Home Networking issue.

Hi all, i'm hopeing somebody will be able to help me. I have my home network set up, like the following.

Laptop
NAS
External HDD
Revo PC

Connected to:
Sweex Switch (Info)

When i try moving files from my Revo over to my Laptop, both have 1000 mb/s capable network cards, travelling through my sweex switch, i get transfer speeds of max 11mb/s

As you can tell this is very annoying especially if it's a 12GB file, it takes forever, and i dont understand why it's so slow, both PC's have GB ethernet cards and its going through a gigabit switch, how can i sort this out or change so i get better speeds?

Hope somebody can shed some light on this, it's getting on my nerves.

Just to verify are you meaning MB or mb and GB or gb???

Also is this with any file? Lets say your large file is one large file but if you transfer 100 zip files that total the same size are you also having the lag?

Have you reviewed cpu and ram usage on both devices while sending and receiving?

there is no way your actually getting 12mb per second, not to mention mb in speed rating stand for mega bits, which is a corporate scam way of making you think its 8 times faster than it actually is.

check out speedcheck with google, if your net speed is slower than 8 times less than quoted, call them and demand they repair the issue, and tell them your tempted to change companies

ed: I should say no way without either T1 or sat connection.

reply to post by whatsinaname


This is on his LAN and not a WAN. Meaning all the issues are within his own home, nothing has to deal with an outside internet company. As far as I was reading the issue.

Yeah, you'll never get the advertised speeds. This is just a guess but it could be the quality of your hard-drive, don't forget the files take time to be sent and written to the hard-drive which will limit the speed. Copy a decently sized file from one place to another on the same computer and you'll probably notice a similar speed.

Thanks for your replies, yes it is a LAN and i'm talking MB i have a feeling its the switch, for some reason the switch keeps losing the connection with everyone and the dots on the front are flashing like disco lights, crap switch is crap.... sweex, never heard of them really i bought it because it was a 1000 meg switch 5 port for £25.

reply to post by Itop1

When i try moving files from my Revo over to my Laptop, both have 1000 mb/s capable network cards, travelling through my sweex switch, i get transfer speeds of max 11mb/s

That's drastically slower than simply plugging in an external USB harddrive to the machine. I get about 40mbps from an external drive.

anyways, have you verified your cable is actually gigabit rated? It has to be CAT5E or higher to actually handle gigabit traffic. That said, you will never actually see anything get anywhere close to 1000mbps, it's just not going to happen.

but you shouldn't be seeing this type of slow down at all.

What NAS box are you using? I have a dlink 323 (or is it 232?). do you have access to a crossover cable? If so use that to connect the laptop and desktop directly and try the same file transfer and note the speeds. If your router (switch) is to blame you'll see a dramatic increase in speed.

Is this your switch?

Sweex

Unless this is a layer 3 switch (going from the price it isn't) than it's actually rather inefficient, you'd be better off with a router as a switch pumps all traffic through all the ports while the router singles out the correct one. But in your small setup, unless you are running a TOR node or a BT tracker, it shouldn't slow you down.

sweex, never heard of them really i bought it because it was a 1000 meg switch 5 port for £25.

Alright, sounds like I was correct and it's your switch. If you can get a cross over cable try what I mentioned, but it seems to be your switch. You can try factory resetting the sucker (I had to do that weekly with any D-link or Linksys routers) and see if that helps you out.

Does your ISP connection have a modem?

Here's my setup for example:

DSL model (only 1 ethernet port)
into
cisco small business router (best 300$ router, hands down)

then I have my NAS box and Desktop plugged directly into the cisco router, and any other clients (laptops, ps3s) get on over the wireless.

If you switch seems to be crapping out a lot and losing it's connection it could be related to your ISP modem, if you have one, and there might be a setting you need to enable.

For mine by default it expects 1 client and picks up 1 ip. But my router does the DHCP and hands out IPS to the other clients. If I don't manually enable "always on" mode in the ISP modem, anytime my router decides to get a new IP the whole network craps out and the router needs to be rebooted.

alot of gbit switches are crap and dont get anywhere near that value under any real load

all data transfers are still listed as bits per second and i seem to remember that vista i think reserved 20% of the potential for quality of service see here

reply to post by Itop1


11 to 12mbs is a fine speed for 100mb nic cards.

Looking at the switch. I see that it is a gb speed switch.

Your bottleneck is probably a nic card on one of your devices. I bet you don't have gb nic on your one of your devices your transferring from or too.

Check your cabling. You will need at minimum Cat5e cables to run a Gig speeds.

The cables should be labelled on the side.

reply to post by grey580

Your bottleneck is probably a nic card on one of your devices. I bet you don't have gb nic on your one of your devices your transferring from or too.

Possible though he said he verified both machines have gigabit LAN. Also, and I appologize for being "that guy" but working in this industry for 20 some years this drives me nutz.

NIC stands for Network Interface Card, so when you say NIC card you are literally saying Network Interface Card card. I know, nit picking, but just like my mom calling her desktop tower her "CPU" or her "Hard drive" it drives me batty.

Back to OP.

Next time you are at your local pc shop or online store see if you can find a "coupler" a small little plastic device with an ethernet port on each end. You plug 2 standard (straight through) cables in and it converts it to a cross over allow you to go from 1 pc to the other directly without a switch or router.

Test your transfer there, it will never be faster than that speed unless some of your hardware is defective.

reply to post by Maxatoria

all data transfers are still listed as bits per second and i seem to remember that vista i think reserved 20% of the potential for quality of service see

8 bits in a Byte.

1024 is a megabyte.

By default, Vista can reserve up to 20 percent of the network bandwidth for QoS traffic handled by the QoS Packet Scheduler. One hundred percent of the network bandwidth is available to be shared by all programs unless a program (Ex: Windows Update) specifically requests priority bandwidth.

One of the various tweaks people enable without fully understanding what they are doing. I don't believe this would have any effect on this transfer unless he's running windows update downloads at the same time.

@OP, the speeds you quoted are what you'd expect from a 100meg network, not a gig network, verify all devices and cables are gigabit rated, sounds like at least 1 device isn't.

OR, your switch is operating in half duplex mode, which wouldn't make any sense but it happens.

Now you said one machine is a laptop, and the other is a desktop. What speed are your drives? Most laptop drives are 5400 rpm or 7200 rpm, as with desktop drives, the lower the rpm the more potential lag you'll encounter for read/write operations.

When talking computer network data transfers, you are limited to the slowest client's max speed.

reply to post by phishyblankwaters


I'm in the industry also.
Been calling them Nic cards for years.
Back before they were integrated in motherboards.

In any case.

On the PC's open up the Local Area Connection Status.
There should be a Speed indication that should say 100Mbps or 1000Mbps

If it's set to 100 then you may not be negotiating your connection at 1000

Originally posted by grey580
reply to post by phishyblankwaters

 

I'm in the industry also.
Been calling them Nic cards for years.
Back before they were integrated in motherboards.

In any case.

On the PC's open up the Local Area Connection Status.
There should be a Speed indication that should say 100Mbps or 1000Mbps

If it's set to 100 then you may not be negotiating your connection at 1000

Other than a duff switch , this is the correct answer, both cards should be auto negotiate.

They come with drivers. Sometimes they come with programs. Check and make sure, cause if their is you should be able to change the settings.