Gigabyte networks

[northan]

I know this has been covered, but I need to check some details.

How long should it take to transfer a terabyte over a network?
My server is gigabyte, router is and htpc.

when I backed up my laptop the other day it took around 10 hours (65gig) So rough maths tells me its gona take along time

Also simpleton question, how do I check the actual transfer speed. I knew how to do it in vista, but not win7.

[elootos]

(01-18-2010 03:22 PM)northan Wrote:  I know this has been covered, but I need to check some details.

How long should it take to transfer a terabyte over a network?
My server is gigabyte, router is and htpc.

when I backed up my laptop the other day it took around 10 hours (65gig) So rough maths tells me its gona take along time

Also simpleton question, how do I check the actual transfer speed. I knew how to do it in vista, but not win7.

Dependant on the number of files and their size. However a gigbit network is faster than your drives can work (assuming you don't have a RAID or SSDs of course). A typical platter drive will run at about 40Mb/sec and therefore a terrabyte should be done in about 7 hours. However, as said it can be dependant on file numbers and their size. I transfered 1.36 terrabytes from my WHS to a 1.5Tb drive in my lounge PC last night and it reported 23hrs till completion! - I'm going home now to see if its complete. But when checking the drive's speed in the Resource Monitor (available via a button in the Task Manager window), it was showing bursts of 40Mb/sec every other second, and in between just 1Mb/sec. I stopped the first transfer and tried just the larger folders on their own without the smaller folders and I was getting a consistent 35Mb/sec instead.

If drives just spin away reading one large file in a linear fashion on their platters then they are incredibly quick, but incorporate loads of smaller files scattered over the drive plus the overheads to manage the shear number of files, then it all starts to slow down.

The transfer for me btw was so I can install an OEM version of WHS and hopefully never have to touch it again for the rest of the year!!