Windows 10: How to setup a well performing local cloud?

OK, that's a really broad request. Sorry, but here's the backstory with highlights for those who don't want to read *Biggrin
- Looking for a speedy LAN solution I can use for cloud access too.
- Windows 10 not performing as well as Windows 7
- Netgear router USB is way slower than expected
- OneNote is slow sharing by OneDrive

So, after using OneNote for years just as my file cabinet (and OneDrive as my file store in most cases) I found that Sharing the notebooks between my Windows 7 and Windows 10 PCs was resulting in horrid performance (slow updates back and forth). As it turns out I have a fair number of GB of notebooks, and saw this as an opportunity to look at getting off OneDrive.

Now, each PC uses an SSD and I have shared external WD Drives on Win10 and also a shared drive on the Netgear router. But was performance comparable? No.

Newer Win10 laptop benched (LAN Speed Lite) at 1.7 GB /sec write speed with 0.5 GB read speed whilst
older WIn7 laptop benched at 1.2 GB / sec write speed with 0.3 GB read speed. OK, these were as fast as I was going to get.

Then benched the external WD drive on the newer Win10 Lpatop at 1.4 GB/s write and 0.04 GB/s read
whilst the Win7 laptop using a file share from the WIn10 showed up at 1.2 GB/s write and 0.27 GB/s read.
Hmmm, WTH? I expected slower access through the network share, but didn't expect the file share was 10x faster than the Win10 could read the same drive plugged in locally. Retested. Verified. Scratching my head on that.

But onward to the router, where I have a similar WD drive shared on the USB Port via the native Netgear software.
The newer Win10 writes at 0.01 GB/s and reads at 0.02 GB/s.
The older Win7 writes at 0.01 GB/s and reads at 0.04 GB/s.

Tests where using 1/2 GB of data at a time and the LAN Speed Lite utiltity. BTW, this is a GB LAN (not wifi) and network performance between the two laptops benchas at nearly .9 GB transfer speeds consistently.
Both laptops are i5 processors, the newer Win10 is a Dell Inspiron 7000 series the older Win7 is a Toshiba Ultrabook

So, that leaves me wondering where I should be putting LAN storage. New storage unit on the LAN (obviously the router approach is horrid for performance), or off Win 10 or off Win 7 (I can play with swapping that around) but wondering what other people use for network storage for a few dozen GB and possible web acccess too?

:)

 

My E5 not performing well

Please see these threads for suggestions:



/t5/Eseries-and-Communicators/e5-Memory-Full/td-p/780338



/t5/Eseries-and-Communicators/Nokia-E72-log-file-on-phone-memory-increasing/td-p/615813



The fix isn't necessarily straightforward, but hopefully the above will help.

 

windows 10 email account setup using advanced setup

Well, setup a local account first instead, if you are running an older version of Windows 10, here is an example how you do that:

https://www.groovypost.com/howto/setup-configur...

 

I use a pair of WDC My Cloud 2TB NAS drives plugged into Ethernet ports on my Router. Nice part is I can access them from Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, both wired and wireless.
My Cloud vs My Cloud Mirror - NAS Storage | Western Digital (WD)

And if everything I've read is correct, there will be no Windows 11, 10 is the last. And if I am assuming correctly there may simply be build updates and perhaps Anniversary updates in the future.

 

Part of the problem in understanding your question stems from the fact that your information is not laid out in very easy to understand format. For instance, when you say:

I'm not sure what you're referring to here. What exactly where you benchmarking? The shares? Local drives? Those number seem very suspicious to me, Writes should not be faster than reads, in fact it should be the other way around, and certainly not those abysmal read speeds.

I'm also suspicious how you are getting .9GB/s (Giga BYTE) "transfer speeds" over a 1Gb (Giga BIT) link.

Your entire post is kind of a dump of stuff and I'm having a hard time making sense of it. Perhaps if you were to clarify your situations, provide tables of results, make consistent use of terms, etc.. it would help.

 

I use a Synology DIS216+II with two 1TB Constellation drives and a Fantom 6TB connected via eSATA. It really comes to how much you are willing to spend. Having the SSD's in the computer are great for the long run. But it comes down to your network that really sets the standards how fast you want to move the data and how.

Also a "Cloud" is just a Network storage space, not how you access the data. If you plan on accessing from outside your network, it will only be as fast as the Upload speed of your home connection. I use both Amazon Cloud and home NAS storage for redundancy. If I am off of network and need something, I can always grab it from my Amazon drive.

 

I reported what the benchmark tool showed, the name is above, you can see what it tests. Results are consistent. From the tool, you can see it is more than just HW I/O as benchmark times includes the actual file open/close and part of why this particular router software is lousy for file access.

SSD write > read? yes, I also benched the Sandisk z400s SSD using UserBenchmark and confirmed faster writes than reads over the duration of a their benchmark. Random writes were about 4x faster than reads and deep queue writes also performed better whilst only sequential reads outperformed sequential writes. (drive showed as 91st percentile compared to other user benchmarks of the same drive. Of course, there are various configurations including firmware that can affect that. But all this is rathole detail compared to the overall problem of comparing the local "HD" vs external HD vs a HD on the router.

For the router with a USB WD 12 TB drive tested using LAN Speed Lite, of 35 seconds test time, about 25 seconds where data transfers and 10 seconds where just waiting for Windows to close the files on the router share.

That kind of thing is just not going to work well for OneNote.

 

Good to know. I'll look at the storage capabilities as I have a lot more external storage that you mention.

, well, it's a cloud if I can access the storage space from the WAN. I think I mentioned that's secondary, as I want some decent speeds here, which I'm not seeing using the Netgear to serve storage.

You mentioned Amazon, that might be an alternative to OneDrive. I wonder if there are any benchmarks there to compare.

 

I had a "Cloud" Seagate once. Besides the fewTB being a bit small for my purposes, The seagate failed and none of my data was recoverable, though I was offered a replacement device. Kinda useless since my primary use for storage external to my laptop(s) is for libraries or backup copies. I have stuck with WD since, though never tried the MyCloud series for irrational fear of the same. I'd rather toss a cheap computer up with extra storage, but the use of the router would have been convenient (both physically and for configuration from outside the LAN, if the performance just wasn't so horrid.

Perhaps we finally move beyond Windows? Of course, XP was at imminent end-of-life with support expiring for what, nearly a decade? Still, XP was in use corporately, not saying much for Win10. On the flip side, there's seems plenty to fix in Win10, so that'll take some years. If it turns out 10 is the end, then i can only hope it's not Windows at all next round. My tag line is more a taunt than a v11 expectation of course.

 

It's not that Win10 is the end of Windows, it's just the last major new/full version/number.

 

Your speeds are only as fast as the connection you have and the connection for the share. It has nothing to do with the hardware or drives that you are accessing. Amazon's S3 storage space, which they use for their cloud, is using the fastest hardware and backbone on their infrastructure, along with delivered through Fiber Optic to various points to split off to providers.

You are over thinking all of this. Benchmarks are great for seeing what your home equipment is capable of. It will do nothing when you either access that data through a VPN or using a third party service to store that data off site.