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I recently rewired my home and when doing it, we ran Cat6 to all of the rooms. Now that everything is connected, I am curious what kind of speeds I am getting between computers on the LAN.

There are plenty of internet-based speed test tools (such as Speedtest and Speakeasy), but there does not seem to be anything nearly as simple for testing on a LAN.

I'm not looking for a high quality, highly accurate tool that is suited for a Network Administrator, I'm just looking for something simple that can be installed on multiple clients (Windows 7) and a file server (also running Windows 7) to get a good idea of what kind of speeds we're getting internally.

Is there such a tool, preferably free (as in no-cost).

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    Easiest way to do it: open task manager, network tab and move something to/from file server.
    – Olli
    Feb 14, 2014 at 20:55
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    @Olli, your suggested measurement could be complicated by limits on one machine's disk IO. If possible, it's better to use a tool which doesn't rely on disk writes.
    – Mike Pennington
    Feb 22, 2014 at 11:43

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I've done some testing myself and I use two tools primarily, firstly, the windows 7 copy dialogue and networking dialogue give me a rough idea of how fast transfers happen under realworld conditions. I have a few standardised loads I test it with (big video file, and a 12 gb folder of music).

Lan Speed Test is a slightly more systematic way to test - I use the free version to test transfer a 9gb transfer size (Smaller transfers seem to have lower throughput - I'd test a few sizes to see how it works

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It has a nice, simple UI and gives you all the information in a single window. You can install this on multiple clients, and use any share that is accessible to the system as a destination to test on, I typically use windows file shares, but in theory, you could do this to say, a iSCSI share. The paid version adds a server option, so you can choose not to use your hard drive or shared folder as the data dump.

You install it on the systems you want to test from - I just have it on my laptop and move around different network segments, but you can install it on as much, or as few systems as needed.

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