How to make a remote network drive as fast as a local drive?

I have two desktop computers, both Windows 7, and they are connected via a gigabit network connection. I share a folder via Windows file sharing (samba). When I browse a folder on a remote computer, it's still quite slow: if I open a folder with ~100 photos of 3 MiB, I can't view them as easily as on a local disk.

How can this be improved? Should I use 10 gigabit networking?

1 Answer

Network speed vs local speed is so different, speeding up the network to extremes is going to be a very heavy costing thing and is definitely not worth the cost and effort.

You will want to look into how big the data is on the network share. IF its not too big (You have enough free space on your C drive with extra space to spare) consider setting the network share available offline. This will in essence copy all the files to your C:\Windows\CSC folder and instead of reading from the network, it reads from your local drive. It will sync new files in the background.

A similar approach can be done using dropbox and similar clients, with the advantage of not being forced to use your C drive. The downside is that these online storage services have limited capacity.

Lastly, there are programs such as Free Sync which you can setup to automatically sync two folders so they remain the same. You will have to keep this program running in the background and then sync the entire folder to a local folder of your choice. You can then open the files locally. Because changes are not detected locally until the next sync is performed, its less reliable to use if you also need to edit the files and other people work in them at the same time.

A last alternative is to go about it the other way.

Lets assume for a second that the files are stored on a server. If you use a remote desktop connection to open the server, you can browse the files locally on the server with much greater speeds than downloading every single file all the time. All it needs to transmit is the visual output of what you see. For quickly browsing it doesn't matter if the compression performed on the video stream makes the video quality less good (its marginal though), depending on your settings.