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[rickwhite]

I've got my DNS 323 rocking & rolling with my iMac thru a Time Capsule hub.
Everything is wired--no wireless between iMac, Capsule & DNS 323.

The DNS mounts fine. 
It shows up on the desktop rather easily & reliably. 
Front Row sees it no probs (excusing the delay.) 
iTunes 10 talks to it (with delay). 

The problem is: copying/moving files is Sooooo very slooow.
It takes twice as long to copy files from my System HD to the DNS 323 as it does from the System HD to the Time Capsule.

I'm running DLink firmware 1.09.  Shareport Utility 3.0
The Dlink has both bays populated JBOD with two 2TB Drives (1 WD Green, 1 Hitachi)

I'm running OS X 10.6.4, 4GB Ram, 1TB WD Black HD on iMac 2.8 intel 24".

Any suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated. 

[47th_ronin]

how slooooooooooooooow is sloooooooooooooow exactly? i get from 3.something to 5.something megabits per second, using gigabit ethernet. i have quite old drives, transmission and twonky running and i know dns-323 is a bit on the slow side to start with. i don't mind much because i rarely transfer any large files.

[rickwhite]

It's probably like 1MB/second.  I'm not really sure.  To be honest, I don't sit & watch files copy.  Where I am really noticing the problem is when I open a folder.  It takes forever to see what's in it. 
Example:  I open a media folder 500GB big... go to the kitchen.  Pour a cup of coffee.  Come back.  And the files start to trickle in.  I can see the file names.  Then the details... then the thumbnails...

Compared to my Apple timecapsule--which is almost as snappy as a firewire drive.

I'm worried that I put the wrong drives inside.  Both are 2TB, both are not on the D Link Approved list.  I'm pretty sure the WD Green has that Advanced Format.  So... is that the problem?  The weird thing is, everything else about the D Link works fine.  Mounting is quick.... and reliable.  It's just the slow, slow file access.

Thanks!

[grixx]

Rick, it has been noted in this forum quite a couple of times, that DNS-323 actually IS pretty slow. Under perfect conditions (e.g. copying of one large file) you can get around 15MByte/s, that's it. Under normal conditions I would expect no more than 10MByte/s.

Now your actual problem comes from MacOS's Finder and (I guess) especially from Spotlight, both of them scanning all the files in a directory more or less completely. Now devide your 500GByte by 10MByte/s....

I'd suggest first of all to stop Spotlight from indexing the NAS shares and furthermore (if possible) stop Finder from scanning all the files, creating individual thumbnails and so on. If you list the directory contents of the shares on the command line you won't see any delay here, I guess.

As for the "unsupported drives" these could only be an issue if they have 4k-sectors. In that case you find loads of information in the pinned thread on top.

And to be honest, it is really no surprise an external HD connected by FireWire beeing significantly faster than a network storage, is it?

Just my 2p,
grixx

[rickwhite]

Thanks Grixx.

What you're saying makes sense... but.. Hmm.  I guess, my expectations were too high? 
I dunno.  I just figured it would be as fast as my time capsule, which it's not. 
I'm pretty sure I disabled spotlight from searching the D Link, but I should recheck that.

As for the speeds... I dunno if I'll agree with you there.  At my place of work we bounce large files between workstations all day long.  It only takes about a minute to copy a gigbyte file from anywhere to anywhere on the network.  Is it unreasonable to expect the same performance from NAS as firewire?

As for the drive, I checked last night, and I am running a 4K sector drive (the WD, not hitachi).  Aside from being slow, it behaves normally.

Thanks for your input.       

[grixx]

As for the speeds... I dunno if I'll agree with you there.  At my place of work we bounce large files between workstations all day long.  It only takes about a minute to copy a gigbyte file from anywhere to anywhere on the network.  Is it unreasonable to expect the same performance from NAS as firewire?

All I am saying is that it is unreasonable to expect this performance from this particular device. Of course there are NAS devices which are a hell of a lot faster than the DNS-323. And copying files from one PC to another should be possible with the network bandwidth as the only limiting factor. Unfortunately, though the DNS-323 provides a GigabitEthernet interface it's maximum transfer rates are only slightly above FastEthernet. Remember that Firewire 400 is four times faster than FastEthernet, Firewire 800 even doubles this.

As for the drive, I checked last night, and I am running a 4K sector drive (the WD, not hitachi).  Aside from being slow, it behaves normally.       

Yes, it behaves normally. But in this case I suggest to either repartition the drive manually as described here in the forum (aligning the partition boundaries with the 4k sectors) or replace it with a standard drive. I have two WD EARS with 4k sectors and aligning the partitions correctly made a big difference in the resulting transfer speeds of the DNS-323.

Cheers,
grixx

[rickwhite]

Thanks again, Grixx.

Gonna take your advice and switch out the 2TB with 1TB drives and just use the DNS as a backup only device. 

Your info was very helpful!

RW.

[Bullzie]

I have a Mac Mini (2 generations old now, purchased July 09) connected Gigabit to an Airport Extreme which in turn has my DNS (1.09 fw) hooked to it.  I average about ~20-23MB/s transfer rates.  It has a single 1TB Seagate drive in it.  What I found almost doubled my performance was when I looked and noticed that both the Mini and the DNS only had Cat5 cables and when I switched them for Cat5e my performance jumped.  So faster speeds are possible.

Andrew

I should note that this is achieved without Jumbo frames, only standard 1500 frames.  For some reason, the talking between the two stops when I increase it past 1500.