[JackMDS]

Anyone have experience with FreeNAS? Wondering if it might be a good way to put a couple old PCs to use (generic Dell w/915 chipset, pentium D, gbit intel lan).

Does not matter which OS, any P-4 class computer with a Giga NIC would do better than a sub $500 stand-alone NAS.

 

[imagoon]

The NAS will have more of an effect than the OS. People here will "blame Windows" all day as Linux zealots. However, I need to work with both at the office. I have a couple of Windows servers that push 200MB/s out the SMB2 shares without having any issues. Not unlike the Linux boxes doing rsync at the same rate.

It is all about CPU / Disk / Network.