Comment Feed for How can I speed up my Windows Home Server file copies? (EnglishBloke on Channel 10)

Re: How can I speed up my Windows Home Server file copies?

Bart — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:38:06 GMT

Great article! I really, and I mean REALLY wished I had read/discovered it sooner. Because -yups, you guessed it- I'm also in the speed swamp they call MS Drive Extender.

I wanted to setup a 'video jukebox'. Basically ripping all my 600 or so DVD's I have onto harddisk and stream them from a server to a media extender.

I had a choice between Linux, a regular NAS (which also run Linux, but is FAR easier to set up) and Windows. A couple of months ago, WHS was released, and it sounded like the product I had been waiting for all that time. I read a lot of reviews about it, and they all were raving about this '(one of the) best products MS had ever released'. NONE mentioned this issue, which I believe is unpardonable because everybody will bump into it sooner or later.

In my case it was sooner.

I started to save up (this took a couple of months), and I was overjoyed when I finally had all the necessary components to build my own WHS in-house. These were a recent G33 chipset motherboard with an Intel dual core chip (E2200) on it, 2GB RAM (RAM is cheap these days), and 3 harddisks: one Samsung 250 GB drive as the C: and 2 Samsung 750 GB drives as the Storage drives.

I setup the server and everything went smooth. Then I started to copy all my rips (which I had mostly done beforehand and stored on my desktop pc) to the server. I got some serious good speeds (after having installed the most recent drivers of my onboard NIC's - VERY important!), 70+ MB/s. Not bad, certainly better than a regular NAS. I was happy, but because this still was going to take a while, I let this run overnight. I got up in the morning, only to find an error message: disk full, continue, abort?

Disk full?? How could this be? I still has more than 600 GB of free space left on the server according to the WHS console. I clicked continue and the copying process happily continued. Strange. Why did this error message pop up in the first place then? After a quite a few movies were copied, another strange thing happened: my network speed dropped immensely. And I DO mean immensely. something from 60-70 MB/s to less than 1 MB/s! Just like that! I had no idea what was going on, but then I started to do my homework, and came across some online articles which explained it to me. I was also the victim of Drive Extender.

During the copy, the 250 GB disk filled up. Once it was almost fill, Drive Extender kicked in, effectively almost annihilating my transfer speeds. Needless to say, I was and am not happy about this!

The best was still to come though. I had copies a lot of files to the \\server\videos share. I also copied a lot of them to the \\server\music share, because I knew there would be duplicates. That way, I intended to remove the duplicates by hand from the music share and copy the rest to the videos share. And that's where's the sh*t really started to hit the fan. Every movie I tried to copy took on average between TEN and FIFTEEN minutes. If you know I have a few hundred movies to copy like that, that is simply not workable. This was only because Drive Extender forced the movie to be copied from the drive pool back to the OS drive, and then back again to where it needed to be. A process, which on a 'regular' server, RAID or no raid, would take mere seconds!

Now I'm not only severely disappointed, I'm severely pissed even. If I had known this beforehand I would have NEVER started with WHS. The nature of what I intend to do with my server dictates that I'll ALWAYS be working with large files, so this will ALWAYS be an issue for me. This is simply not acceptable. I wished I had gone with a regular Windows 2003 setup which at least offer the possibility to use regular RAID arrays, and not this Drive Extender nonsense. Or I could have gone with Ubuntu Linux server combined with Samba, which would have cost me absolutely nothing, with the exception of a bit of time because the learning curve is more steep and I'm no Linux guru.

As said before, everybody will run into this, if not only for the way they market WHS. They say: "Oh, you can use a small older drive for your OS drive, 80 GB is sufficient." WRONG! This should be the fastest drive in your system. If anything, pick a WD raptor!

You say Steven , to use a drive of at least the same speed and size as your OS drive as you use for your storage drives. In my case this would be a 750 Samsung drive. Only to be used for a 20 GB OS partition and a landing zone for copied files? I'm sorry , but that's asking too much! A 750 GB drive simply as a buffer only to overcome the downsides of Drive Extender? That's ridiculous! If you ask me, this is a serious design flaw!

