By Philip Churchill on November 23rd, 2007
Speed up Data Transfer to WHS
Janssen Jones has posted 5 handy hints over at the WHS forums to speed up data transfer when copying material to your shared folders on the home server.
- If transferring LARGE amounts of media to the Music, Photos or Videos folder, disable “Media Sharing” for that folder. When Media sharing is turned on, WHS is indexing each piece of material as it comes in. Depending on other factors with your machine, this can cause a significant slowdown.
- If transferring LARGE amounts of data, disable “Folder Duplication” for that folder. When folder duplication is turned on, WHS is making two copies of each file you send to the server. Depending on other factors with your machine, this can cause a significant slowdown.
- If transferring LARGE amounts of data, be aware that USB drives may not perform as well as SATA drives. Depending on other factors with your machine, this can cause a significant slowdown.
- If transferring LARGE amounts of data, be aware that ‘multiple’ USB drives may not perform as well as a single attached USB drive, especially if they share the same BUS. Depending on other factors with your machine, this can cause a significant slowdown.
- If at all possible, try to ensure that your system drive is the largest drive when you install WHS. If you install on a small system drive (e.g. 80 GB) and then attach a few large (e.g. 500GB) data drives, sooner or later you’ll run into performance issues, at least in the beta.
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Good suggestions. Although Microsoft has no control over #3, #4 and 5, they really should add more intelligence to greatly minimize #1 and #2. I think its doable. For example, they could put some sort of logic that halts indexing and duplication until no new data has been written over a certain amount of time. That way, for most operations users wouldn’t have to be knowledgeable about turn on/off duplication and media sharing. Consumers shouldn’t have to think about it.
Agree with JohnCz
Whilst Microsoft have done a great job with WHS and it will only get better interms of features either made by MS or third parties.
I do feel however more could of been done/can be done to make it a more consumer friendly experience, like implementing features mentioned above. One i can think of is the router config feature, currently if it cannot configure your router automatically it refeers you to some help files to manually configure…. sorry but this wont be enough for an average comsumer who has had little or no experiance with networking.
RB
Rick B has a good point about router info. If you think about Microsoft’s requirement that WHS be plugged directly into the router and that a router is 24/7 device…the more it becomes apparent the two probably should be merged. Eliminating power cables and ethernet cable mashup. I’ve seen PCI card based routers. Here are a couple…
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1764
http://pcpartscollection.stores.yahoo.net/aspcirocaeta.html
http://ecommerce.cadsystem.it/product/d213ead7-4a32-4740-bf76-df03a8084154.aspx
As a side note. I’m surprised that we haven’t seen more Cable/DSL modem gateways. Currently there are no gateways on the market with 4 port gigabit switch and N-draft wireless networking. I think this because many consumers are acquiring their cable/dsl modem from their ISP and ISPs tend to steer clear of home networking or taking on the added costs of integrating wireless capabilities in a modem/gateway.
Hi JohnCZ,
Have you posted that suggestion on using some sort of logic control over at the Connect site?
Thanks for the links to the PCI router cards, I didn’t even know they existed. I think Microsoft’s idea was that since nearly everyone has a router it would be a bad idea to integrate one within hardware, but it would be a good idea to have it available as an extra with say the HP EX475.
Hi Rick B (RB 1),
Thanks for your comment. The router config feature should now be updated to better implement UPnP.