[goodlad]

Hi tech guys,

I recently purchased an iomega home network hard drive NAS for storing and streaming movies etc.

My issue is this; my windows pcs recognise the drive, and assigns a different drive for each of the folders (eg movies, pictures etc) but when I copy from one folder to another it takes AGES, not exceeding 1.5mb per second. Is this a problem with the setup or are the write times dreadful on these things?

Thanks in advance for any help...

Neil:

[JohnWill]

Well, many low-end NAS boxes have pretty poor access times. Also, the operation you're doing is doubly slow, since you're copying it across the network twice.

Are you using 100mbit connections or do you have gigabit? What is the specific model of Iomega NAS you have?

[goodlad]

Hi John,

Thanks for the response.

It is an IOMEGA network hard drive - http://tinyurl.com/yesk7rt

I am doing the copying from a laptop on wireless G. However, I would have thought (perhaps naively) that the drive would do it all internally rather than going back and forward across the network if it was simply folder to folder copying - although I guess from the laptop's perspective, it is copying across drives so therefore it has to go via the laptop and therefore across the net twice.

[JohnWill]

Oh, copying using wireless and having two transfers explains your results! Wireless SMB transfers are slow anyway, and doing them twice on the same wireless link is really slow!

If you're going to do file transfers of any size, at least connect with a wired connection for the transfer. Of course, not speaking French, I didn't get that much from that page, but it appears that the drive does have a gigabit interface.

[TerryNet]

Even with 802.11g 1.5 mega bits per second seems slow. With a good signal, no interference and no other traffic on the network you should be able to get around 12 Mbps I think. Maybe you're confusing bits and bytes? 1.5 MBps is 1.5 * 8 or 12 Mbps.

[JohnWill]

Terry, remember that he's copying between folders on the NAS, so the data is coming and going on the wireless link, so he's cutting the transfer speed in half. I'm thinking he's talking bytes here, since that's what the transfers would be reported in.

Given the 25-30 average real throughput of an 802.11g link, a total throughput of 3mbytes/sec (1.5mbytes each way) seems pretty normal.

[TerryNet]

Agreed. That's what I was saying in different words. 1.5 mega Bytes is pretty much the max. to expect; 1.5 mega bits is bad news.

[JohnWill]

Well, yes, 1.5mbits/sec would be pretty ugly!

[goodlad]

I think its Megabytes per second, as it took about 20 mins to copy a film, it has got a gigabit ethernet; so will connect wired to copy next time and see what happens.

If I was to setup the drive as one drive letter rather than several, would the drive copy internally without sending across the network both ways?

Thanks a lot for your help.

Neil

[TerryNet]

Does the NAS include a processor and one of its functions is "copy"? Probably not, so the processor that does the copy is your computer. That means that your computer needs to read bytes into its memory and write them back to the external drive.

[JohnWill]

Copying between folders on the NAS has to go to your computer unless you have a higher end model. I have a pair of D-Link NAS units, a DNS-321 and a DNS-323, there's no internal copy available. I also have a higher end model, the Synology DS209, they provide a web based file manager that does the copies directly within the NAS, and it's lightning fast for that box.

For the inexpensive ones, if you have the option to connect using something like Telnet or SSH, you can use the Linux copy or move commands to move stuff directly. That's how I moved 300gigs on my D-Link boxes when I reorganized my folder structure.