X60 as NAS file server: slow transfer speeds over gig-e

[reso]

Howdy folks, I spent the last few days spec'ing out an atom based NAS to build, to basically have some network storage, and then remembered that I have an X60 notebook sitting around doing nothing, so I decided to hook it up as a file server running Windows XP pro and a 1 TB USB 2.0 external drive. Not the best server by a long shot, but it is doing the job pretty good,

My question is about network speeds over the gig-e network. Locally, I can copy files from the X60's hard drive to the USB hard drive at about 30-33 MB/sec. This compares bang on with the USB hard drives benchmark, as HDtune gave it a very stable 33 MB/s.

Over the gig-e network, I can only read or write files to both the X60's local drive (60gb 5400 rpm sata drive) and the external USB 2.0 drive at around 14-15 MB/s. I find this speed very slow. I was originally thinking of getting a cardbus eSATA port to connect the external drive, to get past the 33 MB/s speed limit on the USB 2.0 interface, but it now appears that the gig-e networking in the X60 is the main bottleneck.

Has anyone experienced this? Is this the expected behaviour?

Things I have done: verified that the x60 is connected with 1000 gig-e and not 100mbit, yes, windows reports the connection as 1.0G. I have updated the ethernet card drive as well. I have tried with and without windows firewall.

Any suggestions would be great! Thanks.

Also, anyone else using their old X60's as headless, low power, silent network file servers? So far, aside from being a tad slow, mine is working just great!

Thanks,

reso

edit; Thanks for looking, please comment! If you use your x60 as a 24/7 server, as I'd love to hear about what you have done. I just thought that I would add that this is the T2400 1.83ghz X60 with 2GB of ram, type 1706-5KU.

[bill bolton]

Over the gig-e network....

Please tell us a LOT more about your LAN setup

Cheers,

Bill

[reso]

Hi Bill! Thanks for moving the post, I selected the wrong forum.

You're right, I need to provide more network information: it is a typical home network. I use a DLINK Gamer Lounge DGL-4300 wireless router and it is running the latest Dlink firmware. Network consists of two macbook pro's, connected either with 802.11g or their gigabit nic's, a PC desktop (vista 64 or ubuntu) with a gigabyte nic, and then of course, the X60 fileserver, using the intel PRO/1000 PL gigabit network connection.

I am trying to figure out how I can benchmark the internet connection between the two computers, unfortunately, this is turning out to be quite difficult, as google is just flooded with what appears to be bloatware/spyware benchmark applications.

Now, at this point you might be wondering why I am using the X60 as a file server when I have a PC running ubuntu! The PC is an overclocked i7 920, ati 4870x2, 3 HD's, 5 fans. It consumes quite a bit of power as you can imagine, and generates a lot of heat. I try not to have it running 24/7, plus, it dual boots windows and ubuntu and I frequently switch, so setting up both OS to be a file server would be quite a pain.


Anyway, thanks for the reply, let me know if I can provide any more useful information or if you have any suggestions,

Thanks,

reso

[reso]

Hello, I will reply to myself with some more information. I found the program LANBench (http://www.zachsaw.co.cc/?pg=lanbench_t ... _benchmark) and used it to benchmark the connection between my Vista 64 PC desktop and the X60 thinkpad notebook.

The results of this LAN Benchmark was about 48569231 kbits per second, and works out to 59.3 MB/s Here is a screenshot:



Next, I ran this LAN benchmark in the background while copying a file from the X60's hard drive to the USB external hard drive, and timed how long the transfer took. The transfer was 1401 MB and took 71 seconds, = 19.7 MB/s. Here is a screenshot:



I did the same transfer, from the X60's hard drive to the external hard drive, but without the LAN benchmark running, and it was 23 MB/s. (NOTE: this are unaccurate, I am timing them with a stopwatch).

