Long delete times and RoboCopy question

[giskard]

Hi all. To add some context to the query, my setup is a home network (GigE), a Windows 7 64bit install and the unRAID rig is 4.7 on a HP Micro Server. I have a 2TB parity drive and a 2TB data drive (both Samsung).

 

Historically, I've used RoboCopy to backup/sync things like photo's and music etc to external drives. I'm noticing that trying to do the same thing on the unRAID rig is painfully slow (circa 1MB/s). Copying the same data using something like TeraCopy i get anything from 5-30MB/s. Is there anything I'm missing that would make RoboCopy a poor performer in this situation? I'm also getting time timestamp issues, causing RoboCopy to overwrite files previously copied. I'll wrestle with this a little more, but any tips will be appreciated.

 

The other curious issue I've encountered is when deleting from a mapped unRAID share using Windows Explorer. I deleted a test folder of 2GB of photo's and it took around 30 minutes. Any thoughts on why this takes so long?

 

Thanks in advance for the assistance. Cheers.

 

 

[jortan]

Not sure why it would be slow.

 

As for overwriting files it shouldn't, you could try the /FFT switch (will skip files with < 2 second time difference, designed for FAT but SAMBA can have similar timestamp issues) or /DST (compensates for OS handling of 1-hour daylight saving differences)

 

Try one or both with the /L switch to test - it will list files to be copied without making any changes.

 

If you're using the native Windows 7 robocopy executable, it does multithreaded copying by default (.  You could experiment with different values using /MT:n

If you're using an old version of robocopy.exe from the administrators pack - don't!  It's included with Windows 7 / 2008

 

What switches are you using in your robocopy command?

[giskard]

Thanks for the advice. I was using an old version of RoboCopy. Using the native version doesn't seem to help, but i will continue to test.

 

File deletion is still painfully slow. Not sure if this relevent, but I've been switching back and forth between 4.7 and the new beta. The current data drive was formatted/zeroed in the beta. When i switched back to the 4.7 build, i didn't reinitialise or reformat the disk (the parity disk was rebuilt). Could this make a difference to the speed of writes and deletions?

 

Thanks again.

[StevenD]

If I'm deleting a bunch of files or large directories, I ssh into my unRAID box itself and use MC (midnight commander). Its very quick.

[giskard]

Thanks, I'll check MC out. I've done a bit of a test on the rig. Here are the results:

 

Test set - 138 files 180 MB total

 

robocopy 5:31

delete 3:22

 

teracopy 1:51

delete 3:00

 

So far, stability is great, but performance is pretty poor. I've registered the plus version, so I'm going to throw in a cache drive and see how that flies. Anything else i should be checking to find the performance bottleneck?

[giskard]

For reference, i think i have solved my 'speed' issue. Rather than copying, moving and deleting files over SMB, I'm now mapping network drives via NFS. Very snappy, both with copying and deleting files. RoboCopy is back to it's full speed as well. Just thought I'd pass this on in case someone else has a similar problem.

 

Cheers.