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After you get to about 30 megs a second you will hit your hard drives limit about. You should also consider getting rid of all protocols execpt tcpip and just run that one and mabey IPX if you have games or programs that need it. Netbeui is a terrible protocol that was built for 10baseT networks that were very small.
How fast are your drives, If you are running ata 33 drives then that will be the problem, Your drives are slow compared to my ata 100 drives , One of my systems is running ata 100 in a raid 0 configuration , This is very quick , I also set the PCI latency to 64 rather than 32 ( recommended by promise )
This system is pretty quick in file transfers, I would suggest setting your PCI latency to 64 for large file trnasfers and if your drives are slow go for an ata 100 drive on an ata 100 controller, If you have an ata 100 drive as master and the slave is a slower drive than your transfer speed for both drives is at the slower drive speed EG Primary master ata 100, primary slave pio made 4 = pio made 4 on the primary controller , make sure your cd rom is on the secondary controller and keep your primary hard drive seperate if possible , Do not put an older slower drive in the primary chain
100 Mega Bits per second, at half duplex, is
50/8= 6.25 MegaBytes/sec. Ethernet also suffers
from collisions, and protocols require header
info to be added to the data packets. Netbeui
is a low end protocol. IPX/SPX is more efficient
in my experience, and results in better throughput. Try uninstalling Netbeui, adding
IPX, and make sure that file/printer sharing
is only bound on IPX. Run your time test after
reboot and you will find that the speed is limited
most by your hard drives - the slowest drive
is the weakest link. Check your BIOS and drivers
to insure that UDMA-100 is possible if your
hard drives can handle it (up to 133 on the
big new ones.)
To take advantage of higher network speeds, you
must get RAID, preferably with Ultra-160 SCSI
drives. This is why these drives are used in servers.
Good call to limit the number of protocols is use. If don't really need it don't use it. No chance your PCs/cable are near a copier is there. Have heard bad stories about the interfearence they generate.
You could always try a different hub/switch. You said that you are using a SMG Router. I don't know if you have access to any other equipment, but maybe you could try a 100 Mbps hub or switch.
I just sent a 315 MB rar file from my workstation to on of my servers and it transferred in 32 seconds. So you've definately got a problem there. I'm running on the 100% switched network though, so I doubt you'll get those speeds unless you have a switch.
I've run into this many times before, and there hasn't been a clear cut answer to improve performance. The first thing I always try is changing the settings in the NIC properties. If the NICs are set to 'auto detect' for line/link speed I force them to 100 Full Duplex. Try this one PC at a time and look for speed changes. I've seen changes, both good (faster speeds) and bad (decreased speeds) when doing this. At home I have a 2K file server and a few XP boxes. Some have Intel NICs, and some have Netgear. When I send to the server my network utilization is always around 75% - This is with a DMA 100 drive on the server running on a DMA 66 onboard controller. If I cant get the speed up with a software change, trying a new NIC, preferably a different name brand is the next step... I've heard Netbeui is a faster protocol to use for p2p networking but around 7MB/Second isn't too bad with tcp/ip. Good Luck!
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Trebuchet MS, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Trebuchet MS, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Originally posted by lph:
<strong>100 Mega Bits per second, at half duplex, is
50/8= 6.25 MegaBytes/sec. Ethernet also suffers
from collisions, and protocols require header
info to be added to the data packets. Netbeui
is a low end protocol. IPX/SPX is more efficient
in my experience, and results in better throughput. Try uninstalling Netbeui, adding
IPX, and make sure that file/printer sharing
is only bound on IPX. Run your time test after
reboot and you will find that the speed is limited
most by your hard drives - the slowest drive
is the weakest link. Check your BIOS and drivers
to insure that UDMA-100 is possible if your
hard drives can handle it (up to 133 on the
big new ones.)
To take advantage of higher network speeds, you
must get RAID, preferably with Ultra-160 SCSI
drives. This is why these drives are used in servers.</strong></font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Trebuchet MS, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">ATA-100/133MBps are theoretical burst rates. Usually maximum sustained external I/O speeds hover anywhere between 20 to 33MBps.
And while it is true that external I/O transfer rates can reach a maximum of 160MBps for SCSI 160 15K discs that is the maximum transfer rates, minimum being closer to round about 60MBps and average somewhere between that. The real reason SCSI drives are used in servers are not only because of the max transfer rates but also faster seek times and most importantly greater throughput. The ability to "serve" files to a much higher number of users than an EIDE drive can ever handle is clearly the truly decisive reason to use SCSI over EIDE drives in the server environment.
I haven't seen yet a compelling reason to use very expensive SCSI 160 15K discs on a normal desktop, the price for the setup is extremely prohibitive.
Actually I think Milenko hit on a good one, using a switching hub/router can make all the difference on a network. Along with suggestions made by many others concerning protocols and adjustments. And of course the HD's specs can also contribute to the speed and efficiency.
