Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Speeding up Firewire File Transfers?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the maximizing-bandwidth-usage dept.

Milo_Mindbender asks: "I've got a pretty common problem: copying a ton of files from an old Windows XP computer to a new one. After noticing how long transfers were taking over my 100mbps Ethernet, I hooked up a IEEE1394/Firewire cable and things were much faster. Strangely though, Windows is still only using about 10% of the cable's 400mbps bandwidth. Does anyone know any tips/tricks for speeding this up or any Shareware mass-file-copy tools that would be faster than Explorer/file sharing? Right now, the older machine is setup with Windows file sharing and the new machine is copying from it, neither machine is using much CPU and the disks are nowhere near their max speed. The number and size of the files might be what's slowing it down, since it's gigabytes of files in the 100-200k size range."

4 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's the hard drive, not the fire-wire by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    your hard drive is most likely not fast enough to receive the full 400 Mb/s stream from the firewire. The fastest SCSi drives are 320Mb/s and that's not sustained.

    You are confusing MByte/s and MBit/s. Firewire is 400 MBit/s, while SCSI is 320 MByte per second.

  2. Re:archive then move? by biglig2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Nothing to do with compression (although that may help); it's about one big file being faster to copy than lot's of small files that add up to the same size. Even if you zip them up without compressing (it'll be an option somewhere) then this will help.

    Another thing is that even without looking at third party tools, you should be using XCOPY in preference to windows explorer.

    There is an Exchange server utility that is optimised for moving gigantic files very fast; doubtless you can find similar programs about.

    --
    ~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
  3. It's a good thing you don't write Windows... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    It's a good thing you don't write Windows for a living. I'll bet you anything that those write operations are coalesced over several files at a time. Nice try, though.

  4. Optimize for performance by Svenne · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No one's mentioned this?

    Bring up the properties of the firewire disk in "Device Manager". Go to the Policies tab and make sure it's set to "Optimize for performance".

    --

    Slagborr