Hi Violation,

Great post. I totally agree with you that the potential speed differences between Gigabit and Fast Ethernet are substantial, but as you hinted, potential and real world performance are two way different things.

35MB per second with peaks of 70 on gigabit compared to 10-11 for fast Ethernet is nothing to baulk at. Based on my experiences with it, the first 100 to 200 MB of a large file goes pretty quickly on both, but then slows down (does it load into RAM first and the slow down from having to move data to disk?)

I'm hoping to do some actual measurements to get real world numbers on both types of networks, but your averages certainly seem to be what I'm experiencing as well.

Given that MSS is "essentially" a Windows based PC, I bet we could do some checking and see if that's how flavors of Windows Server handle file transfers across a network. I imagine it would be similar for Home Server, though with probably more RAM dedicated to the task.

I'm not sure the drive scattering would even be a factor for this, considering the home server does its balancing act separately. It begs the question... During a transfer does data get placed on one drive, or separated out as fast as it can depending on what drives are idle and then balanced after the fact? Hmmmmmm...

Your thoughts?

I haven't really payed attention to transfer speeds when copying data 'from' the MSS, but it sounds like there's some things happening under the hood there as well.

Violation said:

Matt Whitlock said: I'm not sure the drive scattering would even be a factor for this, considering the home server does its balancing act separately. It begs the question... During a transfer does data get placed on one drive, or separated out as fast as it can depending on what drives are idle and then balanced after the fact? Hmmmmmm...

I'm not sure either, but what I meant was, if data scattered across the drives, then maybe the demigrator service is somehow responsible for locatiing, copying those fragments to memory, before transferring via network. I'm just speculating here so feel free to humour me :D  It'd definately be good to get some clarification on this. I'm also about 90% convinced that the demigrator service actually starts balancing the data transfer of large files before they are even complete. I reckon this why we see such a drop in performance. Again, this is just speculation though.

Copying from I have a good feeling you're right that the demigrator service is putting everything together in RAM on the send.

Copying to, I was wondering if data is balanced during transfer or just put anywhere then balanced after transfer to increase performance (question is, how much performance impact is there between balancing and just the time it takes to copy to disk).  However, in hindsight, some kind of service that logs where the heck its putting data would have to be required for it to even balance after the fact, right? So maybe --> Network --> RAM --> service starts (slowdown) --> begin copy to disk?  

It's certainly a great question, though I'm not even sure how one could possibly test that.

Violation said: Seriously though, it would be good to know exactly how this functions because then we can tweak the hell out of it :D Tweaking is good....

I may check to see if MS has any white papers on the subject (doubtful, but worth a try). As an avid PC tweaker, the statement "Tweaking is good" is words I live by. I don't care what other people say, a 2% performance increase from tweaking may not be much, but it's still 2%!

I did some poking around the drives on the MSS through remote desktop. I unhid any system files to see if there was a folder that was obviously this fabled "Landing Zone." I didn't see anything that stood out, but there were some empty folders that could be, C:/DE \ D:/DE?

Of course, it could also just use the page file... I could try and watch the folders during a large transfer to see if anything stands out I guess, unless you can think of a better way to test it.

Violation said: Unfortuntely, due to a PSU failure on my EX475 (See my thread under the News/Gossip Section), I am unable to test this at the moment. I am *supposed* to be getting a replacement unit on Tuesday so hopefully I'll be able to have a little look myself.

That would be great. I saw your other thread and hope you get back up and running again soon.

When that time comes, perhaps we could collaborate on this adventure and put together a guide about it here on the site? I'm always up for trying to figure this kind of stuff out. I'm still a bit new to WHS, but I'm learning quite a bit the more I play with it.

Hey Violation,

It's Tuesday... did you hear anything about your replacement as of yet?

Violation said:

Matt Whitlock said: Hey Violation, It's Tuesday... did you hear anything about your replacement as of yet?

Hello! I can happily report that I DID receive my MediaSmart replacement on Tuesday as HP promised. My faith is somewhat restored and after some testing, all my data seems intact and I'm well chuffed! I knew you could do it HP, you just needed a little friendly nudge!  :D  Anyway, I will run this new unit in gently but hopefully that will be the last time I should need to have any replacements. Hopefully the others will get theirs sorted too!  Anyway, now I can get back to some network throttling to see if we can boost the LAN performance of these puppies! I've heard that there is a driver upgrade that can be used to improve the network performance and gain more consistent speeds for data rates.

Woot! Three cheers!

Glad you're back in the saddle! I knew it would work out.

Okay, driver upgrades are a great place to start. According to the Device Manager in the EX475, the Network Adapter is the SiS191 1000/100/10... REV_01 based on what I can tell.   Do you see something similar in yours?

Good find. So here's my concern, if I were to install this newer driver package and something goes wrong and I lose my network capabilities, would I not even be able to remote into it to roll back or worse... not be able to use the server restore disc to factory reset it? I'd hate for you to pretty much brick your MSS, particularly since you just got it. ;-)

I've found the SiS driver for the 191, which is now at v 2.05.

Dare we try... Anyone out there braver than me?

Sweet! You've definitely got some gumption!

It probably would have made sense to benchmark some things to do some before/after comparisons. Are you noticing any improvements?

When you installed it, did you run the setup.exe file, or just update the driver directly through the device manager?