# Solved: Hard drive read/write speed



## FredVN (May 15, 2006)

I copied some large files from a SATA harddrive across a wired Ethernet 100Base-T network to a new LaCie NAS harddrive. I was surprised at how long it was taking, so checked Networking in Task Monitor. The network was shown to be operating at only 25-35% of its 100Mbps capacity. CPU was running less than 20% capacity. No other programs were running and nothing else was being transferred over the network. Computer a 1GB RAM, so that should not have been a bottle neck.

Is that a normal harddrive transfer rate or do I have a problem somewhere?

FredVN


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## FredVN (May 15, 2006)

bump


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## JohnWill (Oct 19, 2002)

Please compute the actual transfer rate and post it. It's not unusual for cheap NAS units to only transfer at a couple of megabytes/sec, but we don't have any numbers to see what performance you're getting.


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## FredVN (May 15, 2006)

I transferred 97,923,000 bytes in 32.4 seconds which by my calculation works out to about 24.2Mbps or about 3MBps. This is not an expensive NAS so it sounds like that is reasonable performance. Right?

What are the typical transfer rates of consumer grade EIDE and SATA hard drives?


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## JohnWill (Oct 19, 2002)

That is typical for a cheap NAS. The typical transfer rates for an IDE or SATA drive are in the 40-50mbyte/sec range, so you can see there is better than a 10:1 difference in the speeds. 

I just did a quick test on my Metalgear NAS, and I get about 4mbyte/sec transferring a couple hundred megabytes of files, which I think it typical.


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## FredVN (May 15, 2006)

Thank you. That speed difference is amazing. I assumed that an NAS would be a least on a par with an EIDE drive. Do you have any idea why NAS's are so slow?

FredVN


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## JohnWill (Oct 19, 2002)

FredVN said:


> Do you have any idea why NAS's are so slow?


Sure. First off, they're normally running on a 100mbit Ethernet link, so the maximum speed they could have if all the stars and planets aligned is around 10-11mbyte/sec. Next, they typically run a stripped down version of Linux on a wimpy processor with minimal memory to do the NAS software, which adds a huge bottleneck right there.

It's not that it isn't possible to have a faster NAS, it just costs a lot more for the hardware and software sufficient to properly feed a gigabit Ethernet connection for decent speed.


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## FredVN (May 15, 2006)

Thanks, John. I guess it just goes to prove once again that you get what you pay for---if you are lucky. It is hard to imagine why people would skimp on the interface when the hard drive is the limiting technology. But I guess that is modern marketing.

Thank for the info.

FredVN


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