Windows XP vs Windows 7 gigabit transfer speeds

[equalizer]

I have an Intel quad core Q6600 and a dual core E7300 with XP and XP pro. Have Intel gigabit PCI NIC and a RealTek on board PCIexpress gigabit NIC. Transfer speed is horrible 18-20MB/sec. I had tried jumbo frames, adjusting window size, etc with no change. 1GB file tranfers in 50-55sec.

I just installed Windows 7 on second partition on both PCs with default settings. Super easy install BTW. Anyway transfer speed with same hardware is 50-70MB/sec! Will have to replace PCI NIC with PCIX NIC to see if I can get 80-90MB/sec speed. 1GB file transfers in less than 20 secs, 500MB file in 7 secs. Only difference is XP vs 7. Are there other settings in XP that could account for that?

 

[thiggins]

I assume that Win7 has the same file copy improvements as Vista SP1 and probably more. There are no tweaks that I know of that you can do in XP to get equivalent performance. See How To Build a Really Fast NAS - Part 6: The Vista (SP1) Difference.

 

[equalizer]

I assume that Win7 has the same file copy improvements as Vista SP1 and probably more. There are no tweaks that I know of that you can do in XP to get equivalent performance. See How To Build a Really Fast NAS - Part 6: The Vista (SP1) Difference.

Thanks Tim I have read most of your articles on this topic. I didn't see XP -XP testing. Can you or anyone else confirm that fastest XP-XP transfer speeds? Tim, can you point me to a NAS review where you compared XP with Vista?

 

[00Roush]

This might help... http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=1802

In my own testing I average around 60 MB/sec for XP to XP file copies using standard drag and drop. I think your hardware should be capable of similar speeds. I recommend changing to a large system cache on both the client and server for the best performance with XP. Along with that ensure that the latest network drivers are installed.

I have actually spent quite a bit of time digging into why Vista is better than XP at network file copies. I have come to the conclusion that XP's file copy engine is to blame. It is basically single threaded and only keeps one read/write in flight at a time. (it was designed that way) Whereas Vista's (and most likely Win 7) file copy engine is multithreaded and keeps about four reads/writes in flight at one time. While this is not the only change I believe it is the main reason for the difference in performance. To actually test this conclusion I wrote a program that copies a file similar to how Vista does. For more information about my program take a look here.

00Roush