Faster Copy/Move Tasks?

[CelticDubstep]

I have a FreeNAS System. It has one dataset with one share/drive letter. It is an extremely simple setup. I have the drive mapped to Z on my Windows 10 Pro workstation. However, I am in the process of trying to organize the shared drive... such as deleting folders with large amount of items, moving folders with large amount of items to another location (again, same share/drive letter)... It is extremely slow.

For example. If I were to do a "Cut/Paste on my personal workstation, it's instant as it simply tells the file system the file moved from X location to Y location. It doesn't move any date. If I make a copy of a file, it's all done on the same drive so it's fairly quick. However, it seems like with FreeNAS... if I copy files, it seems as if my computer is a "proxy" as if my computer receives the file from the server, only to put it back in a different location.

There has to be a better way of doing this. I'm not trying to bash FreeNAS as Windows Servers/shares have the same issues, but I can RDP into the server and perform the tasks on the server much faster. The same goes with Synology Devices I've used in the past. However, I can't VNC/RDP into FreeNAS as there is no GUI, and the web interface doesn't allow this option.

There has to be a way... right?

 

[Alecmascot]

WinSCP ?

 

[Basil Hendroff]

There's not enough information to provide you with any useful feedback. You need to quantify a bit more. The makeup of your FreeNAS hardware? What's between your PC and your FreeNAS server? What transfer speeds are you seeing? What version of FreeNAS are you on? etc.

 

[kappclark]

Check your ethernet cable --- also reboot any switches in the circuit ..

I had a devil of a time recently troubleshooting an OpenMediaVault box which would not go better than 100Mbps ... I swapped the network card, switch -- reinstalled etc ... ran iperf and was still slow....then figured I would replace the cable, and wow - 10x the speed ! file transfers are back where they should be ... easy enough to swap the cable ...

 

[SweetAndLow]

If you are using smb and doing the move in the same dataset it will be faster. If you're moving between different datesets then it has to read everything to the client and rewrite it.

The other option is to just use mv on the cli locally on freenas.

 

[Samuel Tai]

For example. If I were to do a "Cut/Paste on my personal workstation, it's instant as it simply tells the file system the file moved from X location to Y location. It doesn't move any date. If I make a copy of a file, it's all done on the same drive so it's fairly quick. However, it seems like with FreeNAS... if I copy files, it seems as if my computer is a "proxy" as if my computer receives the file from the server, only to put it back in a different location.

According to https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Server-Side_Copy, server-side copy is enabled by default in Samba 4.1 and higher. However, as you're not seeing in Windows Explorer, try RoboCopy as the Samba KB article suggests.

 

[Samuel Tai]

According to the Guide, Section 13.5:

Samba supports server-side copy of files on the same share with clients from Windows 8 and higher. Copying between two different shares is not server-side. Windows 7 clients support server-side copying with Robocopy.​

 

[Samuel Tai]

Robocopy works. On my system, I timed a local server copy of a 3.8GB Windows installation ISO. On the server using cp, this copies in 38.52 seconds. Performing the same copy with RoboCopy, it took 40 seconds.

Using Windows 10 Explorer, this took a little longer, but Event Viewer didn't show the copy taking up any network bandwidth, so the server-side copy appears to be working for both Explorer and RoboCopy.

 

[danb35]

The other option is to just use mv on the cli locally on freenas.

...or mc, which can be a lot easier to navigate.

@CelticDubstep, be aware that datasets are treated in many ways like independent filesystems. That means that moving a file from one dataset to another makes a copy (reads the whole thing, writes it out to the new dataset), and then deletes the original. Moving a file within a dataset is very speedy, very much as you experience locally on your computer.