Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Restoring backup after HD crash in Ensemble taking FOREVER

Since this is the first time my HD has crashed I have no reference point to compare with and found nothing in the forum about this.

When I replaced the HD it took about an hour for the new drive to format which seemed too long to me but once it was done it started accepting the restored backup files just fine except for one problem. It is taking 15-20 minutes to load 1 CD. I have about 1600 to reload so at this pace it is going to take days to complete. That just seems WAY too slow to me.

Any feedback if this is normal?

The original drive was a 7200.11 Barracuda and it was replaced with a Barracuda 1TB from Best Buy since that was all I could find locally. My entire network is gigabit running through a Cisco E4200 router and a netgear gigabit switch. The back up is USB connected 2.0 (I know that is a bit slow) on a Fantom 1TB external HD.

I was wondering if a different drive might make a difference but as slow as this is it is either normal or something is way out of line because I just don't think the drive alone would solve this problem if it is one at all.

Thanks!

MYC52002,

Sounds very slow! Have you connected your PC with the backup on wirelessly or wired, wired is always better, but even so 15 minutes per album, something is wrong, have you tried stopping and restarting the restore? This worked for me once.

Just as a reference I recently reloaded my library and it was restoring an album in around 40 seconds, certainly no more than a minute. Power cycling everything and starting the restore again would be my advice.

Russ

Hi,

On a good wired gigabit network; restoring a Sooloos backup from a USB 2 connected drive should yield a restore rate of about 40 seconds per album. With a USB 3 or direct eSATA drive this can be halved two around 20 seconds.

Can you confirm that Control:PC is running on machine hard wired to your network and not connected via WiFi?

I had an Ensemble on lone once, I do recall it takes longer (circa 30 mins) to format a disk then say MD600, but an hour does seem a bit too long.

Regards,
Carl

Ok. then something is not right. I am hard wired all the way. What you are stating for time is kind of what I was expecting. I have tried restarting the restore etc. with no difference.

What I have not tried is to power cycle the unit, pull the HD out and reinsert to see if that will make a difference.

Is there a way to have the unit start from scratch again i.e. reformat the drive and start all over?

Thank you both for the replies. I will update after I try these couple things.

Before you get too far I would try the HDD in a PC. See how it performs there. Copy a chunk of backup folders to it and see if the write speed is OK.

Unfortunately I do not have another PC to install it in. I use a Macbook Pro as my desktop but to your point I am thinking of just getting another drive to eliminate that as being the issue. After the reset of everything I still had about 8 minutes to reload one CD. Still not right.

I was monitoring the network traffic and it seems that it is sending the data at about 1Mb /sec so that seems good which then leads me to think the drive is potentially the problem. It did take a long time to format, much longer than it should have and it's not like others haven't had issues with drives.

Off to get another drive and see how that goes.

Do you really mean 1 Mb/sec? If so, you are well below par on your Gb network.

You may have a dodgy network cable that is impacting network speed to or from the Sooloos unit.

Well I think you have a point about my network speed. 1mb/s is far short of what it should be doing. I was thinking along the lines of the size of a song file transferring at that speed should do so in a few seconds so the total of 40 seconds for a CD made sense. I did put in another drive and I still have the same issue.

I hate network diagnostics. Not sure where to start now since the network cable is run through the wall to the upstairs to where the Sooloos is so not an easy way to deal with that.

I also wonder if the router could be the issue in some way but my internet speeds are within spec so I don't think that would be the problem. I have a hard time understanding how a cable that otherwise has been working fine simply won't pass the data very fast.

Another oddity also, my activity monitor on the Macbook for the network says it sent 312Mb for the one CD I processed from a clean start up yet it says it received 17Mb (is that the macbook or the Sooloos that received the 17Mb?) Not sure how those numbers interact with each other but 312Mb is far larger than the CD should be. Its almost like a lot of the data being sent across the network is not being used?

Is there a way to narrow it down to the cable being the most likely issue before I have to run a new cable through the walls?

Yes. Take MBP to Ensemble and connect two together (probably along with router) via your Netgear switch with known good patch cables.

Ok. I was hoping I could direct connect to the Ensemble but figured I would need the router to get an IP for it. I will give that a shot albeit it will take me some time (rack system in wall, router not easily accessed. etc. Thanks.

You could configure a static IP for both (different of course, but on same subnet), then you could connect directly.