I was going insane trying to copy all 4TB off my DNS-320 to a new 4TB external USB drive, but the read transfer rate was unbearable at 5Mb/s (over Gb ethernet), so I pulled the drives out to copy manually...
The nearest computer on hand was my notebook running Win7, but the NAS's drives are formatted ext3.
I stumbled across a free little open-source program called Ext2fd on SourceForge that can read ext3 filesystems on Windows. It's a little rough still, but by default it's read only, so I found it fairly safe (do your own research though) I had to reboot after installing to get it to work.
I plugged the drives into an old USB2.0 Sata cradle, assigned a drive letter in the little tool that comes with the driver, and copied the rest of my data off at a far less annoying 26MB/s.
Of course it would have been better if I had an external sata port on this notebook, or a USB 3.0 cradle, (or a fully working NAS damnit!) but 2 days of solid copying beats a week.
This only works if your drives are configured separately, and not JBOD or Raid. Hacking around on a Linux live-cd would probably be the next best alternative in those cases, and both drives would have to be connected at once.
Hopefully that nifty little ext3 filesystem driver helps save someone else's sanity.
Now I have an empty NAS and hopefully can get to the bottom of the speed issue.
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Topic: Reading Ext3 formatted drives on Windows. (Read 5208 times)