Transfer of a video file over a wired network

podgeandrodge

Would be interested in hearing any opinions you guys have on this situtation:

I have a wired network - ethernet cable from pc upstairs down to modem at television. Cable from modem to WD TV live. So all networked and wd tv shows up correctly as a network drive.

Question:

If I transfer a 350mb video file from my pc to the hard drive attached to the WD TV live, over the wired network, it takes just over one minute i.e. just over 5 megabytes a second transfer. Not great but adequate.

If however I connect my Nokia N8 to the same pc and copy the file from the N8 rather than the PC (even though the N8 is connected to the pc!) the file goes to the WD TV in 28 seconds - over 12 megs a second.

How can a file get transferred quicker over the network from a phone connected to the pc than from the pc itself to the same destination?

Hope I've explained it clearly - it's got me baffled!

Snowbat

The last time I saw a problem like this, it was due to the hard drive controller in the PC sharing a PCI Interrupt with the ethernet controller. The problem was solved by physically moving the ethernet card to another PCI slot.

What operating system are you using? Are there any extra cards fitted in the PC?

podgeandrodge

Windows 7. No extra cards that I can think of other than graphics.

Am I right in saying that the PC is seeing the hard drive and the phone as simply 2 hard drives on the network? It would not distinguish between them for the purposes of allowing faster transfer speeds from one rather than the other..

Alun

How is the N8 connected?

podgeandrodge

Alun wrote: »

How is the N8 connected?

Via USB. Actually it shows up in My Computer under "portable devices" rather than under "hard disk drives" dunno if that points to any variation on what is driving transfer speeds.

Zab

Are you sure that the N8 is using the computer's network connection rather than its own wifi? Are you using the computer's interface to do the copy or the N8's screen?

podgeandrodge

Zab wrote: »

Are you sure that the N8 is using the computer's network connection rather than its own wifi? Are you using the computer's interface to do the copy or the N8's screen?

Absolutely. The N8 (and I've just tried my new 808 ) is connected as a portable device to the pc and I'm copying and pasting from within My Computer.

edit - I've looked at the portable device properties and the transfer mechanism within windows seems to be something called MTP - media transfer protocol which differs from ordinary mass storage.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/gg585602.aspx

Whether this is relevant I have no idea!

Zab

I guess I'm with snowbat on there being a conflict then, unless your drive is always that slow (i.e. not only when the network is in use) but I imagine you would have noticed that.

podgeandrodge

Zab wrote: »

I guess I'm with snowbat on there being a conflict then, unless your drive is always that slow (i.e. not only when the network is in use) but I imagine you would have noticed that.

I'll attach another portable hard drive and see what speeds that comes up with - just to distinguish from the main hard drive..

podgeandrodge

Ok, copied the file over to a new USB3 external usb drive and then copied from that over the network to the WD TV live - same 5megs transfer speed as built in hard drive.

So it's definitely something to do with "hard drives" versus "portable devices" as recognised and dealt with by Windows.

I've posted over on windows7forums also to see if they come up with anything.

Alun

I'm wondering whether doing the copy/paste via MTP is actually performing a sync rather than a real copy, and just doing a read of the destination file to determine whether it's identical? That would only be the case if the file already existed on the WDTV, so try deleting the file off the WDTV first before copying it and see if the same thing happens.

Other than that I'm stumped, because on a 100Mbit/s network, 12MByte/s is about right for a normal Windows file copy of a large file like that. Do you have another Windows 7 machine on the wired network you could copy the file to to eliminate any possible slowness on the WDTV side as regards write performance?

podgeandrodge

It's deffo a real copy on the portable drive attached to the WD TV live. I've since copied other similar files with exact same results.

I'll attach my XP laptop to the network and try a file transfer from that as I have a spare ethernet cable up here in the pc room. Will let you know. Though it can't be slowness on the WDTV side as it is receiving the files at 12MBytes from the phone.

Thanks.

Alun

The only reason I suggested slow write performance on the WDTV as a possibility was in case the file was somehow being synced rather than being copied in full, but if you've eliminated that then it's no longer in the running as an explanation.

It's certainly a puzzler.

podgeandrodge

Ok...

Connected my XP laptop to the network and transferred the file from that after mapping the WD TV as a network drive. Took 40 seconds so about 9 megs a second. Couldn't get the N8 recognised fully on XP laptop so didn't try that aspect of it.

But Windows 7 definitely slowing down something on hard drive transfers compared to portable devices.