[Laurence]

I'm new to the whole NAS thing so let me know if my thinking is incorrect here...

I recently picked up a Promise NS4300N Gigabit NAS unit and a couple WD "Green Power" 1TB drives. I realized that these drives are much slower than the Samsung or Seagate drives, but I though since it was going to be limited by the network anyways it really didn't matter. Once I set up the two drives in a RAID 0 configuration (I'll switch over to RAID 5 once I get a couple more drives!) I thought I'd copy about 500GB of data to the NAS. The Finder told me that it would take around 15 hours... That's less than 10MB/s and that seemed a bit slow to me... I have a gigabit router (D-Link DGL4300... strange coincidence about the 4300 again and doing an ifconfig from the command line shows that the computer is connected at gigabit speeds. The NAS shows an average throughput of around 130mbps on its end as well... I wasn't expecting full gigabit speeds, but thought I'd get around 30-50MB/s instead of 5-10... Do my expectations seem unrealistic? Its not really that important as this is mostly going to be used for storage, not active use, but If its not working properly I'll investigate more, if it is then I won't worry about it!

Thanks for any insight to this.

[ginoledesma]

How are you connecting to your NAS? Via CIFS (Windows file sharing), AFP, or something else like FTP?

I have a D-Link DNS-323 (with 2x500GB Seagate 7.2K RPM SATA Drives) connected to my AEBS. With the 802.11n connection, I get about 8-12MB/s when doing file transfers over CIFS from the NAS to my MBP, whereas I'm getting between 6-9MB/s when doing file transfers from my MBP to the NAS. Using AFP, I'm able to get an extra 1-2MB/s on average. The best throughput I got was with FTP, peaking at 15MB/s.

With a GigE LAN connection, I'm able to push 14-18MB/s easily using any of the above-mentioned protocols. But I've noticed that it also depends on the size of the files I'm transferring.

[mduell]

Perhaps a little on the slow side, but pretty much normal for consumer grade NAS.

[Laurence]

I was connecting using AFP, it also does SMB/CIFS, FTP, and "Unix" which I assume is NFS. I'll try the other protocols, but as long as what speeds I'm getting aren't off by an order of magnitude I'll leave well enough alone! Thanks for the quick responses.