I just replaced my Dell Poweredge 440SC (Celeron CPU) with a EX495. And the 495 works pretty well. Until I want to back it up. I have a huge database that changes almost every day. This makes for very large backups. Using a robocopy script very much like the one posted elsewhere here, I was moving about 80GB of data to an external Firewire 800 drive at a rate of 3217 megabytes per minute, or about 34 minutes for the backup. Using the same script to the same external hard drive plugged into the eSATA port on the EX495 I moved 10GB of test data at 334 megabytes per minute, or about 30 minutes of test data or over 4 hours (240 minutes) for the same 80GB of real data. This is insane.

I got the EX495 because I wanted a way to backup my computers without having to deal with hanging external hard drives off of each one. Looks like that may be the only thing it does get used for it if backing it up is this painful.

I feel like I'm backing up my old 286 to an Eagle QIC80 floppy tape drive again.

The first backup is slow as it backs up everything, after that, it is very fast since it backs up only changes.

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HP EX470, 4 GIG, 4200+ EE SFF, WHS V1, Production
HP EX485, 4 GIG, E5800, WHS 2011, Stablebit Drive Pool, Transfer Server, Backup Server
HP EX490, 4 GIG, Q9400S, WHS 2011, Stablebit Drive Pool, Mediaserver
HP EX485, 4 GIG, Q8200S, WHS 2011, ITUNES Server

You mentioned a 10GB chunk of test data, but were you using the internal MSS back-up or a manual copy/Roboscript? As erail noted, those initial back-ups can take a while. Regardless, you also have to consider what else the server is doing. I'm finding that the initial 48 hours of EX495 life has been hectic. I've done inital back-up on 5 PCs, a Time Machine initial back-up on an iMac, manually transferred about 600GB of data, fooled around with the Media Collector, installed add-ins, run avast! scans, and had a heck of a time getting my Remote Access straightened out. The EX495 has done a nice job, and at times it has been slow. Slowest was when the iMac Time Machine backup, an initial PC back-up and storage balancing were running simultaneously. Thankfully, the worst is behind me and I expect the next 48 hours and beyond to be a good bit calmer.

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X510 w/7 TB (100% WD Green EARS)
Stock Processor, 4 GB Memory Upgrade

It was running the Robocopy script. The script was timed so it would not fire when the desktops were backing up (that tool is great, additional backups take under ten minutes per Windows desktop), all media sharing, harvesting and streaming services have been turned off via the options available in the WHS desktop.

But what is telling is that TeraCopy was able to copy the 80GB file in 34 minutes while Robocopy, Xcopy XXcopy, Copy, and every other utility I threw in there was taking at least 4 hours. FastCopy copied it in zero seconds, but also created a useless file of zero bytes. TeraCopy does not support actual syncing, as far as I know as it does not remove orphaned files on the destination drive. A quick test drive of the backup confirms that TeraCopy did make a good backup of the file.

Please understand this: using the same tools the EX495 is taking eight times longer to back up the same files across a faster data bus with more RAM and over twice the CPU power as the previous server. I've been using RoboCopy scripts for years across networks of dubious reliability and I have never seen this poor level of performance compared to the CPU and bandwidth levels available.

I'm afraid I probably can't offer any additional rationale or sleuthing. However, when I copied 195 GB of videos from one server to the other over a 1Gig connection, it did it in about an hour.

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X510 w/7 TB (100% WD Green EARS)
Stock Processor, 4 GB Memory Upgrade