Archive for June 2010

I’ve tried finding a comparison of Gigabit Ethernet vs USB 2.0 transfer speed performance on the internet but couldn’t find anything useful as everyone compared theoretical speeds rather than actual speeds saying that Gigabit is faster.  I didn’t believe that as actual and theoretical transfer speeds are two different things.  I did the testing myself on an SBS 2008 server with a powered external Seagate USB 2.0 3.5″ 1.5TB drive plugged into the server and compared that with a Gigabit ethernet Thecus NAS and copied 5GB files from both USB and the gigabit ethernet NAS onto the server.  It’s also worth noting that the NAS is connected to the server via Cat6e cable via a quality Netgear Gigabit Ethernet Switch (with separate buffers on each channel, etc), and Both the NAS and the server have dual gigabit cards configured to run in a loadbalanced arrangement.  The result I got was 2:45 for USB 2.0 external hard drive and 3:45 for the Gigabit Ethernet NAS.  This was done on the weekend too, so there was no other load on the network.  So even though in theory Gigabit Ethernet should be faster, in practice USB 2.0 is actually faster.  So if you’re trying to work out whether to do backups to a NAS connected via gigabit lan or an external USB 2.0 drive then if performance is your main consideration the USB 2.0 drive should actually be faster.  It’s also worth noting that 2.5″ USB 2.0 drive that draw their power from USB 2.0 actually seem to run a fair bit slower than the powered USB drive.

It’s pretty common to connect SAMBA based NASes and other devices to an SBS 2008 network.  For example in our case we’ve got a Thecus NAS, but I’ve heard of other people trying to connect Netgear ReadyNAS, QNAP NAS and other NAS servers.  It’s also pretty common to need to join these devices to the SBS 2008 Domain, which results in these items getting created in Active Directory.  The problem however that this generates is that the Event Log / Event Viewer gets flooded with EventID 10009 DCOM Errors saying DCOM was unable to communicate with the computer <computer> using any of the configured protocols.

I’ve searched far and wide for the solution and still havn’t been able to find anything official.  The best I came across was DCOM 10009 errors on SBS2008 with NAS.  I tried doing that by deleting the computer record in AD and then creating a new record as pre Windows 2000 computer.  I should also mention that I have these records in a separate OU under MyBusiness/Computers.  After deleting and re-creating these records I had to re-join the devices to the domain.  It looked like the issue was fixed, but then I checked the log again and it seems I’m still getting the DCOM 10009 errors, so not really sure what else to do.  Either way, this is the only reasonable solution that might actually fix it for you, and if you don’t re-join the device to the domain after deleting and re-creating the device in AD, then you might not be able to authenticate with the device at all.  Hope this helps.