Slow Gigabit Transfers

zotexa

Honorable
Jun 5, 2013
19
0
10,510
Here's the previous thread about hardware/my plan etc

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2934098/gigabit-nic-transfers.html

My plan was two gigabit cards for direct transfers but my XP machine is old and doesn't have PCIE so I had to settle for a USB to Gigabit for that and an Intel PRO 1000/PT card for my main Windows 7 PC. While it is nowhere near gigabit I know USB 2.0 is 460MB/s so I should be getting somewhere near 57.5mb (obviously I know there's overheads and whatnot but read on)

At first it was starting at 20mb/s and then dropping to 12 which is essentially the same as what I was getting before doing it through my 10/100mb switch.

I have set the IP of the main card to 192.170.0.1 and the XP machine to 192.170.0.1 and then accessed the shared folder via \\192.170.0.2\Downloads

After some tweaking it starts at 30mb/s and drops down to roughly 17mb/s both ways.

Intel Card Settings:
Link Speed & Duplex: 1.0Gbps Full Duplex
Jumbo Packets: 9014 bytes

USB to Gigabit:
1000baset full duplex
Jumbo Packets: 9014 bytes

and the specific component names if that helps:

Intel PRO/1000 PT Desktop Adapter
Asix AX88178 USB2.0 to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter

any advice is appreciated cheers

 
First off, you seem to mixing up MB/s and Mb/s. The former means megabytes per second, the second means megabits per second. 1 MB/s = 8 Mb/s.

From Wikipedia: "USB 2.0 was released in April 2000, adding a higher maximum signaling rate of 480 Mbit/s called High Speed, in addition to the USB 1.x Full Speed signaling rate of 12 Mbit/s. Due to bus access constraints, the effective throughput of the High Speed signaling rate is limited to 35 MB/s or 280 Mbit/s."

So your initial transfer rates seem reasonable. As to why they drop, I'm not sure. Your XP machine might just have an old, slow hard drive that's holding back transfer rates, especially if you're transferring many small files.
 
does the xp machine have a USB2.0 connection?

12MB/s is what you should be seeing on USB 1.0 ; and your math is wrong. while technically the max data transfer speed of USB2.0 is 60MB/s, in reality it hovers around 30~ish on the max side of things, but when you add in upstream communication it usually ends up in the low 20's

there is one more monkey wrench to consider. an old (8yo) LARGE (+1TB) 5400RPM hard drive which is mostly full without a supporting RAID setup will probably max out it's WRITE speeds at around 20MB/s or even slower, depending on the size of the drive and the age of the unit.
 
Yeah the XP machine has a 2.0 connection and the drive is a 160GB WD Caviar Green. I'd be happy if it was a consistent 30MB/s and for the most part it's always large file transfers since it's coming from a torrent machine.

Is there any way to figure out what would cause the speed drops? I noticed with a 500mb .AVI file of some GTA footage it start's at 30MB/s and then drops down to low 20s yet with a 1.69GB movie it starts at 24MB/s and drops down into 15/16MB/s.

Apologies for the mix ups of bit/byte and all that, still trying to get my head around this whole networking thing; Very fun to learn though. Cheers for the speedy responses!
 
WAIT - lets backtrack a sec

You're downloading on the winxp but writing to a network drive location on a 2nd pc?

no wonder you're hitting 12MB/s transfer speeds you don't have just a download/upload to torrent going, you have a download/upload to your network drive.

replace that usb nic with an actual gig PCI network card; probably will fix your problems, cause right now it's the USB2.0 port that's killing you.
 
My bad I phrased it wrong, the XP machine functions as a torrent machine/hosts some IRC servers, and once they've downloaded I then transfer them over to the 7 machine.

The XP machine only has a legacy PCI port since it's an old IBM A50 hence the USB nic.