WHS Performance

[00Roush]

Something else I came across is if you don't like exactly how WHS works out of the box you can change it. I mean I accidentally installed WHS as a basic Windows 2003 install without all of the WHS extras. Which basically means it would work just like Windows Server 2003 Small Business Server.

Almost forgot in your current setup you could do a reinstall of WHS with just one of the 500 GB drives attached so that it would be your OS drive. That way you could have your fast Seagate drive as part of the storage pool that gets used. Just a thought... you know if you get bored.

00Roush

 

[benogil]

Along the lines of what OOrush is saying ( I think ), on the AVS forum under htpc, is a 149 page media server thread. It's just a thought, but folks in the last few pages have been playing with disabling the backup services for WHS, and just using it as a host OS for Flexraid and using the OS for streaming app's ( squeezecenter, ps3mediaserver, etc. )

Ben

 

[mtber]

no, not getting bored - yet


The client back-up is a key fetaure for me and one of the reasons I decided to go with the WHS, so in my case turning it off is not an attractive solution.

I ran the Iperf tests on the various clients (have dropped John from the mix for now). I've compiled the results from the IPerf runs (red bars), IOZone runs on the local machine (blue solid and strip) and IOZone machine to machine data (burgundy solid & strip) in the attached graph. The IOZone data is the average for 4G & 8GB transfers (where the results have reached “steady state”).

There are some IOZone machine to machine results that I need to generate to fill in the gaps.

A few things that I have noted in examining the data:

• Huge difference in WHS local performance between going to the system disk (C)and the Public share or “D:” drive (as noted in previous posts) – reads are particularly poor

• Eric (Vista 32) to Kelsey (Vista 64) – results are about as good as they will get given Kelsey (Vista 64) local results, performance limited by Kelsey (Vista 64) hard disk (Kelsey to Eric similar, but not quite as good)

• Best results are between two of the faster disks Dorene (Win 7), Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB, to Kelsey eSata, WDC WD5001AALS-00L3B (500GB).

• The Kelsey (Vista 64) and Dorene (Win 7) to WHS IOZone results are similar somewhat correlate to the poor WHS D results (although the drive map was to Public).

• Even though the WHS has a very fast system disk (Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS 1TB), the two extended storage disks (Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3500630AS 500GB) are dragging the whole system down.

Still some tweaks to try based on suggestions from this thread, but it seems that my WHS is hopeless, at least in regard to large file transfer performance. (because I’m not going out and buying a bunch of fast extra disks!)

John