What Does Windows Use for File Transfers?

[bobber205]

Because it sucks.
When I moved over to linux a few weeks ago and I connected to my macbook via FTP I was surprised about how fast things went.

I could copy a 200 meg file over in about a minute and a half. This took easily 10-15 minutes on windows. Why oh why? That's what I'm wondering right now.

Anyway, anybody have any ideas? Is it the NTFS partitioning scheme? Or could it be lots of factors?

 

[theman]

not sure, but sometimes when you transfer large files with windows explorer (drag and drop) it just hangs and crashes, and you have to start over. this doesnt happen all the time though.

 

[contoursvt]

I dont think the issue you have is a windows thing. I just transferred a 558MB file from my Vista computer to my Windows 2000 computer and it took 1:25. My connection is through a 100mb ethernet. This is through drag and drop via the shell.
I tested through command line FTP and got 50.69 seconds for the same 558MB file. There is a difference but its not astronomical. FTP has lower overhead so it shouldnt be surprising that its faster but it shouldnt be such a drastic difference as what you're experiencing

Because it sucks.
When I moved over to linux a few weeks ago and I connected to my macbook via FTP I was surprised about how fast things went.

I could copy a 200 meg file over in about a minute and a half. This took easily 10-15 minutes on windows. Why oh why? That's what I'm wondering right now.

Anyway, anybody have any ideas? Is it the NTFS partitioning scheme? Or could it be lots of factors?

 

[synth3tik]

Windows can transfer files?


WOW

 

[contoursvt]

You need to figure out why that happens because its not normal. If it was, I'd go crazy transferring the 2+ Gigabyte files which I do frequently. Maybe its a virtualized windows problem. I've never seen this happen on a real windows box. Just out of curiosity are you doing it over wireless?

not sure, but sometimes when you transfer large files with windows explorer (drag and drop) it just hangs and crashes, and you have to start over. this doesnt happen all the time though.

 

[contoursvt]

They sure can Windows even had a preemtive multitasking server product with SMP support six years before Apple came out with OSX server. Imagine that will ya.

Windows can transfer files?


WOW

 

[Bikedude74]

One way to achieve this is if you lock the NIC speed (and duplex) on one side, and keep it to auto in the other. The autosense algorithm will quite often assume 10/half in such a scenario.

Auto in both ends usually works.

This btw is regardless of OS.

The Vista team did make some alterations to how they access networked files, but not anything that could account for the dramatic lack of speed you're experiencing.

E.g. http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/03/30/564809.aspx (problems when server claims to support 'fast queries')

 

[theman]

You need to figure out why that happens because its not normal. If it was, I'd go crazy transferring the 2+ Gigabyte files which I do frequently. Maybe its a virtualized windows problem. I've never seen this happen on a real windows box. Just out of curiosity are you doing it over wireless?

No, it's just whenever I get a new PC, new HDD, or reinstall windows, I copy all the folders onto an external and then drag and drop when I have windows up and running. But I have a whole bunch of 20 year old docs, programs and other stuff I will probably never delete, and some files have become corrupted, or weird things happen to them. So, whenever windows encounters one of these files it will either crash, or say "The file ... could not be copied" and then when you press OK, it terminates the whole process and you have to start all over again. So I figured it out, and downloaded this DOS copy program called XXCOPY. You should check it out, it's soooo cool for backing up. There are so many options you can use. (one of which is "continue copying after error occurs). It is loads better than windows explorer. Besides, it's kind of fun to use DOS every once in a while (even if it's just fake DOS.)