I am copying a small number of large files between a Vista x64 SP1 workstation and a Windows 7 RC workstation. Windows says it will take 7 hours to copy 117GB of data from one computer to another over an uncongested 1 GBit/s switch. Robocopy isn't doing much better.
I seem to remember from my Exchange days, that there were several utilities that claimed to copy very large files between servers. Are these utilities still available and if so, which are most effective in the above situation?
Edit:
I am trying a Robocopy to a USB 2.0 external HDD, as this is all I have available at the moment and it is faster, this is unusual, as the two computers I am using are the only two computers connected to this particular 1GBit/s switch.
Edit 2:
Seems to be some problem with the NIC on the source, can't get the throughput above 3MB/sec after swapping everything else out. As this is the old machine I switched to using the external HDD which copied faster than the NIC, however it still took 3 and a half hours in total.
Something is wrong here.
Check for disk fragmentation, network misusage, another program grinding the drive or faulty hardware; Windows w/1Gb network can saturate the bandwidth that 7200 SATA drive can provide, i.e. 60-70 MB/s
I might also suggest that you create yourself a nice scheduled task to transfer the file(s) overnight.
For something that large and considering it's a local copy I would either plug the hard drive of one of those PCs into the other and do a direct copy. Alternatively I would use an eSATA hard drive to do the transfer. That's going to be way faster than even GigE.
That all assumes this is a once off, which is how I read your post.
Well, it should take about half an hour to copy that.
Anyway, how long did you wait before canceling it? Did you take a look at the details, to check actual copy speed? Vista's initial estimates are very often way off. After a while it recalculates the speed to give you better estimate.
Here's a tip that says that disabling the network stack's receive-window-auto-tuning may fix your problem. Run As Administrator:
You may also want to consider enabling jumbo frames (9000 bytes MTU) on each system to see if that helps.
I have heard of this happening with a lot of people using vista to copy over the network.
I did a quick google search to verify. There a lot of "fixes" listed here.
This article explains the Vista SP1 file copy improvements and why it works the way it does.
I've seen slow copy performace over ipv6, especially over wireless, as a test did you try disabling ipv6 just as test?
you could be running into the vista performance problems, smb2 probs, differential network copy etc, I think there are bugs somewhere in those also
also try teracopy, it optimizes the transfer
I would consider using SyncBack. We use it to move up to 30 GB files over WAN with reasonable throughput for off-site backups. There are different versions of it some of which allow throttling the use of bandwidth, using native versus Windows copy and FTP.
There is a protocol for transferring files. It's called FTP. You may find that this works better for you than using network shares. (although other posters are right that you should get better throughput that you are doing over the network).
The best file copy utility by far is Teracopy, from codesector.com I've been using it for years with XP, and find it works just as well in Vista. I agree with the other posters that something else is probably wrong in this situation, but to answer the original question, teracopy FTW.
I've found that a single-threaded file copy tops out at around 40Mb/sec - consider using richcopy to do a multithreaded transfer.