NAS Drive slow

LBM


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Hi there !

Just bought a Seagate Blackarmor NAS 110 and connected it to my Cisco Router (WRT54G2). The router is connected to a D-Link DSL-500B Router (ADSL2+Ethernet Router) and there is only two computers on the network: A PC (Win XP) and a my MacBook Pro. The problem is that even when I connect the MacBook Pro using the ethernet cable I find the NAS Drive very slow, a lot slower than a hard disk connected via FireWire or then a USB drive. Is this normal or there is a way to optimize the access speed ? By the way, I usually do not access the NAS Drive using the PC.

Thanks in advance,
LBM
 

cwa107


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Network attached storage will usually be much slower than locally attached. Even USB can peak at 480Mb/s. Normal Ethernet will run at a peak of 100Mb/s. Gigabit (which I don't think your router supports) can theoretically peak at 1000Mb/s, but there can be substantial overhead with any network connection. With that said, I'd be willing to bet that what you're experiencing is fairly normal.
 
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LBM


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Hi, thanks for your answer.

One doubt: When you referred to a "substantial overhead with any network connection", what exactly did you mean ? Even if I bought a Gigabit router I nothing would change substantially ?

Thanks again in advance,
LBM
 
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I don't know about substantially but it would be faster and over wireless the actual speed will always be somewhat slower than wired.
 
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If you have a gigabit router and the NAS is gigabit it will be substantially better than 10/100 Mbps Ethernet (which oddly enough is known as Fast Ethernet lol.) You also have to make sure whatever device you connect to the router is gigabit as well to take advantage of it. Overhead he is talking about is in terms of system resources bogging things down, distance in relation to router (signal capacity), network traffic, and so on.(Generally though I wouldn't think this would hinder you that much though and would certainly be an improvement on what you have now) I run my NAS on gigabit with cat6 to the router just to maximize potential throughput. Now if you're talking wireless access then things get even slower b/c of the maximum wireless throughput of 300Mbps on N based routers is all you can get (some routers now offer 450Mbps but I believe you also have to have a compatible receiver) You have a wireless G router (maximum 54Mbps) which is what is making it even slower and creating a bottleneck. You can definitely improve your network throughput speeds by upgrading to a gigabit capable N router. I would also suggest running a dual band router on 5GHz to maximize throughput speed, but 5GHz has a very short range so get ready to set up repeaters or be close to the router when connected. Otherwise the regular 2.4GHz spectrum would at least double or triple your current wireless throughput speeds and you would see significant gain with a wired connection on gigabit.
 
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10bt and 100bt are fast! Compared to 10b2 ;)

As with anything, there are trade-offs. Generally speaking you when you go from a direct type attachment to a network attachment, you give up some throughput for convenience.
 
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LBM


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Thanks everybody for the information provided.

Best regards,
LBM
 

cwa107


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Hi, thanks for your answer.

One doubt: When you referred to a "substantial overhead with any network connection", what exactly did you mean ? Even if I bought a Gigabit router I nothing would change substantially ?

Thanks again in advance,
LBM

There's a lot of factors at play here, and your level of satisfaction is contingent upon your expectations. If you're expecting it to perform at the same speed as an internally or attached drive, that's not going to happen. A hard drive connected to an internal, dedicated bus like SATA is directly integrated through the your computer's chipset. There is no "translation layer", like there is with network attached storage.

Will it improve with a hard-wired Gigabit connection? Yes. Will it be as fast as a Firewire or USB connected drive? Probably not. "Overhead" refers to the levels of translation a data packet must go through to traverse a network. When a device is on a local bus, the data has a more direct path.

In short, if you're expecting stellar speeds when editing high def video stored on a NAS, think again. If you just want to stream video across your local network or use it for backups, then that's perfectly doable. I just want to make sure you have a realistic expectation.
 

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