How To Build a Really Fast NAS - Part 6: The Vista (SP1) Difference

[kevinherring]

Tim: well done on this, your perserverence finanlly paid off! Just got a gigabit switch the other day but am not getting anything close to reasonable speed between a Vista server and OS X client. My task for the day....

Roger: You have some serious knowledge in your head! Thanks for the lesson.

Thanks to everyone for their hard work on this, it shows what we can really be achieving.

Kevin

 

[daskino]

Testing on Windows / and with run of the mill hardrives

Hey all, interesting article on the file block size of windows Vista.


Now that Windows 7 RC1 is out is could be interesting to test how the new OS performs.

Secondly, now that it is confirmed that it is the file block sizes that determine file copy rate , it could be interesting to see how "normal" harddrives perform on the Vista system. By normal I mean std run of the mill seagates and WD std 7200 3.5 inch Terbytes .

Will they stop at the 70-80 Mb barrier or can they sustain a higher troughput rate at the fraction of the cost of the velocity drives?

 

[thiggins]

I don't think that "normal" SATA 3.5" drives will reduce performance that much. The bigger factor is block size.

 

[Ranana_Bync]

How To Build a Really Fast NAS Part 6 The Vista SP1 Difference

I was in the process of doing this Had some trouble with a few of the links so it took me a bit.

Great How-To Looks really good

 

[zudzug]

How to enable all of that under Linux

Hello,

Despite a lot of searching on the Internet, I haven't found how to implement larger record size in Linux. (Ubuntu)

I just installed Samba 4 and I know this should be SMB2 enabled. No dice on relevant information about this as well.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

 

[00Roush]

Hello,

Despite a lot of searching on the Internet, I haven't found how to implement larger record size in Linux. (Ubuntu)

I just installed Samba 4 and I know this should be SMB2 enabled. No dice on relevant information about this as well.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

It depends on if you are talking about Linux being used as the client, server, or both. With Linux on the server having latest Samba version installed is all that should be needed. It a bit more involved with Linux as the client.

Overall the client OS and the software that is doing the file transfer is what controls record sizes (read/write sizes). But if your goal is to achieve higher transfer speeds in my opinion you don't necessarily need to to use larger record sizes. What is needed to improve transfer speeds over a network using SMB, as rogerbinns pointed out, is a program that can do concurrent reads/writes. Windows Vista SP1 and Windows 7 both implement an updated file copy engine that does concurrent reads/writes (async I/O) right out of the box. As for Linux... so far I have not really heard about many programs that really do concurrent reads/writes.

If you are looking to improve performance on a particular setup feel free to start a new thread and we might be able to help.

00Roush