I have a small LAN with 3 (2 Vista and 1 XP) PCs connected with Gigabit hardware and Cat6 Ethernet via a Gigabit Netgear switch. The file is being transferred from a SATAII drive to another SATAII drive. I am only getting file transfer speeds of 8.79MB/sec over the LAN.

This still sounds very slow to me. Is there something I should check first?

I highly suggest running qcheck to check the actual bandwidth. It's a free download. But yeah that does sound slow. Are they all gigabit ethernet controllers or maybe it's a vista IPver6 issue.

Thank you for the advice. I'm a novice at this.

I installed Qcheck and used the IPCONFIG command to get the IPv4 address for 2 of my Vista PCs connected via Cat6 and a gigabit switch. Both have gigabit cards. The switch has a green LED for gigabit connections and yellow for non-gigabit. The green light is on for the 3 connections (Computer A, B and C).

The throughput comes back with 800 Mbps but my file transfer for large files (e.g. 20 GB) is still in the 9-10MB/sec speed ranges. I enabled Jumbo frames on all cards and turned on and off firewalls without any noticeable improvement. Shouldn't I be getting about 3x that speed for file transfer?

Any other suggestions would really be appreciated. Thanks!

Hmm might be the windows file sharing your using to transfer files. I have heard of people complaining of slow file transfers on vista but I have yet to see anyone fix it. I know mccafee firewall can slow it down. Wish I had more experience with Vista. Hopefully someone will chime in and help you out. Just keep in mind your hard drive maxes out at 70 mbps and vista will do alot of disk caching if you don't have alot of ram.

When you save a "Vista IPver6" issue, what do you mean?

I am running a 3 PC network. My Windows Home Server and Desktop sit right next to each other and have about 3 feet of Cat5e cable between them and the Gigabit router. I get throughput speeds of 890 - 900 mb/s (it hauls a$$).

On the other hand, my HTPC is located donwstairs on the other side of the house (1,000 sq. ft). I have a Cat 5e run that is very long (and admittedly has a lot of slack at the moment). I can only get throughput speeds of 110 MB. This is piss poor.

I could pull some of this slack out of the Cat5e wiring, but it will be a royal pain in the butt (cutting into the drywall). Is there something else I can do (Vista software related) to improve this performance before I am forced to cut the drywall?

Please help. My network should be screaming. Every PC has on-board Gigabit NICs. I have them running into a D-Link DGS-2208 Gigabit switch which is run into a D-Link DIR-655 router. There is simply no excuse for this crappy performance.

Well here is a quick check although this is a pain. Move your htpc up stairs and benchmark it with the shorter cable go to the vista pc. If that ups the speed then it's a cable problem. I know 100 mbps only uses 2 of the 8 wires so gigabit might use more and one could be crimped wrong on the connector.

If that doesn't up the speed then it's either network card or vista.

Now put in a ubuntu live cd disk or your favorite live linux distro (sorry not trying to promote linux just qickest way to remove vista if it is the problem don't install it just use it temporary in the ram)

check that with qcheck

if you want jumbo frames under Ubuntu linux open up a teminal and type
sudo ifconfig eth0 mtu 9000

If that doesn't work than it's def the network card if it does you have a gremlin in your vista software to figure out

IP ver 6 is what vista uses by default when it can and older operating systems such as XP use ver 4. I've just been noticing many networking complaints with vista that I have no answer to and it's either vista being weird or the new IP protocol not playing well. Anyway I hope this helps.