Slow transfer speeds from laptop to raid5 server...WHY????

I have two machines machine A is the asus in my sig, speeds on the hardrive avg 50MB/s+. Machine B is a raid5 server built from an old dell. It has a highpoint rocket raid card, 3x500gb hdds, runs xp corporate. Speeds avg 100MB/s+.

I have a trendnet wireless n/gigabit router. One line from the router goes to a rosewill gigabit switch in my bedroom. From the switch, one line goes to machine a and one to machine b.

When I transfer files from the laptop onto the server, I see an abysmal 8MB/s transfer time. Obviously there is a major bottleneck, how can I find it and rectify this? Is there software for this purpose? Are there settings I should be tweaking ie packet size, mtu...etc??

 

The bottleneck is the fact that you're doing a NETWORK TRANSFER.
Something here has a 10/100 adapter which is preventing gigabit speeds, so you're getting 100Mbps, which is about 12.5MB/s theoretical. Because you never get theoretical, 8-9MB/s sounds spot on.

 

nothing is on a 10/100 actually.

the nic in my server is gigabit, my laptop is gigabit my router ports are gigabit and the gigabit lights are on on my switch for both devices.

this is why i am so confused.

 

A lot of switches will only support the speed of the lowest speed device on the switch. So if another computer is plugged into the switch, and it's not related to this transfer but has 10/100, the switch is probably running at 10/100. Unplug every device except the two you're transferring between from the switch and post your results.

 

use a straight cable directly between them and try the transfer, if it's a lot faster something else is messed up, if not then well, you know...

Anyway sometimes gigabit stuff auto negotiates to 100mb even though both ends are gigabit *shrug* so you might have to force them to gigabit.

 

thanks for your help guys, its a huge help to have people to bounce ideas off of. gonna try out your suggestions and and see if i can systematically sniff out the bottleneck. will post back for sure.

btw nothing else is plugged in, but would a sleeping laptop connected to the same network via wireless affect the speeds of the wired portion of the network? i almost refuse to believe any modern piece of networking tech is that friggin stupid.

also, "force them to gigabit?" where can i learn more about this?

 

Log into the administration panel for the router, and it should have switch speed. Choices will probably be 10/100, 10/100/1000, Auto. Auto will probably be default, change it to gigabit.

It's possible the laptop could have an effect but I agree, it's not likely.

 

you were right hep!, went into device manager and found that my old 10/100 nic was enabled as well as my newer 10/100/1000 nic. disabled it and boom! blazing @ 40-50MB/s steady, with bursts to 60ishMB.

 

Glad to have been of assistance
Networking isn't only part of my profession, it's also a major hobby of mine.