Network copy quirk over gigabit.

[Mad Bob]

Hi all,

Although my problem could fall under OS, network issues, hardware or
otherwise I thought I would start here.....

My setup is as follows...

PC1 : AMD processor on a Gigabyte 7N400Pro2 1GB ram running fully patched
Win2K. Ethernet is onboard gigabit.

Hdisks

2 x 40GB Maxtor using onboard RAID striping.

PC2 : AMD processor on a Gigabyte GA7DX+ 512MB ram also running fully
patched Win2K plus latest BIOS. Ethernet is PCI gigabit.

Hdisks

1 x 40GB Seagate as boot drive (IDE1-master)

1 x CD reader (IDE1-slave)

1 x 300GB Seagate (IDE2-slave)

1 x 300GB Maxtor (Connected on USB2 via PCI USB card)

Both machines are connected via a gigabit desktop switch.

Both have eachother setup as a user (for full file sharing)

Both have ZoneAlarm (latest) and have eachothers static IP address set as
trusted.

Both have Norton AV 2005, but with Internet Worm protection switched off
since this really killed any network speed.

So here is the quirk....

Copying files from PC1 to PC2 external USB drive is good and constant at
19MB/s.

Copying files from PC1 to PC2 internal Seagate is same to start with
(19MB/s), but then transfer drops to 50% or less.

One of the internal drives on PC2 then goes mad !! IE lots of head movement
noise, but because they are so close to eachother I cannot say which is
making the noise; either boot or 300GB Seagate. Also, PC2 desktop becomes
unresponsive and it can take upto 3 mins before it responds again to mouse
or keyboard.

Copying files from PC2 to PC1 is not a problem whatsoever.

As far as I am aware both machines are setup exactly the same; since I set
both up.

One thing I did notice, in device manager / disk drives / my_disk_name /
general, under location I see the following :-

Drive 1 has location 0(0) - IDE1-master

Drive 2 optical has location 1(1) - IDE1-slave

Drive 3 Seagate has location 1(1) - IDE2-slave

Is this numbering correct ?? I removed the optical drive and performed
another test, but the same stall problem occurred. Just curious.....

Any suggestions ?

I can live with this, but I would like to get to the bottom of it.

Thanks in advance,

Mad Bob.

 

[Mad Bob]

One thing that has just occurred to me is....
External USB drive was formatted NTFS with default allocation size.
Internal new 300Gb Seagate was formatted NTFS with 16KB allocation
size.......

I will put the Seagate back to the NTFAdefault size and see what happens.

Mad Bob.

 

[Mad Bob]

Hi all,

Just to let you know what happened last night.

1) Reformatted Seagate 300GB drive to default NTFS allocation size; 4096
bytes.
This had the effect of making file copying much better, but the stall
situation still occurred but later at about 2GB's worth of data.

2) Tried my external USB hardware attached to the drive, but since I did not
want to remove the drive from the computer I hacked the USB circuitry and
powered the drive from the computer. Hey presto, everything works as the
Maxtor; 20MB/s constant.. Great, but why ???

A close examination of the USB circuitry (this forms part of the external
enclosure) revealed a miss soldered resistor and a capacitor on the +5V line
that had killed itself. This means that the +5V had no smoothing
whatsoever.

All is up and running now.

Just thought I would share my findings with you all.
Best regarsd,
BlueBottle.