Update:
I decided to create two RAM disks on each one of the machines I am transferring between (one XP machine and one NT), using an app called RamDiskNT (they also have a 9x version) available at <a href="http://www.cenatek.com." target="_blank">www.cenatek.com.</a> The max RAM disk size I was able to create on the NT machine was only 12 MB (a far cry from the original 220 MB test file). So using a single file approximately 12 MB in size and still going through the SMG router using NetBEUI, I was able to achieve a transfer in about 3 seconds going from the XP to the NT machine and in less than 2 seconds (more than 6 MB per second!) going from the NT machine to the XP. The XP is using PC 133 SDRAM while I think the NT machine is using 66 MHz SDRAM in an old Dell Dimension with a P166. So as "format c:" and lph hinted at, it does appear that a signigicant amount of slowdown was occuring at the hard drives. Perhaps now I will try transferring via TCP/IP and changing some of the hardware settings in the Linksys cards, just to see if I can further increase the transfer speed.
Thanks for all the helpful suggestions!
2 things:
Had same problem here (see other post I started) but it was partially resolved by setting my NIC to *half* duplex. Although my NIC can support full duplex, the crappy cheapo card in our fileserver apparently only supports half duplex. So I set my card to half duplex nd am now running at a half decent speed again.
Also - can't remember details, but there is a KB on M$ website that gives info on Win2k writing to NT. If the source is Win2k and the destination is NT, Win2k will try to write "large word format" or something - NT doesn't support this in write mode but only in read mode. This means that transfer from 2k to NT will be much sloer. There is a workaround. Like I said, can't remember the details, but have it noted down at work. Post if interested and I'll check back on Monday.
Update #2:
I've been learning about different factors that affect network speeds. According to results published in an article at Tom's Hardware Guide at <a href="http://www6.tomshardware.com/network/01q3/010820/index.html" target="_blank">http://www6.tomshardware.com/network/01q3/010820/index.html</a> there can be significant performance differences (including the amount of work passed to the PC's CPU) among different brand / models of 10/100 cards when running under Windows 9x, Me, but not so much under 2K supported cards (with the exception of a PC's CPU utilization).
The article at Tom's Hardware Guide also provides a link to a free network performance app at <a href="http://www.netiq.com/qcheck/default.asp" target="_blank">http://www.netiq.com/qcheck/default.asp</a> which I have not tried yet.
I also found a discussion at <a href="http://www.dslwebserver.com/forums/ubb/Forum9/HTML/000001.html" target="_blank">http://www.dslwebserver.com/forums/ubb/Forum9/HTML/000001.html</a> to be interesting. For Win98 machines, one poster named Glen claims that by enabling TCP Large Windows and SackOpts and changing the default receive window to 372300, he is able to get 89MBps out of his Win98 LAN, using Netgear FA311tx NICs (which he said performed better than his Dlink 530TX+es NICs), although I wonder if such a setting would adversely affect data integrity in Internet communication since the window size determines how much data the sending host can send before waiting for acknowledgments from the receiver: <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/WINDOWS2000/techinfo/reskit/en/CNET/cnbc_imp_fuzn.htm" target="_blank">http://www.microsoft.com/WINDOWS2000/techinfo/reskit/en/CNET/cnbc_imp_fuzn.htm</a>
For more information about how to set TCP window size, SackOpts, and other TCP features I found this article at SpeedGuide.net helpful:
<a href="http://www.speedguide.net/Cable_modems/cable_registry.shtml" target="_blank">http://www.speedguide.net/Cable_modems/cable_registry.shtml</a>
this Microsoft article:
<a href="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-GB;q224829" target="_blank">http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-GB;q224829</a>
and the Windows 2000 Server TCP/IP Networking Guide at
<a href="http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/reskit/tcpip/part1/tcpch02.asp" target="_blank">http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/reskit/tcpip/part1/tcpch02.asp</a>
Part 6, Chapter 31 of the Windows 98 Resource Kit also provides explanations of several TCP/IP registry settings in Win98:
<a href="http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/TechNet/prodtechnol/win98/reskit/part6/wrkc31.asp" target="_blank">http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/TechNet/prodtechnol/win98/reskit/part6/wrkc31.asp</a>
From what little I know however, if a computer connects to the Net, TCP/IP should not be used for file and print sharing due to security vulnerabilities (esp. for "always on" Cable and DSL connections), unless a separate NIC is used for the Net connection. So if this is true, why is Microsoft phasing out NetBEUI?
I noticed the same problem on my Windows XP/ W2K Server connection when moving 11 GB between the two. Everyone said that my Asante networking hardware was to blame...maybe even the IDE bus on all my drives. I read a few articles on Quality of Service (QoS) and decided to uninstall it from my XP machine all together. Now moving that same 11GB it averages 50 MB and spikes to around 70-75 MB. I was amazed at the jump in performance. Might be worth a shot.
<a href="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q316666">Here's one artilce from MS</a>
"As in Windows 2000, programs can leverage QoS through the QoS application programming interfaces (APIs) in Windows XP. One hundred percent of the network bandwidth is available to be shared by all programs unless a program specifically requests priority bandwidth. This "reserved" bandwidth is still available to other programs unless the requesting program is sending data. By default, programs can reserve up to an aggregate bandwidth of 20 percent of the underlying link speed on each interface on an end computer. If the program that reserved the bandwidth is not sending enough data to utilize it completely, the unused portion of the reserved bandwidth is available for other data flows on the same host."
Hello,
NetBEUI is being phased out because it is a pig and not routable.
To test actuall throughput fom machine to machine try (search google):
1. iperf - I found this to be a great test that does not take into consideration CPU, Socks, etc.
2. NetCPS - Uses winsocks thus limited by CPU if you are using older machines. Look at Task Manager when using this to watch CPU utilization.
I hope this helps.