[secretdonkey]

Okay, I'm a newbie, first post, and though my question *touches* on networking, I'm still guessing this is the more appropriate forum for it. I hope mods agree.

Here's the skinny - I bought a WD MyBook external HD, 320 GB, with both USB and Firewire 400 connections. I had it hooked up by Firewire to a semi-retired G4 desktop, and accessed it over an 802.11g wireless network. I wasn't impressed with write speed to and from my new MacBook, and just bought a new Airport Extreme Base Station. I plugged the drive up directly to the Airport via USB but still am not happy with the write time.

I have not yet tried plugging the drive directly via firewire to the MacBook to see if the bottleneck goes away, but I'm wanting a wireless external HD and though that would be interesting for testing purposes it's not a viable option.

Viable options that I've thought of are this:

1. Leave the drive plugged up to Airport Extreme via USB because that's about as good as things are going to get.

2. Go back to connecting the drive to the G4 and the speed of Firewire 400 + plus the extra throughput of now having 802.11n will help out significantly.

3. Buy an ethernet network drive (LaCie, etc.) to plug into the Airport Base Station and find some other use for the MyBook.

Thoughts?

Thanks!

[ginoledesma]

What type of read/write speeds are you hoping to get? I have a D-Link DNS-323 network storage enclosure that's connected to a D-Link wireless router. Over a wireless 802.11g connection, I get the max of 1.8-2.4Mbps read speeds and between 1.4-2.0Mbps write speeds. This is the fastest I've seen 802.11g do on my Mac regardless of how the drive itself is connected (directly to the network, Firewire+Mac sharing it, etc).

You will definitely get faster connections if the hard drive is directly connected to the Mac. I don't have 802.11n yet (I'm considering getting it), so I don't know the real-world speeds of wireless transfers.

[secretdonkey]

Apologies but I'm not savvy enough to know how to determine these read and write speeds. I looked in the activity monitor and saw some numbers that may be revealing, but given that I wasn't sure of what I was looking at, the fact that the numbers were fluctuating quite a bit, and it would take a fair amount of effort to document these numbers that may or may not be relevant, I'll give you some numbers this way...

I needed to backup a 22 gig iMovie project. I took a note of the estimated time remaining in the progress indicator at about 1 GB, figuring things would have settled in to a steady pace by then. The results:

1. Drive plugged into Airport Extreme's USB port - estimated time was 3 hours.

2. Drive plugged straight to MacBook via USB - a little over 20 minutes

3. Drive plugged via firewire into G4 and shared with MacBook over Airport Extreme - estimated about 45 minutes.

There's a large difference between those numbers. Either my expectations of the improved speed offered by 802.11n are very unrealistic, or something is wrong. I confess I'm new to wireless, but was it false hope that the new Airport Extrememe might be able to move data a bit faster than 1/9 th the speed of a straight USB 2 connection?

And I know that firewire 400 is reputed to have "a slight edge" over USB 2 when dealing with heavy data loads, but Firewire 400 was still more than twice as fast as USB over Airport.

I don't think I'll bother hooking back up my 802.11g wireless to make any comparisons, but my seat-of-the-pants guess is that when configured to the fastest "acceptable" option, Airport Extreme's 802.11n offers me no noticeable difference.

Not to be a naysayer, I'd love to find out there's some simple answer that will help speed things up a bit for me.

Thanks for any thoughts!

[ginoledesma]

I use MenuMeters to display the current throughput of my network connectivity. I've been using this little gem since it came out. It's been very, very handy. Can you install that tool and report back what throughput you're getting with your 802.11n connection and the shared USB drive? In the "Network" tab of the preference, select "Throughput" as the choice in the drop-down list. The upper portion indicates the transmit speed and the lower one indicates the receive speed.

The varying posts across this forum and others show that Airport Extreme should at least propel transfer rates into the 8Mbps-10Mbps range for wireless transfers.

[kamina]

It's fairly simple to count.

With the drive connected to the computer you where getting an estimate of 20 minutes for 22GB. That means about 1GB/minute, in other words 17MB/s.

When it was connected to the airport it was estimating about 180 minutes. This means 120MB/minute or 2MB/s.

The theoretical maximum for USB2 connections is about 40MB/s. For Firewire 400 it's about the same, though you usually end up getting better performance "in the real world". Firewire 800 could do 80MB/s.

I would start by making sure the drive is formatted as HFS+. You can do this by looking "disk utility" (note if you format it you lose all the data in it). A lot of people have mentioned getting pretty bad performance with the My Book drives if they are formatted as FAT32. I would also try with Firewire as it generally gives better performance. I think you should get about double the performance with the drive connected directly to the Macbook.

The USB connection on the Airport Extreme is pretty slow. Even a slow network drive (like most of them are) will give about 6-10MB/s writes, and the faster consumer ones go to about 20MB/s or above (on a gigabit network).

Also note that 10Mbps equals to a bit over 1MB/s, the terms can be misleading.

[secretdonkey]

Thanks for the input, gino and kamina! I did format the drive when I first bought it. Looks like the disappointing performance via Airport's USB simply "is what it is." At least the bright side is that I have other options with that drive. Plugging straight up to Firewire looks like it will be worth the trouble when I'm shuffling around 20 GB video projects... =P