Slow copy between servers

[outonalimb]

I have just copied 200GB of data from one Windows 2003 server to another and it took 50 hours. I connected both devices to together with a Cat5e crossover cable - each server had gigabit ethernet cards installed.

I was shocked and concerned over how long this took. However, I noticed that there were thousands of small files and folders that are part of our backup solution. I tried a similar copy again but this time with a 20 large video files (5GB each) and this only took 3 or 4 hours.

Does it take longer for Windows to copy many small files as opposed to fewer large ones? If so, how can I speed this copy up for future use? I'm concerned that if we had 1TB that it would forever to transfer the data to another medium.

Regards

 

[lhuegele]

The bottle-neck is more than likely your hard drives or storage arrays. Do you have a lot of fragmentation on them? What sort of storage bus are you on, SCSI? Is it a RAID array, and if so, which RAID level is it? How fast are the hard drives themselves, 5400rpm, 7200rpm, 10000rpm?

Good luck,

 

[lhuegele]

Another thing to check on is the other processes running on those servers. Do they serve any other functions? Are there processes running that are taking up some of your resources?

 

[itsp1965]

Besides the above, how did you perform your copy? Did you use Windows explorer which is ridiculously slow at enumerating files prior to copying
Try using robocopy between the two servers to see if you get better response

 

[cajuntank]

Just for sake of argument and expounding a little on the above suggestion, I would be courious to see what it does with both servers booted into safe mode with networking to see if the throughput is still suffering.

Also just to make sure as well, since you said you used a crossover cable, was this home-made? Might want to try another.
Are these two servers the same brand/model (ie.. same nic brand)
What nic speed 100 or 1Gb?

 

[outonalimb]

I have 2 Iomega 200d NAS boxes - both exactly the same hardware. The crossover cable is a Belkin (shop bought).

The disks are 7200rpm SATA disks in a RAID 5 configuration.

I xcopied the data to try and speed up the copy - copy and paste takes forever.

 

[itsp1965]

xcopy copies to memory first then to its destination. If you have plenty of RAM this might take some time. As I have indicated, try using robocopy.