Next, from my Vista 64 PC, I copied a 414 MB file to the X60's USB external HD over the network, timed it, and repeated a few times: result is 13-15 MB/s. The same vile copied from the LAN PC to X60's internal HD averaged 20 MB/s

Summary:
LAN Benchmark: 60 MB/s
X60 HD->USB HD: 23 MB/s
X60 HD->USB HD while 100% Network utilization: 19.7 MB/s
LAN PC -> X60 HD via SMB : 20 MB/s
LAN PC -> USB HD on X60 via SMB: 13-15 MB/s

So, there is some more numbers. Copying to the USB HD attached to the X60 over the lan is 5-8 MB/s slower than copying to the USB HD from the X60 itself (with 100% network utilization).

I then benched the USB HD in HDTUNE, here are the results:

HD Tune Pro: WDC WD1001FALS-00E3A0 Benchmark

Test capacity: full

Read transfer rate
Transfer Rate Minimum : 22.6 MB/s
Transfer Rate Maximum : 32.2 MB/s
Transfer Rate Average : 31.6 MB/s
Access Time : 14.3 ms
Burst Rate : 30.4 MB/s
CPU Usage : 11.5%

With attached graph of results:



Anyway, there it is. I guess I don't really have that much too complain about, but it just bothers me a bit that it appears that the USB HD interface isn't the bottleneck, but that copying to the USB HD over the network only is. Windows firewall, network stack, SMB+ protocol overhead?

Any advice, comments, suggestions, remarks, welcome,

Thanks again,

reso

[tricky]

There are some TCP optimizations you can do on XP. Google for TcpWindowSize and Tcp1323Opts and you should find all sorts of suggested settings for a gigabit network.

Since you're using a USB drive, there's also that driver switch to optimize storage devices for quick removal vs performance. Can't remember how to get to it off the top of my head, but you've probably seen it before. That might help write performance.

You'd probably get a measurable improvement if you ran Vista on the server rather than XP as it supports SMB 2.0, but you're probably looking to make do with what you've already got.

Good luck!

[eatbuckshot]

I vaguely remember something about slow network transfers in vista...(a quick search on google does reveal sometweaks) But that's just an inkling

What you could try doing to help rid of more experimental inconsistencies is set up a small ramdisk on each of the computers to exchange files. (512mb perhaps)
Imdisk is a great free utility for this. Also try another xp machine if you have, or if not try transferring on the xp machine to the vista vs on the vista pulling from the xp etc.
http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html#ImDisk

try disabling firewalls? antivirus firewalls?

other thoughts.. recently i tried increasing throughput between my t61p and my desktop both running win2003 server x64, went from 80MB/s to 112 MB/s by increasing the tcpwindowsize and opt1323

[reso]

Thanks for the advice on the XP tweaks, I will give them a shot tomorrow. Tonight I did a sustained 100GB transfer, and it was 11 MB/s. I just reformatted the NTFS USB drive to use 4k allocation units as opposed to 64k units and will see if that makes a difference. I have used Vista for a few years and have experienced the "slow network copy" bug before, quite severally actually, it would seriously crawl at KB/s over SMB. That has been fixed for quite some time now and I haven't experienced anything but good performance from Vista 64 business at least the past year. I was an early adopter of vista, got it on a new work computer right after it was released and had to live through that "hell year" of limbo where everything sucked in Vista and everyone ragged on it, and claimed XP was the best (everyone seems to have forgotten the same growing pains that XP caused form Win98SE2 by the time vista was released).

If it the speed doesn't really change in with some tweaks and playing, I think I will give ubuntu a shot and see how that goes.

Anyone else using their X60/61 as a file server?

[reso]

Howdy again.

So, I've changed a few things that were suggested: disabled windows firewall, disabled windows qos server and networking feature, tweaked Tcp1323Opts and TcpWindowSize, made sure that the drive was mounted for "performance", rather than "quick removal".

