Cloud Computing LAN speed

One of Win10's nicer tweaks is that it shows the transfer rate of data from one device to another, be it a local USB memory or a storage device elsewhere on the LAN.
I am copying some music files to a NAS drive for a friend. The source device is my laptop which connects to the LAN via wifi (n), the NAS is plugged into the router via a LAN cable.

The transfer rate varies enormously. Currently it is around 1.5MB/s (which is better than usual) but can drop to painfully slow speeds in 'K's/s for no apparent reason. Currently 5GB is looking to take about an hour- but if it goes into 'slow' mode it could still be at it tomorrow morning :grayyawn:

As there is no significant other traffic on the network (that I know of) I would love to know the likely causes of the drops in speed. Or even if there is a way of diagnosing.....

TIA.

Not sure where 'Cloud' fits in but wifi constantly adjusts 'speed' according to changing conditions.

If you get similar symptoms on a fully wired connection it might give some clues.

I suppose you could call it my own 'mini-cloud'? Besides, it was the closest-fitting topic I could think of
Good call re. wifi Vs. wired. I will try plugging in tomorrow- by the looks of things it will still be going well into the day as speed has dropped to near dial-up speed now!

Where is your router compared to your laptop and what is in between the two?


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trevortron said:

One of Win10's nicer tweaks is that it shows the transfer rate of data from one device to another, be it a local USB memory or a storage device elsewhere on the LAN.
I am copying some music files to a NAS drive for a friend. The source device is my laptop which connects to the LAN via wifi (n), the NAS is plugged into the router via a LAN cable.

The transfer rate varies enormously. Currently it is around 1.5MB/s (which is better than usual) but can drop to painfully slow speeds in 'K's/s for no apparent reason. Currently 5GB is looking to take about an hour- but if it goes into 'slow' mode it could still be at it tomorrow morning :grayyawn:

As there is no significant other traffic on the network (that I know of) I would love to know the likely causes of the drops in speed. Or even if there is a way of diagnosing.....

TIA.

Click to expand...

The windows copy routine is crap, I have done some tests and copying a large number of files that are small in size but total size may be 1GB takes longer than copying a single file that is also 1GB. I would use Terracopy as it doesn't use the Windows copy API

jfish said:

The windows copy routine is crap, I have done some tests and copying a large number of files that are small in size but total size may be 1GB takes longer than copying a single file that is also 1GB. I would use Terracopy as it doesn't use the Windows copy API

Click to expand...

I used Terracopy for quite some time, even paid for it, but since Windows 10 it's been currupting files quite a lot.

In my testing copying files from my PC to a NAS drive and vice-versa there wasnt much difference in speed between Terracopy, Windows or Total Commander's built in copy routine. Using Windows 10 with a fully wired gigabit network.

There are quite a few factors to consider when transferring files around a network, not just cables or software.

Network card/interfaces play a big part in getting good speed. For instance a cheap network card will not have much buffer or decent chips so will not be able to keep the speed up, where as a more expensive card sshould be able to reach higher speeds and maintain them. This also applies to wifi adapters.

Many NAS drives also have this problem as the embedded Linux operating system and apps take up much of the limited CPU and memory power.

I have 2 Zyxel NAS boxes and they have single gigabit ports, the speed I can copy files to and from them is much slower than I can copy to and from another pc on the same network.

I also have 2 Dlink DNS-340L NAS boxes with dual gigabit network ports, these are very fast and can keep up with the speed of the PC sending the files.

I also have a Netgear radyNAS 104 which has dual gigabit ports too but this a quite slow.

When I stopped using the built-in network adapter in my PC and puut in a reasonable network card my sustained transfer speed went up by at least 50%. Making fitting the whole house with cat 5e worth it.

Cabeling also affects speed, a cheap cat 5e cable will not have the same performance as a more expencive one, but as with all things, being daft and paying through the nose wont help.

jfish said:

I have done some tests and copying a large number of files that are small in size but total size may be 1GB takes longer than copying a single file that is also 1GB.

Click to expand...

This is normal as effectively when transferring multiply files you're transferring each file individually so the process is constantly stopping and starting.


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jfish said:

The windows copy routine is crap, I have done some tests and copying a large number of files that are small in size but total size may be 1GB takes longer than copying a single file that is also 1GB. I would use Terracopy as it doesn't use the Windows copy API

Click to expand...

Well I never knew there were alternative programs for copying files. I am thinking the problem may have been with the host PC. I gave it a 'clean'- MWB and then CCleaner. After that it zapped through 5GB in less than an hour. Happy with that.
Terracopy sounds interesting, but @Captin 's experience sounds worrying- is this a general problem?

in my novice opinion i think anything connected by wire/cable is always secured and better than wireless as the later is only convenient thats all

Hello!

One trick that can save time when copying large number of smaller sized files especially in the case of slow USB drives is to zip the files first without using any compression at all ... like for 7-zip, it is the Store compression level ... reason being that there are a number of steps that are performed when initiating a copy action for each file ... with large number of files, this can slow things down a lot!

On the other hand, real life usage exposes the poor state of wifi throughput ... perhaps lifi's mixture of speed with limited mobility will solve such issues!

Regards,
Ahmed