Comments on: Speed Up Windows Home Server File Copies?

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 12:58:29 +0000

Does jumbo frames make a difference?

By: arnoud

arnoud — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:50:13 +0000

in my case i see 100% cpu load and small or no network traffic during times of the backup. Is my P3-866 bottleneck?

By: Danial G.

Danial G. — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 20:54:21 +0000

The WHS/2003 Defrag method sucks, as it doesn’t take advantage of file placement for speeding up access to most common files, nor does it apply intelligence to the most common files used, and so on.

It’s also very S-L-O-W too… and if you buy third party solution like Disk Keeper, it actually slows down your WHS by monitoring all the time running in the background. Perfect Disk does a much better job! No annoying CPU and memory hogging, and it actually places your most used files on faster hard drive areas to access faster your data/files.

This only proves that the method of having Microsoft monopolize their source code, denies other individuals to IMPROVE upon the application. Consider how Windows has been around for a long time and it’s still using the same old defrag application….

That’s why open source (GPLv3) is better for society, as everyone can benefit and contribute to the overall success.

By: John Philips

John Philips — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 10:46:33 +0000

Hi mikehd,
The defrag utility that the Windows Home Server Drive Extender white paper talks about is the one built into Server 2003/WHS. Defrag tools that are specifically built for WHS are OK.

By: Susan Mills

Susan Mills — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 21:31:55 +0000

As a typical home wife, with five “digital” teenagers at home, we bought the HP (HP EX475) WHS a month ago.

First, relating to this above topic, about WHS transfer speeds, can anyone at all explain to us why connecting an external USB hard drive MUST be first formatted when using WHS?

My teenagers typically share files with their friends, relatives and family members, but our WHS is already full (1TB) and so they wanted to just connect their USB or eSATA external hard drives to the server, but this isn’t allowed unless you first FORMAT everything in order to use.

That means everyone has been connecting our external hard drives to our PC’s and then transfering all these files to the WHS, after making room by deleting older transfered files. Our typical transfer speed is even slower than any of our USB hard drives. Meaning, if you just copy a file say 800MB to a PC, it takes less than 2.6 seconds on average… but if you transfer files (movies and photos) to the WHS, it takes about 2 hours 13 minutes here. So you can image having to transfer 300GB/1TB (remmember 5 teenagers plus husband and wife and relatives) plus files…

Our teenagers call our HP WHS a “Turtle”! Rather than expecting WHS to be a server, for us, it’s our PC’s serving WHS!

And as for Philip’s comment, triple speed? You mean you were only experiencing slower speed (???), but now it’s (still slower than your average USB 2.0 or eSATA), right?

By the way both methods of tranferring files to the WHS be RJ-45 (1Gbit router) or 802.11.n allow PC to PC to be many times faster… Our best is at 300MBps, and the worse (laptop) was around 33MBps sustained. WHS wasn’t even that… but around 128 Kilobytes!

Why cannot WHS allow external hard drives to simply connect and share without first reformatting?

Shouldn’t WHS be plug and play ready to serve?

By: mikehd

mikehd — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 14:37:00 +0000

Point 3 (use a defrag utility) and Point 10 (read MS’s WHSDE white paper) conflict with each other. MS is pretty clear about not using defrag utilities. Or did I miss something?

By: Philip Churchill

Philip Churchill — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 17:22:32 +0000

Hi Alan,
Thanks for your comment. I am using Vista on my client PCs and since installing the RC1 of SP1 for Vista my transfer speeds have tripled. Something worth looking into if you are using a Vista machine.

By: Alan

Alan — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 18:46:32 +0000

WHS speeds can drop to as bad as between 1Mbits/s to 7Mbits/s which as you can imagine may disappoint you heavily especially if your on a 1 Gigabit network!

1Mbits/s = extremely slow file transfers folks!