Windows 7 File Transfer Speed over Gigabit is slow

Question

I've got windows 7 pro running on my file server and my main desktop. Each has a gigabit network connection and I'm connected to a gigabit switch. However, when trying to copy some large files, it's running pretty slow at a measly 12-15 MB/s
The data is coming from a 7200RPM SATA drive (which I think should be good for almost 150MB/s) and going to a Drobo on the server connected via FireWire 800, so I can't think of any bottlenecks I might have in the hardware. But TeraCopy still says it's only going at 12-15 MB/s

What else could be wrong here?

Answer 1

I hate to say this is Windows voodoo. I've seen improvements from disabling firewalls/anti-virus to using RAM disks, changing gigabit nics from PCI to PCIe, using faster switches, jumbo frames, flow control and shorter & better cables.

Funny when I download files from a samba box I seem to get better performance, but still not better than 15% utilization.

I did a quick search and found this site. I hadn't tried these settings yet.

To more directly address speed, in Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft made changes to the CopyFile API to increase performance. I don't know if TeraCopy uses it, but I know RoboCopy does. Perhaps running the test with RoboCopy could bring better performance.

Also, my best transfers were using PCIe cards going from a RAM disk to a RAM disk with my AV off, but still I didn't get more than about 20-25%.

Perhaps some of these tips will work for you.

Answer 2

This might be a bit late, but for those having similar issues, I noticed that file transfers between Windows network shares (Win2k3 -> Win2k8R2; Win2k3 -> Win7; some other configurations) are unreasonably slow when TeraCopy (v2.1) is used.

The prime example was when the setup was as follows: 2 Servers, both having gigabit NICs and connected to a gigabit switch; First server running Win2k3, the second running Win2k8R2. TeraCopy transfer speed of a ~21GB file was 50MB/s at best. Meanwhile, I had a sustained 105MB/s using the normal Windows copy (pulling on the Win2k8 box from the Win2k3). FTP yielded similar results at approximately 105MB/s sustained. Similar results were achieved with Windows 7 running on the client box.

In similar setups I would get even lower transfer rates with TeraCopy, from 8MB/s to 35MB/s. I tried to tinker with offload options and other settings of both NICs until I decided to try to use the regular Windows copy instead of TeraCopy. The speed difference was surprising.

The common thing in all of the above setups was the Win2k3 box which acts as the file server. I was changing the OS on the second server which was downloading the test file.

I have not tested transfer rates between two Win2k3 boxes using TeraCopy and the regular Windows copy yet.

Answer 3

There are many possible choke points -- However Windows 7 SP1, can and does run VERY fast over Gigabit Ethernet.

I just transferred several gigabytes worth of large files from two disks on my PC to a Synology NAS Box (DS1010+). That pair of Explorer.exe driven transfers reached 118.25Megabytes/sec ( 950 Megabits/sec ) which is 95% saturation of my switched Gigibit Ethernet network, including running through multiple Dlink Gigabit Switches.

Answer 4

I'm running Windows 7 using Parallels/Boot Camp on a 3.4 Ghz Quad Core i7 with 16 gigs of RAM. Network transfer speeds were between 2 - 60k per second, until I followed the advice in a Cake404 post regarding Broadcom network cards.

After turning off Ethernet@WireSpeed and disabling "Large Send Offload" options (under the configuration settings for the network card), my transfer speeds went up to multiple megabytes per second.

Answer 5

This is a driver issue and a common problem.

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7files/thread/a57e4e87-fc82-4b4e-a057-4c206422190e