Is it possible to have a lower priority "background" sync?

[timg11]

I have a media center computer, and I would like to use BC3 to sync to another machine.

Normally BC3 copies as fast as possible, and fully utilizes the hard disks. If the media center is trying to record a show at the same time, that would be a problem.

Is there any way to throttle BC3 to use a portion of disk bandwidth, or even better to put it at a lower disk-access priority than other applications? I don't think changing the CPU execution priority would work, since it is more of the priority to the disk that would matter.

Windows offers the Background Intelligent Transfer Service, but that is more about using idle network bandwidth than disk bandwidth.

Does anyone have any ideas how to approach this? I didn't find any related keywords in the help or this forum, but maybe there is a capability in BC3 and I'm just looking for the wrong term.

[Aaron]

We do not currently support throttling limits over the internal network. I've added your notes to our wishlist.

We do have limits that can be used over FTP. If you used the ftp:// protocol you could limit transfer speeds in the Transfer tab. I am not sure if this will lessen the processing or resources requires enough to help with HD encoding (which can take a lot of resources).

[timg11]

I discovered that this capability does exist in Windows in Vista and Windows 7: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows....2FO_subsystem

"Windows Vista also implements I/O scheduling as prioritized I/O. Disk I/O requests in Windows Vista are assigned priorities; a higher priority request is given preferential treatment, over a request that has a lower priority, during the execution of the request. Windows Vista defines five priority classes – Very Low, Low, Normal, High and Critical. By default I/O requests are assigned Normal priority. Windows Vista also allows reservation of bandwidth on a per-application basis during disk access; this aims to guarantee the required throughput rate to the application when it accesses the disk. Both these features are used by Windows Media Player with respect to media playback."

[Chris]

timg11,

Thanks for the follow up, I'll also add this to our wish list.