I move a lot of files around between machines on my home network, and lately, I've been wondering why it's been taking so long to move files - and why my throughput was so low. I use Foldershare to do a lot of the moving automatically, and when it's moving files, it tells you how fast data is moving.

Before making any changes, the max speed I was seeing was 900 kB/s, which seemed a bit slow. - note that Foldershare reports speeds in Bytes (capital B), while the max speeds of network cards and routers is bits (small b). My router is 100 Mb/s and the transfer was from a wireless machine running at 54 Mb/s.

Unfortunately, the file server is an older machine, so I hadn't realized it only had a 10Base-T card in it (10 Mb/s). That's had to be it, right? Given that 10/100 network cards (100 Mb/s) are cheap, I replaced that first.

After replacing the card, I fired it up, and synced a file via Foldershare. Things were better, but not great. I was topping out at about 1.4 MB/s. Huh. That doesn't seem right. It's better, but not that much better. Time for some more digging.

It turns out that, since the machine is older, the motherboard's onboard USB is 1.1, and not 2.0. That's a difference of 12 Mb/s and 480 Mb/s. That's a huge difference, and explains the (only) minor gain in speeds once the network card was replaced. I have two large USB drives attached to file server, and that's where all of my storage is at, so that's where Foldershare syncs to. So now what?

As it turns out, NewEgg.com had a deal that day where you could get a USB 2.0 card for the cost of shipping. I can afford that, so I got one of those. It came yesterday afternoon, so I installed it and moved my external USB drives over to it. I fired up Foldershare, and copied a synced a large file. My speed? 1.5 MB/s. That's barely faster than before I got the USB 2.0 card!

It turns out this issue wasn't with USB 1.1 vs. 2.0. This is a Foldershare issue. On my file server, the CPU was running at about 100%, and most of it was Foldershare.

To get the new performance, I copied files directly rather than using Foldershare. I don't have any stats for this though - I didn't realize I would need them. I did copy over a 1.63 GB ISO file through the filesystem to see what it was like, and I was getting much better speeds - over 2 MB/s, and it was maintained speed. That's still lower than I would like to see, but it is a lot faster than it was a week ago, so I guess that's not bad, considering it cost me $5.00 for the whole upgrade.