Windows 7: Painfully slow gigabit file transfers

Hi Skinleech,

With gigabit, the quality and the length of the cables become critical factors.

If you are using cat5 instead of cat6, they must be of best quality.



The best way to troubleshoot, but a bit messy for you, is to put the pc's close together in one room, and use short, new and high quality cables.

100mbit uses only four wires of the eight.
Gigabit uses all eight, thus making crosstalk more likely.
That's why you should use cat6 cables.

Whilst that is true, it was working fine prior to installing 64bit Windows 7 RTM (I was running 32bit build 7227 previously I think, without issue). It's all cat5e cable and as I say, whilst maybe not super fast, as long as it works I'm not all that fussed. But it's just not working just now.

Thanks again fore the replies to date.

Not working?
I thought you said it was painfully slow?

It might be not related to the network at all, but to the HDD's, the chipset drivers etc.

I suggest doing a HDD speed test.

And disable AV software, it might slow transfers down considerably.

greetz

Sorry, it's just the way I wrote it - it is working, but is painfully slow.

No AV software on either machine to disable at this time, but chipset drivers is something I'd not considered. But then, file transfers between internal drives on PC1 or between PC1 and USB would be affected too surely?

I have a PC to PC 1Gbit lan connection and i too only get about 10-15 MB/s

Am i doing something wrong(its the same with or without firewall)?

Hmmmm....I just tested at work.

My configuration is a Dell E6400 laptop on a docking station with a 1Gbps connection, going into a simply 5 port NetGear GS105 switch and then connected to a Self Built Windows 7 64-bit machine with an Intel 10/100/1000GT network card.

I copied an 8GB ISO file from the Windows 7 box to the Windows Vista laptop. Hitting the details tab on the Windows file copy window, showed a transfer rate around 70MB/s. It fluctuated between 68MB/s and 72MB/s. And that's pretty much gotta be limited to the 2.5" hard drive installed in my laptop. I wasn't expecting to get 70MB/s honestly.

I remember reading an article about increasing transfer speeds when I was trying to do the very same thing with my Windows Home Server.

The article mentioned turning on 'Jumbo Frames', providing that all your network cards support it, which in theory should dramatically improve network performance by raising effective bandwidth.

I can't find the article but if you Google 'Jumbo Frames' there is some interesting stuff available.

I know when streaming from my WHS to my Xbox 360 it seemed to help quite a bit.

You should be able to find the option in your network cards' advanced properties.

Might be worth a try?

1000BASE-T is certified for use on CAT-5E cables. Upgrading to CAT-6 is not necessary.

I thought I had these enabled, but I didn't. Speeds have improved now, thanks. But still only ~10mb.

I've just checked the setting, and despite being set to 1.0Gbp full duplex I am only connecting at 100mb.

Any ideas on this one?

Check cables with a cable checker. all 8 wires must work, or it will switch back to 100mbit.

(cable checkers are quite cheap, had mine for $ 20)

The fact it worked before doesn't say much.
Sometimes coincidences work that way.
It might have been a slight jerk on the cable.