I wished they had given me the option to setup WHS with a regular RAID array, and leave this drive extender nonsense where it should be: uninstalled. But they didn't. A true shame, because WHS also has it's merits: it's really very easy to use, the backup facility is awesome eg. But it also has a few quirks, Drive Extender being the worst of them, but also eg. the lack of an onboard FTP server. Which server does not support FTP out of the box? I mean, come on! I KNOW I can install one myself, but that's not the point. FTP is such a standard protocol, it's like buying a car without wheels. It simply should be there, no question about it.

So what am I going to do now? Honestly: I don't know. Try 2003 server? Maybe... Try Linux? Tssss.... I can always use FreeNAS, that's supposed to be pretty good... Or maybe sell the whole server PC and buy a regular NAS instead. Synology has a very nice model coming up... I don't know anymore, I'm truly in limbo here.

But most of all I feel cheated. Cheated by Microsoft, but most of all but all those 'reviewers' who never discovered this issue, or,if they had, decided to leave it out of their review. From all I read, and I read dozens of reviews, WHS was the best product since sliced bread. Not ONE word of comment (except maybe the review of Tim Higgins from SmallNetBuilder.com, but he didn't like it for other reasons - lack of protocols, no print server, no backup of the server, ...he received a lot of bad comments by all those MS fanboys because of it as well!) about how bad Drive Extender can be...

Hehe.. so I decided to write it off... but I'm still stuck with the problem. All suggestions are very, very welcome!

Re: How can I speed up my Windows Home Server file copies?

EnglishBloke — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 04:59:55 GMT

With USB 2 the access speeds are very fast, there-fore the bottlenecks remain the same.

Re: How can I speed up my Windows Home Server file copies?

n1080i — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:05:09 GMT

What if you are copying from USB 2.0 drive that is attached to the WHS to a WHS share? What type of performace should you expect? Would the network play any part in this given that it is still a share?

Re: How can I speed up my Windows Home Server file copies?

buddadams — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 05:28:30 GMT

This piece is the best ever because: access speed is what it’s all about and all the hype for WHS that says, “ just drop WHS in any old computer” will blacken WHS quicker than anything. I mean, BackUp is nice but boring because there are dozens of overnight BackUp setups that will work and are cheaper. Central shared file management and the fastest access is what matters. Clearly, the Gigabit switch, cable, and interfaces are first, right after all your old unused discs are finally junked for good.

What about typical MoBo gigabit interfaces; any comment? On the cable, do we need to connect the second pair of wires also for full duplex? Then if “yes”, the interfaces and the switch have to be compatible. This is beginning to sound expensive with WHS software cost, a deceptively modest beginning.

Re:

EnglishBloke — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 05:22:06 GMT

Hey Northern Geek, your right I am a northerner too. Originally I was born in Middlesbrough, brought up near by in Redcar and then lived in Loftus (North Yorkshire) for a while, and finally I moved to Watford down south until I eventually moved to the US. This is the reason the accent is a little hard to pin down :)

On the UK side of things for Media Center, I know people are doing this now with no issues, including digital television dual channel receivers.

Do you have a specific setup you've been having an issue with?, if so let me know the specific issues and setup and I'll try and help out :)

Re:

EnglishBloke — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 05:05:30 GMT

I can answer this by referring to a quote from Charlie Kindel who heads up the Home Server team.

“Ever, like Never, is a very long time. Right now, our customer research clearly indicates that consumers are very happy with the hosted email solutions they currently have. Given this, and the work we’d have to do to make managing an email server brain-dead simple, we believe our resources can be better spent on solving other problems in multi-PC households. Therefore we have no plans at this point for integrating an on premise email system, Exchange or otherwise, in Windows Home Server.”

I think Charlies response points out something very important, multi-PC households and the cross collaboration between services available to them is a really important goal of Home Server. I know I'd rather see more features around this cross collaboration (for instance between Home Server and Media Center) than be able to manage my own email server.

I would encourage you to take a look at a service I use called 'Windows Live Custom Domains' located at http://domains.live.com/

This service allows you to link your own domain name's MX record with 'Windows Live Hotmail', for instance you can browse to http://mywhs.myhomeserverdomain.com to access your home server and browse to http://webmail.myhomeserverdomain.com to access your email.