The good news is that downloading files from the USB hard drive on the X60 is now at about the limit of the USB 2.0 speed to the external hard drive! I can download and streaming files at about 29-30MB/s. Writing files to the USB disk is still quite slow, at 10-11 MB/s maximum. Also, writing files over the network to the x60's HD (5400 rpm 60gb drive) is about 15-18 MB/s, so a little bit faster than the USB external hard drive, but not much.

So, it appears that changing the windows xp networking settings has dramatically improved the READ speed over the network, and marginally improved the write speed.

Anyone have suggestions as to speeding up the write speed to the USB drive over the network?

Thanks again!

reso

[frankiepankie]

If you are fan of Ubuntu, have you already tried sharing folders with an Ubuntu liveCD ? (or complete install on a 2nd HDD for example) ?

[tricky]

Disabling the NTFS last access time update might help a little, if you haven't set it already.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINES\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem
NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate = 1

I am running an Ubuntu file server off an old laptop, but not an X60. It's a Pentium M with 100Mb ethernet. It's solid as a rock -- last reboot was 6 months ago, and that was only because I moved to a new apartment. If you're willing to go the Linux route, I'd highly recommend it.

[rek]

Two things come to mind:

1/ Have you looked at the Device Manager to see what options are available in configuring the driver? Some laptop NICs have battery conservation modes you can set, that lower power consumption at the expense of performance. You might need to un-set them.

2/ Does your router support / have you enabled Jumbo Frames on your network? Apparently this enhances the transfer speed of gigabit ethernet networks.

For what it's worth, the best case transfer speed I was able to get out of my network was about 30-31MB/sec. (From one fast desktop PC to another, sustained transfer of large files, with the rest of the network idle. This is without jumbo frames, as my router doesn't support it)

My desktop machine at home is currently a Mac Mini running Windows 7 - which is kind of like an X60 that's been re-packed into a square box that's been bleached white, with an Apple logo stuck on top.. does that count?

A few years ago, I used a ThinkPad 600 that had a dead LCD panel as a 24/7 server. (I still consider an X60 a bit too 'good' for this sort of use, unless it has some kind of hardware fault that prevents it from being used as an ultraportable... but with the prices they are going for second hand, I can see how this is a good idea!)

[donzoomik]

You're better off using Vista or 7, as XP can't use Gbit effectively. Without hardcore tweaking 15MB/s is pretty good. My old X60 used to do 50MB/s (HDD limited) a few years ago on Vista.

[Zender]

There's definitely some limit to WinXP & SMB. The fastest transfer I've seen was between two decently configured desktop PCs (both running WinXP) was around 30MB/s. Normally it hovers around 20-25MB/s. The fastest transfer over gigabit network I've seen on my WinXP T60 was from my file server (running Slackware linux) using FTP - around 70MB/s. No jumbo frames on any configuration.

I've met some benchmark on the internet which actually found out that WinXP really has this limit around 20-30MB/s, whereas Vista/7 can do 60-80MB/s over SMB.

[Zender]

This could help.
http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=1802

[msb0b]

I had slow transfer rate problem between my T60 (Vista SP2) and Win2008 and WHS file servers. I was only getting 10 MB/s down and 4 MB/s up over a gigabit link, until I found a tip to turn off TCP/IP/ICMP checksum offloading, then the speed went up to 40 MB/s up and down. Maybe you can give it a try.

I've also found that Intel Pro/1000 PL does not support jumbo frames due to hardware limitations/bugs.

[teetee]

It seems the transfer rate is slow when you are dumping files to the usb disk or the hard drive. Have you done the HD Tune test on the disk write speed? I only saw the read speed test.

Also it might help to find the bottle neck if you can monitor the cpu utilization on the computer and the router uptime status during the file transfer. Have you tried to disable the anti-virus program during the file transfer as it might take cpu(s) processing time (and therefore might affect the I/O) during the transfer.

[Woodenspoon]

hm, i'm getting much worse, 1.7MB/s copy over network to the thing, i've tried swaping network cables.. turning on and off those network card features/settings, updating drivers, removing avg.... its a fully updated xp sp3 system:(