Windows Home Server performance - very slow.. any ideas?

["keyvan2r" <k1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All

I moved my DVDs and Blu-rays from my old Buffalo 3.5Tb NAS box to a
self-build WHS box. I am using a fairly high performance MB (ASUS), cpu
(E4600) with 6gb of ram. I have currently 4 hd's connected via the MB sata
ports. these consist of 2xWD 1.5tb and 2x Hitachi 2Tb drives. This shows up
as 6.37tb with 3.15tb free after I copied my movies & music.
I am getting really really sluggish performance from this setup.
I know (think)its all related to physical disk I/O. The performance is so
bad that it virtually makes it useless for streaming DVD or blu-ray movies.
In fact on most occasions it takes the best part of 1 to 2 minutes to
either run WHS console or RDP into the server. Sometimes it times
out...Also opening things like explorer or even double clicking shortcuts
takes ages to respond.
When running the performance monitor (from server admin tools) it looks
like when any of the shares are being accessed by client pc's all physical
disk activity indicators go to full / 100% usaged. The cpu load remains ok
(between 3% to 20%) but all indicators such as:
current disk queue length
avg disk queue length
avg disk write queue length
avg disk read queue length
These all go to 100% or full usage every 2 or 3 seconds during any form of
disk access.
Is this normal?? If so then it seems WHS is not that good for large disk
managment. I am sure this can not be the case.
Is there any way I can improve disk performance. Is there anywhere were
settings can be altered to sort this problem?
Is there anyone else with this issue with similar type of HD capacity?
I have looked on a few forums for WHS and no joy so far.
Any help, advice, or even pointing to a good resource to research this
issue would be most appreciated.
If I can not resolve this I will have to scrap the WHS solution and look at
alternatives which work like unRAID or other disk-server solutions - that
would be a real pain..!!

Thank you



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