In addition you can configure up to 500 email addresses which will go to different logins for your domain. Now isn't this easier than managing it yourself :)

Re: How can I speed up my Windows Home Server file copies?

northerngeek — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 21:30:57 GMT

Steve,

I too am an English bloke, however I have not yet left the country. I was wondering if there was any way you could shed some light onto the ways in which you can use a media center if you're in a less... well American locale? Sky, Virgin Media etc... if you guys could get a deal with either of these that'd be amazing, but until then MS needs to step up to the bat for them and make something incredible, a lot of people want media ceters but can't get them working fully here.

P.S. Where in England are you from? Seems Northern but I can't place it.

Re:

jeanfreau — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 16:47:07 GMT

Will Windows Home Server ever become a "Home Exchange Server" so that I can manage my home email accounts on multiple computers and also access from the web?

Re:

EnglishBloke — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 16:27:49 GMT

Very fair question.

My article covers the worst case setup scenario, and how you can design around preventing it. If your seeing 250Mbit/s right now, that's the speed you will see on your network with a home server, a home server cannot change that. Frankly you should also be very very happy with your network speed also as your definately getting the better end of home Gigabit speed right now.

Now as for the performance of Home Server. You won't see less performance as you put it than your current solution, however you could if you did not get the right initial setup with the Data drive for instance. Designed right your copy performance will be the same as it is now. The big difference is you will benefit from some amazing features which only Home Server can offer you, some of these are...

Full System differential backups of all systems on your network. (Differenatial in the sense you will not need a seperate backup image everytime your system is backed up, you will have a master backup with differential changes each time your system changes)

The ability to restore an entire system backup onto the same drive or even a new drive with no loss of data. (This btw is a life saver, since I've been using WHS i've already saved 3 dead machines using this - One last night!)

The ability from any machine with the WHS client on to 'mount' a backup of any drive from any machine which is joined to your WHS from ANY time (backup). This is awesome, I can mount my C: drive from my MCE machine of 12/5/2007 on my laptop and access the files that existed on my desktop at this time for instance.

The ability to mirror (duplicate) shares across drives on my WHS. This allows me to pick and choose what I want mirrored across my drives, for instance my photos I want mirrored. My Recorded TV I really don't need mirrored :)

These are just some advantages to your current setup, a lot more exist.

The speed of your network and your WHS is only as good as your weakest link, this article points our what and where the weakest link could be. If you ensure you don't have a weak link like that, you will experience the same performance you have now, but will gain the massive benefits supplied by WHS as well.

Enjoy.

Re:

Marty — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 04:48:55 GMT

Hmm... Something is not right here.

I get an average transfer speed of 250Mbits/s with my current server. It is an old 800Mhz P3 with a RAID 5 controller (4 160GB IDE drives giving about 480GB storage), Gigabit ethernet, and running Windows Server 2003 (OS runs on a separate pair of mirrored 40GB drives). This server has run great for 5 years now, but I just need more storage and was looking forward to the WHS simplified user management.

I was excited about setting up a WHS with drive extender and a few big (i.e. 750GB) SATA drives, that is, until I read your article. I was planning to setup a WHS on an unused 2.4Ghz P4 server, adding a 4 port SATA controller (no onboard SATA) to support the storage drives.

From your article, it sounds that I will actually get WORSE performace with WHS than I have with my current, 5 year old server. This is disappointing, as up to now, I had read that Drive Extender did not result in performance penalties when compared to hardware RAID.

What's up?

Re:

EnglishBloke — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 17:24:12 GMT

Nup thats the whole problem, I actually do mean Mbits/s

Gigabit ethernet is capable of 1,048.6 Mbps by definition (Mbits/s) however the you cannot expect that due the reasons I mention in the article.

125 MBps - (Mbytes/s) is actually 1Gigabit maximum speed. So you could never even if you could run MAX speed expect 200MBps (Mbytes/s).

Re:

joiseystud — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 04:58:45 GMT

Nice job. One correction though>

"The first thing worth mentioning is that the 1 Gigabit network should be able to copy in theory at about 100-200Mbits/s between the Vista PC and the Windows Home Server. "

Should be 100 - 200 Mbytes /sec i believe.

Re: How can I speed up my Windows Home Server file copies?

fasst1 — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 00:03:47 GMT

Steve that was an awesome explanation of all the bottlenecks that can exists. It really helped me paint the picture.

Mike