1

I am moving a virtual machine image of about 8Gb from my laptop to my network hard disk and it's taking a long time, windows reports a transfer rate of 840KB/second.

I'm wondering if the slow transfer is to be expected or if there is something wrong with my network configuration?

  • My wireless router is a Netgear N600 with dual band N300 (300Mbs) Wifi.
  • The switch is just a 4 port Linksys ethernet switch with a wired connection to the router.
  • The hdd is an Iomega Home Media Network 2TB Hard Drive

network map

4
  • How fast is "very slowly" in Kb/s?
    – David
    Dec 19, 2013 at 14:20
  • @David, see my edit
    – Grokodile
    Dec 19, 2013 at 14:20
  • are you moving one large file, or many small ones? moving many small documents over the network to a system with minimal intelligence will require a lot of metadata to be passed in addition to the data itself, and allocating new files is a relatively costly operation. you should benchmark with a single large file to determine what your real IO speed is. Dec 19, 2013 at 14:52
  • Frank, the virtual machines hdd (.vdi) is one large file of about 7.5Gb.
    – Grokodile
    Dec 19, 2013 at 15:01

2 Answers 2

1

If you plug your laptop into the switch via ethernet and try the transfer again, it will tell you if the issue is with your wifi signal.

If the transfer is fast via ethernet, then I would reboot the wifi router, and move your laptop closer to your wifi router or check for signal disturbance (such as a poorly shielded microwave oven).

3
  • Correct I'm getting about 8.5MB/s wired. Although my wifi signal reports as 'good'. Thanks
    – Grokodile
    Dec 19, 2013 at 14:58
  • You should be getting similar speeds via wifi if it is working properly.
    – Deesbek
    Dec 19, 2013 at 15:00
  • 1
    You didn't mention what kind of WiFi connection you have on your laptop. That may be what's slowing you down.
    – heavyd
    Dec 19, 2013 at 15:08
1

840 KB/s isn't exactly impressive. There are two possible causes here:

  1. Your Wifi connection isn't strong enough. If you have only a few bars of signal, try moving your laptop closer to your router while the transfer takes place.
  2. Your Portable HDD isn't very good. Sometimes the hardware on a portable hard drive bay is very underpowered, esp. on the older ones.

I'm leaning towards 1, good luck.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .