No full PC to PC transfer speed through new gigabit switch?


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Today I got myself D-Link DGS-1005D gigabit switch to enable faster file transfer between my two computers.

One computer runs Windows XP Professional SP3 32-bit, the other Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.

Both computers' network adapters are set to 1000mbit full duplex and are hooked up to the new gigabit switch with cat.6 ethernet patch cables.

I'm trying to copy a pile of stuff from my old Windows XP system to my new Windows 7 system.

Before I implemented this switch, both were set to 100mbit full duplex and the max. file transfer speed between both machines was 10mb/s.

Now with the new switch and gigabit enabled I barely get twice the old transfer speed, only 18.5mb/s max., both through Windows' native file copy handler and Teracopy Pro.

I know that all of my harddrives on both machines read and write faster than that as local copying is usually at least twice as fast as that.

I don't know very much about this networking stuff so I'm not sure if I'm doing anything wrong with this new setup or if my expectations were too high.

I would appreciate any pointers you fine Neowinians could give me! :)

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copying large files you will notice a speed increase. I would guess your issue is that you are copying many files. You are dealing with the speed of the system or systems (memory, hard drive speed, cache, and processor), as the files and folders are created, opened, closed; created, opened, closed; created, opened, closed. The process goes on for each individual file. If you had one large file this process would occur one time speeding up your transfer rate as it would be a constant feed into the file vs stopping between each transfer. Think of it like this, is it faster to go a long strech on a major highway or is it faster to take an off route that is riddled with stop signs and traffic lights that goes parallel to the highway? your stop and go traffic are your files being created, opened, copied, and closed, while highway is a large file getting all the speed it can from the network.

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then either your pc's can't handle your Gb/s transfer rate or the switch you bought is absolute garbage.

try using richcopy, this will help with using the max that the hardware can handle as well as max bandwidth. You can multithread the copies, in stead of a 1 to 1 copy you will have as many as you specifiy (default is 3 simultaneous files being copied at once). This will speed up your copy and use more of the available bandwidth. What are your pc specs, it could be that your pc's can't handle it, SATA 3 Gb/s x 7200 or 10000 rpms on both?

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Does your card and switch support JUMBO FRAMES? If not then you wont get anything great from those devices. You need 4K support in order to send huge packets to spead up the sending processes. Sending a bunch of tiny packets will fill up the channel with more overhead.

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You sure and the hell do not need jumbo frames to see speed increases with gig vs 100mbit.. But as mentioned already there are many factors that can come into play in file transfer -- HDD is a big one. But sure the other specs of your machine can be a huge factor as well..

18.5MB is not bad -- but clearly you got some kind of bottle neck there.. Either you not seeing a good wire speed.. Your not going to see 1000mbit, just like you don't see 100mbit on a 100mbit connection. But lets hope your in the 700 to 800's

What network cards do you have? What drivers are you using? What firewalls do you have running? Do you have any other things tapped into your network card, like the bridge driver for virtual box or vmware player or server, etc. etc. These can all slow the wire speed down. If the nic is real cheap its going to use your computers cpu vs doing it on the card, etc. etc.

But again you don't need jumbo frames to see great speeds with gig.

Here we have been over gig speeds quite a bit -- here is a old thread going over the same basic stuff

https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/771454-network-transfer-speed/page__p__590985244__hl__gig%20speed__fromsearch__1#entry590985244

You will see in there simple tests with iperf showing like 810Mbps on the wire with file transfers in the 70MBytes/sec range.. Sure only one large file, going to be slower if doing Lots and lots of files.. I would suggest you grab iperf and see what speeds your getting on the wire for start.. If you only seeing say 200mbits on the wire then no your never going to see speeds in the 30 or 40MBps range -- but sure its quite possible with just normal sata drives and built in motherboard nics and cheap ass gig switches to see much higher than 18.5MBps -- so yeah you got a bottle neck somewhere.. Tracking it down it the fun part -- I would start with a iperf test to see what you get on the wire.

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Oh, sorry about that. Thought you needed jumbo frames to get some killer gig-e speeds. WTF is jumbo frames for then and why do people moan about it not being in some of the linksys WRT6xx routers (yeah, i know it's "only" Linksys :) )

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All of my HDDs are 7200rpm SATA II. Both computers only have on-board network adapters, Marvell Yukon 88E8053 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller and in the XP machine and a Realtek PCI GBE Family Controller in the Win 7 one, both support jumbo frames.

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Don't get me wrong jumbo frames can lower the cpu cycles required for sure.. But not really something you would ever need on a home network.. And I have played with them alot. I wanted to run them at home just for the sake of running them.. But in the end I just could not see the point and was not seeing any lower cpu or performance. So on a soho network I just don't see them meaning much, other than you can say your running jumbo frames ;) Now if every one of your devices on the network supported them -- sure ok, turn them on -- why not etc.. But most home networks are going to be mix 100/1000 wireless etc.. Different card makers support different frame sizes 4k, 7k, 9k -- then yes your switch has to support them, not just the cards.

I can see where people bitch though -- if your going to sell a gig switch, why and the hell would it not support jumbo? Which is prob their point of bitching about.

I just did a bit of tweaking on my network since I just updated to the latest realtek driver.. And I had moved to the RTM version of 7 and had not done my tcp settings, etc.. And was seeing some crap speeds.. Now wire speed is back to what it should be!

C:\>iperf -c 192.168.1.4 -w 256k

------------------------------------------------------------

Client connecting to 192.168.1.4, TCP port 5001

TCP window size: 256 KByte

------------------------------------------------------------

[152] local 192.168.1.100 port 49170 connected with 192.168.1.4 port 5001

[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth

[152] 0.0-10.0 sec 1.02 GBytes 874 Mbits/sec

C:\>iperf -c 192.168.1.4 -w 256k

------------------------------------------------------------

Client connecting to 192.168.1.4, TCP port 5001

TCP window size: 256 KByte

------------------------------------------------------------

[152] local 192.168.1.100 port 49171 connected with 192.168.1.4 port 5001

[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth

[152] 0.0-10.0 sec 1.05 GBytes 904 Mbits/sec

C:\>iperf -c 192.168.1.4 -w 256k

------------------------------------------------------------

Client connecting to 192.168.1.4, TCP port 5001

TCP window size: 256 KByte

------------------------------------------------------------

[152] local 192.168.1.100 port 49173 connected with 192.168.1.4 port 5001

[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth

[152] 0.0-10.0 sec 1.04 GBytes 897 Mbits/sec

You can ask for more than that can you?? ;)

So did you grab IPerf and do some testing?? Lets see what your seeing on the wire -- if its real low then we will look there to getting your speeds up.. If your seeing decent speeds, say in the 700's then we need to look elsewhere to why your not doing file copies fast as you should.

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