NAS Transfer Speed Extremely Slow

[mask_and_mirror]

I am rather a newbie to this stuff to be honest. Sorry if this is too similar to the sticky above, but at the moment I am dreaming of 2Mb/s

Yesterday I installed an ASUS-M25 NAS on my network (With 2 WD Caviar Green 2TB Drives). This was recommended to me for speed and for Asus' famous build quality. The router it is connected by ethernet is a BT homehub 3.0 Type A. It seems to be working ok despite my trepidation and hopefully will keep all my important files securely. However, when it comes to transferring files to it, the speed is much slower than I expected (appears to be around 200kb/s). Is this normal? :/

I thought of trying to insert the ethernet cable direct into my computer for large file transfers, though this seems like a short term solution, and I am also worried that the whole thing will need to be reconfigured and I'll lose what is already on there.

I am sorry if I am stupid

 

[thiggins]

200 KBytes/second is slow. A Marvell-based NAS with specs similar to the ASUS M-25 should be able to do at least 40 MBytes/second. Note that this is for large single files. Transfering folders of small files severely reduces throughput.

Are you getting the same speed in both direction and how are you measuring fransfer throughput?

 

[mask_and_mirror]

Thanks for replying! I don't know how to measure the speed exactly; that's just what I worked out by sending different sized files and counting the time. It seems slightly faster in the other direction, my calculations were more like 330kbs coming the other way. Is there a way to test the connection speed?

The files I want to put on there are mostly photographs and music, so they probably qualify as large folders of small files. I initially tried moving everything at once, but the estimated time was about 2 days, so I gave up suspecting something was wrong.

:edit:

I just tried sending a larger file, a 250mb video file, and the transfer speed shown was 4.65 Mb/s. That's a great improvement, though still a fair bit slower than you said it should be. I guess maybe there's no way around taking 2 days to transfer all my pictures!

 

[stevech]

Big Data and wireless don't mix. Just facts of life (physics).

USB flash or hard disk transfer, or plug in via ethernet for big data.

Plugging in Ethernet to your LAN, a spare port on your WiFi router, then turn off WiFi on your laptop, should be trivial.

 

[mask_and_mirror]

Would it reformat the drives if I reconnected it in that way? I'm not really sure how to use ethernet; I guess I just plug the NAS directly into the computer when I'm performing large transfers... I must apologise, I really am a complete newbie to networking. I have to say, there are lots of options and settings that I don't understand at all.

The speed of transfer internally seems very slow as well, just moving files around within the NAS drive is a strikingly long process (Looks like about 15 mins per Gigabyte; much slower, say, than moving between the C and D partitions on my PC). Is it because of Raid 1 and having to write everything twice? Or the power-saving hard drives? I've been excited about getting a secure large home storage device for a long time, and it all seems very complex and slow as all I wanted was a large, secure storage device for all my media and files. I'm worried that I've made the wrong decision with this :/ Even the USB transfer was little faster than the wireless

I guess once all the data is on there it becomes less of an issue, but it still makes me sad. I never expected it to live up to the massive speeds promised on the box, but this is almost unworkable.

:Edit:

Another thing that occurred to me is that during installation I accidentally selected the ext-3 filesystem rather than the recommended ext-2. I have no idea what this means, but maybe it's relevant? I haven't changed it back for fear of losing all the data already transferred. :/